[GushShalom] Join us bringing food to Tulkarm & read about The Evil Wall

[Gush Shalom (Israeli Peace Bloc)]

GUSH SHALOM - pob 3322, Tel-Aviv 61033 - http://www.gush-shalom.org/

[For the 55th time we celebrate here Independence Day. More and more there are on this day also  
"alternative ceremonies" which all have in common the wish that Palestine would "next year" be 
independent as well. Meanwhile the authorities, while formally accepting the Road Map, today arrested in 
the Gaza Strip a colonel off the Palestinian Security Service, the same service which it says should "fight 
terrorism."]

() Saturday, another Gush food shipment - to Tulkarm Refugee Camp
() Uri Avnery's latest: The Evil Wall

                                (())(())(())(())                         

() Saturday, another Gush food shipment - to Tulkarm Refugee Camp

On Saturday, May 10, we will bring a truck full of different food items to the Tulkarem Refugee Camp. This 
is where  a month ago the army arrested all men - and after singling out some who were on its "wanted 
lisst" forced the rest to board trucks which drove them off into the fields far from their homes, forbidding 
them to return home. (After a lot of pressure this exile which was originally meant for three days, had to 
be shortened.)

We chose these people who were subjected to collective abuse and who suffer enormous economic 
hardships as recipients of our little gesture of solidarity in the struggle against the occupation.
 
This food shipment includes sugar, beans, orange juice and rice. It is what the refugee camp's food
 
committee  asked for. We finance it mainly with the remainder of the "donate a sack of flour" campa
ign to 
which so many of you, in Israel and abroad, reacted positively.

If you are one of those who live here, and if you want to join the delegation bringing the food, pl
ease phone 
to the Gush Shalom answering machine (03-5221732) and leave your phone number. There is only a 
limited number of places available.


() Uri Avnery's latest: The Evil Wall

Uri Avnery
3.5.04
    The Evil Wall

     For a fraction of a second, I was panic-stricken.
     The terrible monster coming towards me was not more than five 
meters away and continued to move as if I weren’t there. The giant 
bulldozer pushed a great heap of dirt and boulders before it. The 
driver, two meters above me, seemed a part of the machine. It was 
clear that nothing would stop him. I jumped aside at the last 
moment.
     Some weeks ago, in a similar situation, the American peace 
activist Rachel Corrie expected the driver to stop. He did not, and 
she was crushed to death.
     I did not come on this occasion to demonstrate (we shall do this 
today) but to look around. In the olive grove, a few meters from the 
tents that were set up by the villagers of Mas’ha, together with 
Israeli and international peace activists, three monsters were 
preparing the ground for the “Separation Wall”. They raised clouds 
of dust and a deafening roar, so that we could hardly converse. 
They work every day, even on Passover, 12 hours a day, without a 
break.
     The whole Israeli public supports the Separation Wall. It has no 
idea what it is supporting. One has to come to the place in order to 
understand all the implications of the project.
    First of all, it has to be said unequivocally: this wall has nothing 
to do with security.
     It is being sold to the Israeli public as a “security fence”. The 
army calls it an “obstacle”. The public, which of course yearns for 
security, is buying the goods eagerly. At long last something is 
being done!
     And indeed, the idea looks quite simple. Even the most 
unsophisticated person can grasp it. It seems almost self-evident: a 
Palestinian who wants to blow himself up in Israel has first of all to 
cross the pre-1967 border, the so-called Green Line. If a wall or 
fence is built along the Green Line, the terrorists will not be able to 
come. No more attacks, no more suicide bombers.
     But logic says that if this had indeed been a security-wall, it 
would have been built directly along the Green Line. All Israelis 
(except the settlers) would be on one side of it (the western one) 
and all the Palestinians on the other. The line should be as straight 
and as short as possible, because it will need inspecting, patrolling 
and defending. The shorter it is, the easier and cheaper it will be to 
defend it. That is the logic of security.
     But in reality, except for short sections, the wall is not being built 
on the Green Line, nor in a straight line. On the contrary, it 
meanders like a river, twisting and turning, approaching the Green 
Line and receding from it.
     Not by accident. The bed of a river is dictated by nature. The 
water has to obey gravity. But the design of the wall has no 
connection with nature. The bulldozers are quite indifferent to 
nature, they cut through it remorselessly. What then determines this 
design?
     Standing near it, the answer is clearly visible. The sole 
consideration that dictates its path is the settlements. The wall 
twists like a snake according to a simple principle: most of the 
settlements must remain on the western side of the wall, i.e. 
eventually to be absorbed into Israel.
     Standing on a hill which will be crossed by the wall, I saw down 
below, on the western side, Elkana, a large settlement. On the 
eastern side, only a few dozen meters away, there is the Palestinian 
village of Mas’ha. The village itself stands on the eastern side, but 
almost all its lands lie on the western side. The wall will cut the 
village off from 98% of its lands – olive groves and fields that 
stretch up to the Green Line, some seven km away, near Kafr 
Kassem.
     Mas’ha is a big village – like its neighbor, Bidia, where thousands 
of Israelis used to come every Saturday for shopping. Mas’ha, too, 
was once a blooming village. It has a big industrial zone, now 
completely deserted.
     One can reach the village only on foot, climbing steep tracks. At 
the beginning of the intifada, the Israeli army blocked the main road 
with two piles of earth and rocks. No vehicle can pass.
     “First they came to destroy our livelihood,” the village chief, 
Anwar Amar, says bitterly. “Now they come again to take away our 
land.”
     Indeed, the foul smell of “transfer” hovers over the wall. Its 
location leaves whole Palestinian villages on the western side – 
trapped between the wall and the Green Line. The inhabitants will 
not be able to move, to find a livelihood, to breathe. Other villages, 
like Mas’ha, will remain on the eastern side of the wall, but their 
land, on which their livelihood depends, will be on the western side. 
There are places, like the town of Kalkiliya, which will be almost 
completely surrounded by a loop of the wall, leaving only a small 
opening to the West Bank. One of the purposes of the wall is, 
without a doubt, to make the lives of the inhabitants hell, in order to 
convince them by and by to go away. It is a kind of “creeping 
transfer”.
     Like the terrifying bulldozer pushing before it rocks and lumps of 
earth, so the occupation pushes before it the Palestinian population 
– always eastwards, always out.
     Historians can see this as a continuous process that started 120 
years ago and has not stopped for a moment. It began with the 
eviction of the Felaheen from land that was purchased from 
absentee landowners and continued with the Nakba of 1948; the 
massive land expropriations from Arabs in Israel after that war; the 
expulsions during the 1967 war; the creeping eviction by means of 
settlements and bypass roads throughout the years of the 
occupation; and now the expulsion caused by the wall. The Hebrew 
bulldozer rolls in front. Not by chance, Arial Sharon’s nickname is 
“the bulldozer”.
    The wall of Mas’ha and Kalkiliya, which continues to the Gilboa 
mountains, is not the only one. To the east of it, a second wall is 
already being planned. It will embrace the Ariel and Kadumim 
settlements and penetrate 20 km into Palestinian territory, almost 
reaching the central axis of the West Bank, the Ramallah-Nablus 
road.
     However, even this is not the whole picture. Sharon is now 
planning the “Eastern Wall” that will cut off the West Bank from the 
Jordan valley. When it is finished, the whole West Bank will become 
an island surrounded by Israeli territory, cut off on all sides. Also, 
the southern West Bank (Hebron and Betlehem) will be cut off from 
the northern West Bank (Ramallah, Nablus, Jenin), which will also 
be divided into several enclaves. [1]
     This map is very reminiscent of the map of Apartheid South 
Africa. The racist government set up several black “homelands”, 
nicknamed Bantustans, ostensibly self-governing territories whose 
black leaders were appointed by the white government. Each 
Bantustan was completely surrounded by the territory of the racist 
state, cut off from the rest of the world.
     This is exactly what Sharon has in mind when he speaks about a 
“Palestinian state”. It will consist of several enclaves, each one 
surrounded by Israeli territory, without an external border with 
Jordan or Egypt. Sharon has been working on this plan for decades, 
setting up dozens of settlements according to its map.
     The wall will serve this purpose. It has nothing to do with 
security, it certainly will not bring peace. It will only bring more 
hatred and bloodshed. The very idea that an obstacle of cement or 
wire could stop the hatred is ludicrous.
     The work continues now from early morning to late evening. 
Sharon talks about the Road Map while creating “facts on the 
ground”.
     But this wall also has a deeper meaning. It is no accident that it 
is so hugely popular in Israel, from Sharon to Mitzna and Beilin. It 
satisfies an inner need. 
     In his book “Der Judenstaat”, the founding document of Zionism, 
Theodor Herzl wrote the following sentences: “For Europe, we shall 
be there (in Palestine) a section of the wall against Asia. We shall do 
pioneer service for culture against barbarism.”
     This idea, that we are the outpost of Europe and need a high wall 
between us and Asiatic barbarism – i. e. the Arabs – is thus 
imbedded in the original vision. Perhaps it has even deeper roots. 
When the Jews began to congregate in Ghettos, before this was 
decreed from the outside, they surrounded themselves with a wall, 
in order to separate themselves from a hostile environment. Wall 
and separation, as guarantees of security, are deeply imprinted in 
the Jewish collective unconscious.
     But we, the new Hebrew society in this country, did not want to 
be a new Jewish ghetto. We did not seek separation, but the 
opposite – to be open to the region. Not “a villa in the jungle”, as 
Ehud Barak put it, not a European outpost against Asiatic 
barbarism, as seen by Herzl, but an open society that lives in peace 
and prospers in partnership with the nations of this region.
     This evil wall is not only an instrument for dispossessing the 
Palestinians, not only an instrument of terrorism masquerading as a 
defense against terrorism, not only an instrument of the settlers 
disguised as a security measure. It is, most of all, an obstacle 
facing Israel, a wall blocking our way to a future of peace, security 
and prosperity.
[1] A map of the walls can be seen on <www.gush-shalom.org/thewall>

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A map of the separation wall:

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http://www.gush-shalom.org/thewall/index.html (English)

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with
\\photo's - of action or otherwise informative 
\\the weekly Gush Shalom ad - in Hebrew and English 
\\the columns of Uri Avnery - in Hebrew, Arab and English
\\and an archive full of interesting documents

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