MENDING WALL
Last
week I concluded my post wishing everyone Chag Pesach Sameach.
You
probably wondered why I was ‘jumping the gun.’
Well, the truth is I didn’t think I would have time to write this week. Now,
it transpires that I can manage to squeeze in another post, so here it is:
I have
often quoted freely from Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall,” mostly to introduce
something topical. The poem was included in his second collection of poetry,
published in 1914. Since then, it has become one of the most anthologised
and analysed poems in modern literature.
It tells a story drawn from rural New
England. The narrator, a New England farmer, contacts his neighbour in the
spring to rebuild the stone wall between their two farms. As the men work, the
narrator questions the purpose of a wall:
“Before I built a
wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.”
He notes twice in the poem that
"something there is that doesn’t love a wall", but his neighbour
replies twice quoting a well-known adage, "Good fences make good neighbours"
The earliest
known us of the adage appears in a letter written by an E. Rogers
in 1640: “A good fence
helpeth to keepe peace between neighbours; but let us take heed that we make not a high stone wall, to keepe us from meeting.’
By now you have probably guessed where I am heading.
Israel’s border fences and walls “give offense”. Admittedly our border
demarcations with Egypt and Lebanon have evoked few objections among
international watchkeepers.
However, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank have definitely given offence.
Four years ago, the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) quoted a 2012
UN report that predicted the Palestinian enclave would be “unliveable” by 2020
if nothing was done to ease the blockade. The NRC referred also to a June 2017
UN report on living conditions in Gaza stating that all the indicators are
going in the wrong direction and that deadline is actually approaching even
faster than earlier predicted.
Three years ago, Jalal Abukhater, a Palestinian who resides in
Jerusalem wrote an opinion piece for Al Jazeera describing Palestine’s
other open-air prison,
“Under
a debilitating siege for more than a decade, Gaza has been rightfully declared the biggest open-air prison in
the world. But there is another, similar, prison in Palestine that is less obvious because it suffers from a different kind
of siege, undeclared and indirect: the West Bank. Every Palestinian who resides there and holds official
Palestinian identification papers is a prisoner in their own home.
Freedom of movement is non-existent for the vast majority of the
population because of a myriad of Israeli policies aimed at restricting it to
the bare minimum. The situation is certainly shocking yet seems to be largely
ignored by the world, especially by our Israeli neighbours.”
The well-intentioned members of NRC and like groups largely ignore why
Israel is “walling in” Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.
If our Palestinian neighbours were more like Norwegians or other
Scandinavians there would be no need for security barriers. Yes, Israel walls
them in because Palestinian terror groups are bent on killing Israelis.
Just two weeks ago, Diaa Hamarsheh
a 26-year-old Palestinian from Ya'bad, near Jenin
killed five people in a series of drive-by shootings in Bnei Brak.
He crossed into Israel from the West Bank through one of several gaps in the security barrier. For years now, Israeli security personnel have seemingly turned a blind eye to gaps in the barrier that are used daily by thousands of Palestinian workers to enter Israel illegally.
A few days ago,
Tovah Lazaroff reported in the Jerusalem Post about the renewal of work
on a 40-kilometre stretch of the West Bank security barrier.
“Work
was started on the 525-kilometre barrier in 2002 but was never completed. To
date, some 470 kilometres have been built with open sections in Gush Etzion and
the Hebron Hills area….”
“The new barrier will be
comprised of concrete, protective equipment, and additional technological components. It will be up to 9 metres
high and will replace the fence that was built about 20 years ago. ….”
“The bulk of the 525-kilometer barrier, designed to prevent
terror attacks, has fallen into disrepair and has gaps along its route.
According to the Knesset Research
and Information Centre the barrier is estimated to
have cost approximately $2.8 billion.
For most of its route, the
barrier consists of a chain-link fence equipped with surveillance cameras and
other sensors, buffered by barbed wire and a 60-metre-wide exclusion area. In
more urban areas — including around Jerusalem and Bethlehem — the barrier is
not a fence but an eight- to nine-metre-high concrete wall.
The
security barrier was first suggested in the 1990s by the late prime minister
Yitzhak Rabin, who saw it as a way to separate Israel from the Palestinians.
But the project never materialised due to internal opposition.
It was
only during the Second Intifada, as Israel fought waves of suicide bombings and
other attacks emanating from the West Bank, that the idea was revived and
kicked into high gear.
Many
credit the barrier with helping end that uprising, which lasted from 2000 to
2005, though of its planned 708-kilometre route, only 62% has been completed as
of 2022.
Israeli forces on Sunday conducted fresh raids in the district of Jenin, home to the terrorists that recently carried out two deadly attacks in Israel
Several Palestinians suspected of being involved in terrorist activities
were arrested during the raids.
At this juncture I want add a margin note
about Ya'bad where terrorist Diaa Hamarsheh lived.
Jenin played an important role in the 1936–39 Arab revolt in
Palestine, prompted by the death of Izz ad-Din al-Qassam in a
fire-fight with British colonial police at the nearby town
of Ya'bad months prior to the start of the revolt. On 25 August 1938,
the day after the British Assistant District Commissioner was assassinated in
his Jenin office, a large British force with explosives entered the town. After
ordering the inhabitants to leave, about one quarter of the town was blown up.
Izz ad-Dīn ibn Abd al-Qāder ibn Mustafa ibn Yūsuf ibn Muhammad
al-Qassām was a Syrian Muslim preacher, and a leader in the local struggles
against British and French Mandatory rule in
the Levant, and a militant opponent of Zionism in the 1920s and
1930s.
Al-Qassam studied at Al-Azhar University in Egypt and
afterward became an Islamic revivalist preacher in his hometown
of Jableh in Syria during the last years of Ottoman rule.
Following his return, he became an active supporter of the Libyan resistance to Italian rule,
raising funds and fighters to aid the Libyans and penned an anthem for them. Later he led his own group of rebels to fight
against French Mandatory forces in northern Syria in 1919–20.
Following the rebels' defeat, he moved to Palestine, where he became a
Muslim waqf (religious endowments) official. An incorrigible ‘trouble-maker’ in the 1930s, he formed bands of local fighters and launched attacks
against British and Jewish targets prior to his timely death in 1938. The military wing
of Hamas, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades is named after him.
Back to the main text. The author of an
op-ed in The Times of Israel opined that once tensions calm, some experts
believe Israel will revert to its alleged unspoken policy of leaving the
security fence — and the gaps in it — largely unguarded, constituting a key
valve for releasing economic pressure in the West Bank.
Maybe they are wrong. This week security
forces began closing the gaps in the fence.
There are over a hundred gaps
in the fence, mostly small, but some large enough to
accommodate makeshift parking lots next to them on the Israeli side, where people
ferry Palestinian workers to Israeli cities, often
majority-Arab ones.
Surveillance
technology has advanced considerably since the security barrier was first
conceived. The gaps, even the ones in remote sections of the fence can be
surveilled remotely.
I
think a Reuters report surmised that some of the illegal workers making the crossing probably wondered if Israeli surveillance technology is sophisticated
enough to monitor persons of interest from afar, or whether some of the
Palestinian vendors, makeshift car park attendants and taxi drivers who serviced the
breaches were informants for the Shin Bet internal security service.
Among the actions to be taken, is a complete cessation of pedestrian and vehicular
passage into and out of Jenin through the two crossings in the Gilboa area including
the door-to-door transfer of goods to Israeli customers.
However, workers from Jenin
will be allowed to commute to jobs in Israel, but they will be subject to
rigorous inspections at the border crossings.
I vaguely recall the time when we went to the
market (Suk) in nearby Jenin.
Later still, when our home was renovated
all the floor and wall tiles were bought in Jenin.
Now I doubt if we will ever go back there.
I’ll conclude as I did last week wishing you
a -
Chag Pesach Sameach
Beni, 14th
of April, 2022
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