The Palestinians, especially those in the West Bank, have watched helplessly as their land in Area C was progressively gobbled up by Jewish colonizers, thus making it geographically and politically impossible for them to establish a viable Palestinian state. Sadly, Palestinian leaders have been able to do little to push the cause of the people’s struggle for survival, let alone independence.
Here’s a case in point. Last month, a proposal by Isaac Herzog, formally adopted by his Labor Party in Israel, envisions a division of occupied Jerusalem by high walls and checkpoints that would effectively banish 200,000 Palestinian residents from the city. The plan includes building miles of new concrete barriers and wire fences to separate 28 Palestinian neighborhoods from Jewish colonies already in place there.
Herzog, whose party is often identified as more “moderate” than the governing party, explained that Labor’s proposal is aimed at “saving Jewish lives,” and justified on the grounds that “We’re here and they’re there,” evoking the rhetoric of Apartheid South Africa in the 1980s.
Building concrete barriers like that would effectively transform the city into “an archipelago of cantons served by roads and tunnels designed either for Palestinians or Israelis,” as the Washington Post reported last week, requiring Palestinians to show special permits, say, to visit the Al-Aqsa Mosque, go to work, see a doctor, attend school or visit a friend.
The response from the Palestinian National Authority? Not a beep. Its leaders prefer to leave it to Palestinian youngsters to express the public anger and frustration and futility at their condition under Israel’s endless occupation — youngsters armed with kitchen knives who assault those who have tormented them for half century century. Herzog’s proposed wall is to be added to the 422-mile long Separation Wall, or Apartheid Wall, that Israel started building around, and in places well into, the West Bank 14 years ago “to protect Jews from terror attacks.”
What is it with Jews and walls, walls they hide behind? Do they really want to keep Palestinians out or, as any psycho-historian familiar with Jewish consciousness will tell you, to wall themselves in? Is retreating behind walls, where Jews seemingly find sanctuary, part of the Jewish archetype?
Ironically, this year marks the 500th anniversary of the establishment, in March 1516, of the Jewish “ghetto” in Venice, whose government at the time confined the city’s Jews to one small area of the metropolis, an area that remained the required home of the Jewish community until Napoleon, imbued as he was with the French Revolution’s ideals of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, abolished it in 1797. The irony deepens, however, when you consider that it was leaders of the Jewish community themselves who requested, and later negotiated with the city’s government, the establishment of their own walled quarter, or “ghetto” — from the Hebrew “get,” meaning a deed of divorce or separation.
And of course in the 19th century, Jews in Central and Eastern Europe inhabited, in like manner, what was known as shtetls, encapsulated communities that lived with their back to the outside world, behind walls of their own making, and where they even spoke their own argot, Yiddish, a Germanic-based vernacular. So what is it, one asks, with Jews and walls? Is it, after all these years, still part of their historical archetype?
Karl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist, in the early 20th century pioneered the use of the term — from the Greek “arketypos,” or “first imprint” — to illuminate the evolution of the collective psyche of a people, where generations that go through similar experiences develop collective personas, and follow similar life trajectories, in the way they interact with objective world around them — and in the case of Jewish communities, the same existential fear of annihilation, a constant recurring motif in their consciousness, even the consciousness of Jews living in a place like Israel, a garrison state that bristles with the most advanced arsenal of weapons this side of Nato.
They must build walls around them to ward off perceived or imagined enemies — they are, after all, heirs to “the first imprint,” an underlying archetypal identity that has endured for centuries.
Palestinians too, lest we forget, are heirs to their own archetypal roots, though ones different in degree and in kind. A proud people, currently leaderless and fragmented, they have supped their fill. Consider this: When knife-wielding Palestinian youngsters kill Israelis, as they have done in recent months, the tendency is to call their act “senseless.”
