During the last couple of years two prominent British Liberal MPs have been conspicuously punished for voicing outrage at Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. One-time Liberal frontbencher, Jenny Tong, was sacked after confessing she could understand the despair that motivated Palestinian suicide bombers. Now the leader of the Liberal Democrats in the European Parliament, Chris Davies, has had to give up his position for rounding on a Jewish constituent who objected to his claim that the victims of the Holocaust seemed not to care about oppressing Palestinians.
In a coarse and intemperate e-mail, Davies told the constituent to “enjoy wallowing in your own filth”.
Writing to the Guardian last week, he concluded that his predicament illustrated the unwisdom of firing off e-mails in a state of blind fury. But he also drew a wider, more sinister, lesson, namely: “Do not visit Palestine. Do not see the destruction of any hope of creating a viable independent state. Do not recognize the racist apartheid policies of the Israeli government. Do not despair at the fact that Britain and the EU allows Israel to break international law with impunity yet imposes collective punishment on Palestinians for having voted the ‘wrong’ way”.
Davies is right. Even the British political party whose very name proclaims its commitment to free speech is loath to speak out against Israel. When it comes to the Jewish state, only the most tactful, the most scrupulously diplomatic, observations are permissible. Among British politicians, the cruel upshot of the West’s punitive response to the election of Hamas has scarcely been a leading topic of debate. Yet it is getting harder to sustain this non-committal consensus. Recognition that the Palestinians’ plight is an intolerable wrong is increasingly widespread, while attempts to stifle dissent on the subject are becoming counterproductive. Consider the huge success of the play My Name is Rachel Corrie, which dramatizes the life of the US peace activist Rachel Corrie, who was crushed to death in March 2003 by an Israeli bulldozer. Zionists whose lobbying led to the cancellation of the New York production of the play have merely succeeded in boosting its popularity in London. Similarly, the Israeli establishment’s evasiveness over the deaths of the British activists Thomas Hurndall and James Miller at the hands of the Israeli Defense Force has simply fuelled the feeling that Israel is behaving like a rogue state.
Chastened by the findings of a recent independent review, the BBC promises more balanced and informative coverage of the Palestine-Israel conflict. It is to be hoped that promise is kept.
One thing that urgently needs much greater explication is Israel’s West Bank wall and its injurious effects on the lives of ordinary Palestinians. The BBC, or indeed one of its rivals, would do well to commission Ray Dolphin, author of the instructive new book, “The West Bank Wall: the Unmaking of Palestine”, to put together a documentary on the subject.
An able writer, Dolphin is also an excellent speaker — as he recently demonstrated in London when he discussed his book at a packed House of Commons meeting of the Council for the Advancement of Arab-British Understanding.
Dolphin details how the wall is being used by Israel as an instrument of expansion, a means of ruthlessly appropriating Palestinian land. “Talk peace and create facts on the ground”, counseled the Israeli leader David Ben-Gurion. An especially formidable fact on the ground, the wall is the latest manifestation of an inexorable process of colonization — one that Israel has done its utmost to present in innocuous terms. When then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon met US President George W. Bush in Washington in July 2003, he produced some pleasant photographs depicting the “security barrier” not as a wall but a mere fence. Sharon also pulled out a poem by Robert Frost, quoting the line that “good fences make good neighbors”. At a subsequent joint press conference, the American president put on a show of solidarity with the Israeli leader, endorsing his use of the term “fence” and describing it now as a mere “problem”. Sharon had obtained from the US leader, who had earlier warned the project was a “sensitive issue”, exactly what he wanted. It is true that much of Israel’s security barrier is not in the strict sense a wall. A large part of it comprises a wire-and-mesh intrusion-detection (or “smart”) fence 3 meters high, mounted on a concrete base and equipped with censors and cameras. Nevertheless, Dolphin believes that it is disingenuous to characterize as a fence a project that constitutes “the largest infrastructure project in Israel’s history”. Nor is he impressed by Israeli claims that the barrier is temporary. For how could so monumental an undertaking be other than permanent? By 2005, the anticipated final cost of the barrier stood at $1.3 billion. On balance, Dolphin believes that “wall” is the word that best conveys the self-evident purpose of the project: To redraw Israel’s official 1949 border, the internationally recognized Green Line, and create a fresh border deeper within the West Bank, in the process annexing major settlements, territory and water resources to Israel. Dolphin is far from making light of the security threat facing Israel and concedes that the wall may be fulfilling its avowed purpose of thwarting suicide bombers. But would not the wall have been just as effective had it been built, perfectly legally, along the green line?
Noam Chomsky agrees and says such a wall, heavily mined and patrolled by the army on both sides, could be as forbidding as the authorities chose — every bit as forbidding indeed as the one under construction. Moreover, it would have been completed in a much shorter time and at much less cost than the current 670 km structure. The impact of the wall on Palestinian communities has been crippling, isolating them from land on which they have depended for their livelihood, trapping them in a series of disconnected ghettoes and subjecting them to a grueling regime of gates and permits. Dolphin focuses on the city of Qalqilya in the northern West Bank. Rich in natural resources, it was a major agricultural producer as well as commercial and service center for 32 villages — until its encirclement by the wall in 2003. Since then, unemployment has risen by 75 percent and over 600 out of 1800 commercial establishments have closed down; thousands of families are surviving on social assistance, with the resultant pressure taking a grievous toll on civil life in the shape of broken families, traumatized children, rising crime and political extremism. Dolphin also has much to say about East Jerusalem. Enclosing all the settlements constructed since 1967, the wall’s consequences there can be bizarre: Palestinians have been obliged to enter the Holy City illegally in order to obtain a permit that enables them to enter it legally. For many, the outlook is hellish. 11 transit points for vehicles and pedestrians plus 2 cargo terminals are planned along the length of the so-called Jerusalem Envelope; approximately 65,000 people may soon be commuting in each direction daily. Yet there are few signs that the Israeli authorities have worked out how to deal with this enormous traffic of people and goods.
In 2003, the United Nations passed a resolution declaring that wall could prejudice future peace negotiations. A subsequent advisory opinion delivered by the International Court of Justice ruled that the wall was damaging the whole fabric of Palestinian society and violating basic human rights. But Israel’s disengagement from Gaza last summer — Dolphin is hardly alone in seeing it as an attempt to distract attention from the consolidation of key West Bank settlements — has effectively closed down discussion of the wall. When UN Secretary General Kofi Annan visited the West Bank in 2005, he did not even take the trouble to go and inspect the wall for himself.
In a cogent introduction to Ray Dolphin’s book, Graham Usher urges the need to keep up a relentless campaign on behalf of the ICJ ruling. Crisply written and admirably lucid, The West Bank Wall furnishes the facts on which to mount that campaign. They could not be more damning.
— Neil Berry is a freelance journalist living in London. He is working on a book about British Arabists and British Zionists.
