As German Chancellor Angela Merkel, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and Polish Solidarity founder Lech Walesa walked across Berlin’s Bornholmer Bridge to mark the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago, another wall, no less cruel and divisive, was being attacked. At Qalandiya near Ramallah, Palestinian activists pulled down a single section of the West Bank barrier in the occupied territories. Waving Palestinian flags, they danced triumphantly on the wreckage until Israeli tear gas dispersed them. It might very well have been live rounds that were used, had it not been for the immense significance of this act of defiance on a day marking another act of defiance in 1989.
Israel’s wall was declared illegal in 2004 by the International Court of Justice in The Hague. It has also been widely condemned, not least because only a short part of its 436-mile length actually follows the internationally acknowledged Green Line border between the West Bank and Israel. Claims that geographical features dictated the wall’s length are by and large spurious. This socially and economically destructive barrier is also being used for a further land grab of Palestinian property.
Nor unfortunately is Israel’s heartless wall the only example of a man-made barrier. The 155-mile cease-fire line separating North and South Korea is the oldest still functioning wall and undoubtedly the most heavily fortified and patrolled. It is as anachronistic as is the militarized Marxist state behind it. However, as Tuesday’s clashes between North and South Korean naval units attest, it remains one of the world’s most dangerous flash points.
Less dangerous these days but no less sad is the barrier erected over the last 25 years between India and Pakistan. It currently stretches along only half of the 1,800-mile border between the two countries. New Delhi claimed its construction would stop terrorism. Tragically it has not. Nonetheless supporters of the barrier allege that when it can be extended for the entire length of the frontier, security conditions will markedly improve. This remains to be seen.
Arguably the most high-technology and heavily patrolled of the world’s other barriers, the border fence between Mexico and the United States, remains highly porous. The barrier, which is designed in the main to stop illegal immigrants coming into the US and also to prevent smuggling, particularly of narcotics, has so far cost the Americans $3 billion. This figure does not include expenditures on maintenance and patrolling the wall which, in any event, only runs along about a third of the 2,000-mile frontier.
In an effort to curb the investment, part of the barrier is now being set up as a “virtual” wall. There is no fence as such, merely a range of infrared and ground sensors, linked to cameras, radar and watch towers from which border police can be dispatched to intercept intruders. Tragically, each of these pitiless walls seeks to impose separation, regardless of the human consequences. The American poet Robert Frost indeed had it right when he wrote “Something there is that does not love a wall.”
