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Today's
Stories
February 26, 2004
Virginia Tilly
The Deeper Meaning of the Wall
February 25, 2004
Dr. Susan Block
Saddam's
Sex Therapist and the Rape of Free Speech
Bruce Anderson
Treacherous Bastards: The Greens and the Dems and Nader
Ron Jacobs
Our Power is on the Streets and
in Our Hearts
Mike Whitney
Bush
and Gay America: the Politics of Duplicity
Sam Husseini
Jesus in 100 Words
John L. Hess
Kick Off or Flub?
Sam Hamod
Bush's Newest Red Herring
Cockburn / St. Clair
Winning
with Nader
Website of the Day
VotePact
February 24, 2004
Ralph Nader
Why
I'm Running for President
Greg Moses
Rally
the Mob! Bush, Gay Marriage and the Constitution
Douglas O'Hara
The
Merchants of Fear: Smearing Nader
Phillip Cryan
Frozen in Time: The WSJ's Paranoid
Lens on Latin America
David Lindorff
John Kerry's China Connection
Jason Leopold
Cheney's Shame: Halliburton Faces New Charges
Gary Younge
Haiti: Throttled by History
Kromm, Masri & Purohit
Why No Democracy in Iraq?
Steve Perry
Tangled Up in Red and Blue: Beware the Electoral College
February 23, 2004
Neve Gordon
Israel's Apartheid Wall on Trial
at The Hague
Kurt Nimmo
Richard Perle, Executioner: "Heads Should Roll"
Jonathan Franklin
US Soldier Seeks Refugee Status in Canada
Al Krebs
The Liberal "Intelligentsia" v. Nader
Josh Frank
Nader's Nadir? Not a Chance
Bruce Jackson
Nader, Another View: "He's as Evil as Bush"
Gary Leupp
A Misguided
Attack, The Passion, Rabbi Lerner and the Gospels
February 20 / 22, 2004
Cockburn / St. Clair
Kerry:
He's Peaking Already!
Derek Seidman
Chasing
Judith Miller from the Stage: Watch Her Run!
Ghada Karmi
Sharon is not the Problem
Vanessa Jones
This Week in Redfern, a Boy Dies, Chased by Cops
Ben Granby
Anatomy of a Night Raid on Balad, Iraq
John Holt
An Air That Kills: Greed, Apathy, Dead People
Saul Landau
Entry from a White House Diary
Tom Jackson
Why They Couldn't Wait to Invade Iraq
Frederick B. Hudson
Slave Power and the Constitution: Jefferson, Slaves, Haiti and
Hypocrisy
Roger Burbach
Argentina Fights Back
Kate Doyle
Lessons on Justice from Guatemala
Mike Whitney
Operation Enduring Misery: the Afghanistan Debacle
Greg Moses
What Gives Texas A&M the Right to Trample the Civil Rights
Act?
David Krieger
US Elections: an Opportunity to Debate Nuclear Weapons
Sam Bahour
Palestinian Issue Riddles Bush's Budget
David Grenier
You Could Get 10 Years in Prison Just for Reading This
Charles Sullivan
Corporatism vs. Single Party Politics
Poet's Basement
Hilda White, Larry Kearney & Stew Albert
Website of the Weekend
The Rumsfeld Fighting Technique
February 19, 2004
Cecilie Surasky
Anti-Semitism
at the World Social Forum? That's Not What I Saw
Ray McGovern
Iraq
Hawks and Deceptive Intelligence: Did They Really Think They'd
Get Away With It?
Tariq Ali
How Far
Will Bush Go in Iraq?
Ralph Nader
Whither
the Nation?
Wayne Madsen
Would Kerry Purge the Neo-Cons?
Norman Solomon
The Collapse of Dean's Cyber-Bubble
Christopher Brauchli
Cheney, Halliburton and the NYT
Mike Whitney
Bush's Iraq Strategy: "I Hope They Kill Each Other"
Lewis Carroll
Bush the Mighty Helmsman from Yale
Website of the Day
Sex Toy Horoscope
February 18, 2004
William Wilgus
Bush:
AWOL and Dereliction of Duty
William Blum
Mush-Minded
Liberals
Dave Lindorff
Bush's China Syndrome
Greg Weiher
Why
is Kerry Getting a Pass?
Mike Griffin
Killing the Messenger: the AFL-CIO's Attack on Harry Kelber
Mark Hand
Kerry Tells Peace Movement to "Move On"
February 17, 2004
Mike Ferner
The
Countryside Murders in Iraq
Mokhiber / Weissman
Corporation
as Psychopath
Marjorie Cohn
DrakeGate:
a Victory for Free Speech
Kurt Nimmo
Bush's
Endgame: a Review of Chalmers Johnson's "Sorrows of Empire"
Greg Bates
Nader Ambush: a New Low for The
Nation
Ximena Ortiz
A Bush
Doctrine, of Sorts
Gary Leupp
Whatever Happened to Gen. Khazraji?
Sen. John Kerry
"The Cause of Israel is the Cause of America"
Steve Perry
Kerry
1, Drudge 0
February 16, 2004
James Johnston
Huddling
with the Cheeseheads in a NASCAR World
Sara Eltantawi
To
Wear the Hijab or Not
Bruce Anderson
Kevin
Cooper and the Midnight Needle
Elaine Cassel
Feds
on Campus: the Drake Subpoenas
Rahul Mahajan
Bush,
Is the Tide Finally Turning?
Kevin Cooper
The Ritual of Death
Stan Cox
Goodbye, Howard Dean
Larry David
My War
Steve Perry
Bush and the Guard: the Cover-Up's the Thing
Website of the Day
Prison Patriots: Help This Vital Film Get Made
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
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February
26, 2004
It's Location is not
the Point
The
Deeper Meaning of the Wall
By VIRGINIA TILLY
Some people are greatly gratified that the International
Court of Justice has been reviewing the legality of Israel's
"security fence"--known everywhere outside of Israeli
rhetoric as "the Wall" (or, in the media, increasingly
as "the barrier"). Massive demonstrations have accompanied
this review, rightly attacking the Wall as a symbol and instrument
of occupation. And certainly the Palestinian case is very solid.
Where it is constructed on West Bank land, the Wall is clearly
illegal under the Fourth Geneva Convention. (See "Israeli
Settlements: Against the Law".) It clearly serves Israel's
seizure of West Bank land, a goal only thinly veiled by the Sharon
government's anti-terrorism claim. More broadly, its towering
bulk graphically signals the abuse of a vulnerable population
under occupation, galvanizing scandalized international denunciations.
For human rights and Palestinian political activists, judicial
review of the Wall is also valuable for its spin-off effects:
allowing the entire question of Israeli occupation policy to
come afresh under the spotlight of international human-rights
law, an exposure hopefully more constructive than the worn and
sterile orbit of (hitherto pointless) international diplomacy.
But this close focus on the Wall's legality
risks missing the bigger picture. The Wall's deeper import is
actually obscured by those (including the ICRC and some Palestinian
authorities) who hold that, if it is constructed along the Green
Line on Israeli land, they would have no objection to it. Our
recognizing its true significance might be further deflected
by Israeli announcements, in recent days, that the Wall will
be moved over a few hundred yards, here and there, for a few
miles along its length, to make it more humane or "just."
For the Wall's deeper purpose is not simply a land grab. Its
true purpose is to consolidate the two-state solution--the Jewishness
of Israel, the isolation of the Palestinians--by sealing the
crippled fragments of Palestinian society within an impenetrable
walled enclave. And it will have this grander--and ruinous--effect
whatever its precise location.
The Wall in fact represents--actually,
implements--Sharon's "unilateral disengagement" strategy,
a vision reflected also in his plan to withdraw Jewish settlements
from Gaza. Sharon's mission in both policies is brutally direct:
to consolidate Israel as a Jewish state by sealing off a (dismembered
and debilitated) Palestinian enclave "state" while
he still holds power, and before international and domestic forces
(or simple demographic change) threaten to impose a one-state
solution and wreck the Zionist dream from within. The Wall's
"sealing" effect is an essential ingredient in this
strategy. For even if a Palestinian "state" is established,
the fragmentation of Palestinian land, impoverishment of Palestinians
in an enclave economy, and continuing Palestinian demographic
weight will continue to threaten Israel's Jewish character through
the constant pressure of proximate Palestinian labor and trade
on Israeli markets. Even normal inter--ethnic relations manifest
to Sharon and his ilk as a political threat: hence the recent
Israeli law banning the immigration of Palestinian spouses of
Israeli citizens. Dire consequence may arise from such fraternization-dissolution
of ethnic and ultimately of political boundaries, and the staged
erosion of the Jewish state.
The Wall is therefore intended to re-impose
stark ethnic division by the crudest method: physically delimiting
the two ethnic enclaves of Jewish Israel on one side and the
remaining wreck of Christian/Muslim Palestine on the other. Nor
is that deeper ethnic purpose of the Wall obscure, but runs openly
in Israeli debates: for instance, in a draft statement by this
week's meeting of Conservative Rabbis in Jerusalem, which stated
frankly that the Wall is "a legitimate tool for self defense"
but also essential to "protect the Jewish and democratic
character of the state of Israel" (Ha'aretz, Feb 23).
Missing this angle, many people have
overlooked the link of the Wall to Sharon's Gaza-withdrawal plan-an
announcement startling to many and even publicly praised by people
who should know better, like Kofi Annan. Close observers of Israeli
settlement policy, however, received the plan with little pleasure
and less surprise. Gaza has always been expendable to political
pragmatists like Sharon: the territory holds no ancient Jewish
sites important to biblical myth or Zionist imagination; water
is extremely scarce and the settlements have been especially
expensive to maintain; the modest number of settlers (some 7500)
is unlikely to grow; and security for that tiny population, juxtaposed
against the massive and terribly overcrowded Palestinian population,
has been both difficult and very expensive, and will only become
more so.
Possibly even more valuable to Sharon
is, ironically, militant Jewish-settler resistance to an ordered
withdrawal from the Gaza settlements, for it will provide him
with crucial political capital in retaining the West Bank settlements
by signaling the far greater political cost of dismantling the
latter. The settler movements, set on retaining control of "Judea
and Samaria" (names of Jewish kingdoms once located in today's
West Bank), are making the same political calculation. Abandoning
Gaza for a more consolidated hold on the West Bank has therefore
been in the cards for decades; even its inevitable drama is well-planned.
The only surprise was therefore Sharon's timing, so much faster
than anyone had foreseen-and in his hands, it portends only more
trouble.
Withdrawal from Gaza is indeed clearly
timed to serve Sharon's accelerated plan to consolidate Israel's
control over the West Bank, via the settlement grid he has worked
for decades to construct. EU and even US officials (not famed
for their insight) are anxiously trying to confirm that the Gaza
settlers will not be transferred there tokenistic as that concern
might be. The archipelago of Jewish-only fortress-towns and small
cities is, in any case, now close to sufficient for Sharon's
purposes: firmly connected by a strategic matrix of fortified
highways, cutting Palestinian cities and villages off from each
other and already slicing Palestinian society into dismembered
fragments. Visitors to the region are now aghast at the impact.
The Wall is only the most graphic manifestation of this matrix.
But the Wall, again, has a deeper and
more dire function than simple annexation or even security in
a risky annexation strategy. Its ethnic agenda is clear and offensive;
even for some Israelis, it connotes awful images from Germany
and the Cold War. Nowhere else in the world would such a wall
be tolerated: can the reader imagine international acceptance
of such a structure being raised by some government in the former
Yugoslavia? in Northern Ireland? in Chechnya? or in South Africa?
That it might be acceptable if it truly hugged the Green Line
reflects a collective inability of the international community
to grasp its dangers and import for the future, but also a reprehensible
reluctance to address its basic inadmissibility in the context
of any ethnic conflict. And that it is somehow defensible to
some supporters of Israel-whether or not they are genuinely bamboozled
by the anti-terrorism defense-has to be seen as indicating a
fundamental moral impoverishment at the heart of the Zionist
dream.
Which brings us to the bitter heart of
the question. In debates about the Wall, Israel's friends--even
its foes--are evading discussion of its deeper ethnic significance
because of the subject's delicacy. Creating a Jewish state has,
of course, been the central dream of mainstream Zionism (although
not of all Zionism's currents) since the turn of the last century.
It is therefore a political sacred cow, given the passions attached.
But it is that Zionist dream which has now turned to the crudest
ethnic separation, threatening the region, and the world, with
lasting instability. In recent years, a few courageous "post-Zionist"
Jewish and Jewish-Israeli voices have publicly raised the uneasy
contradiction between a truly democratic and a Jewish-dominant
Israel, and questioned the moral and political advisability of
moving on to establish a truly democratic Israel, through a one-state
binational solution. They are still a fringe group, barely scratching
the political surface. But great political change has often,
throughout history, been launched by a few intellectuals-a potential
evidenced in the vitriolic attacks they have received. Whether
other people presently appalled by the Wall wish to grapple with
that debate is, however, a second question. The first question
is whether critics of the Wall can grasp its real meaning, and
so avoid wasting hard work, time, and political capital calling
for its simple relocation to the Green Line.
Virginia Tilley
is an Associate Professor of Political Science
at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, NY. She can be
reached at: tilley@hws.edu
Weekend
Edition Features for February 20 / 22, 2004
Cockburn / St. Clair
Kerry:
He's Peaking Already!
Derek Seidman
Chasing
Judith Miller from the Stage: Watch Her Run!
Ghada Karmi
Sharon is not the Problem
Vanessa Jones
This Week in Redfern, a Boy Dies, Chased by Cops
Ben Granby
Anatomy of a Night Raid on Balad, Iraq
John Holt
An Air That Kills: Greed, Apathy, Dead People
Saul Landau
Entry from a White House Diary
Tom Jackson
Why They Couldn't Wait to Invade Iraq
Frederick B. Hudson
Slave Power and the Constitution: Jefferson, Slaves, Haiti and
Hypocrisy
Roger Burbach
Argentina Fights Back
Kate Doyle
Lessons on Justice from Guatemala
Mike Whitney
Operation Enduring Misery: the Afghanistan Debacle
Greg Moses
What Gives Texas A&M the Right to Trample the Civil Rights
Act?
David Krieger
US Elections: an Opportunity to Debate Nuclear Weapons
Sam Bahour
Palestinian Issue Riddles Bush's Budget
David Grenier
You Could Get 10 Years in Prison Just for Reading This
Charles Sullivan
Corporatism vs. Single Party Politics
Poet's Basement
Hilda White, Larry Kearney & Stew Albert
Website of the Weekend
The Rumsfeld Fighting Technique
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