Sharon’s Wall Creating World’s Largest Open-Air Prison, Israeli Refusenik Warns

By Pat McDonnell Twair


Prof. Gadi Algazi (staff photo S. Twair).

THE DEVASTATING effects of Israel’s apartheid wall on the fabric of Palestinian life was a wake-up call for Arab-American and Jewish activists who listened to Israeli scholar Gadi Algazi discuss Ariel Sharon’s “separation fence” during a brief visit Algazi made to California.

A professor of medieval history at Tel Aviv University, Algazi is the co-founder of Ta’ayush (“living together”), an Israeli-Palestinian grassroots movement against Israeli military occupation of Palestinian land. His activism began in 1979, when he became the first Refusenik in a movement by soldiers rejecting military duty in the West Bank or Gaza. He spent 10 months in a military prison before he was released as a result of public outcry.

Traveling directly from Tel Aviv, Algazi arrived in Los Angeles for a History of Science Conference at UCLA and several smaller talks, including a Feb. 10 session to form a Ta’ayush chapter for Jewish and Arab students at UCLA.

Speaking to a group of professors and activists in the home of Dr. Mahmood and Nancy Ibrahim, Algazi said that, one year ago, few people were aware of the implications of Sharon’s “fence.”

“As pressures grew over the approaching U.S. invasion of Iraq,” he recalled, “rumors were rife in the occupied territories that Sharon might use the transfer option or make significant changes on the ground while the world’s attention was focused on Iraq.

“We figured the most dangerous areas were the small isolated Palestinian villages vulnerable to strikes by paramilitary settlers,” he explained. “On the first Saturday after the war began, we told our friends to leave their gas masks at home and we’d take food staples in trucks to the villages.

“It was ironic,” Algazi observed, “that we felt more secure in the West Bank than in Tel Aviv.”

The medievalist explained that Ta’ayush was founded after Israeli police killed 13 unarmed Palestinian Israeli citizens in November 2000, when they demonstrated to express their solidarity with their cousins in the West Bank. While the grassroots organization does not have an official membership, its e-mail list contains more than 3,000 addresses. Its work in the West Bank is generally done through non-governmental organizations such as the agriculture rescue committee.

“What we expected to gather on that visit in March was information on settler attacks,” Algazi continued. “Instead we came back with the story of the wall. Most Israelis don’t cross the Green Line—they were aware Sharon was carrying out annexation projects, but this was our introduction to the reality of the Wall.”

“The majority of Israelis,” he noted, “believed that Sharon could invade and re-occupy a Palestinian city once or twice, but they couldn’t figure out what he was aiming for. No one realized the prime minister was building a huge political project—a wall—that was comparable in scope to his 1978-79 settlement map.”

Heretofore, the standard routine for activists had been to compile lists of Israeli human rights violations or talk about political prisoners or the right of return, Algazi said. All the while, however, Sharon was establishing a barrier that would fragment the West Bank into bantustans (or reservations, or ghettos) under total Israeli control.

According to Algazi, who holds a Ph.D. from GöttingenUniversity, the wall is developing in phases. The first centered on the northwest tip of Israel, including Qalqilya, with its rich agricultural lands and water resources. Here, he noted, about 150 villages have been separated from their fields, which now lie on the Israeli side of the wall.

“This is not just one fence,” he argued, “it is a system of barriers. In Qalqilya, 40,000 Palestinians live behind a steel wall that has only one gate. In Tulkarm, 75,000 people are contained in an enclave. Rumaneh is another walled ghetto.”

The second phase, Algazi told his listeners, began in May 2003, as the wall turned eastward, with Israel annexing more and more of the Palestinians’ fertile land and water resources—which amount to 40 percent of the West Bank, including the south Hebron hills and Jerusalem, where the barricade around Abu Dis has been replaced by a 9-meter-high wall which cuts off the 250,000 Palestinians within the municipality of Jerusalem from the 600,000 Palestinians living nearby.

Algazi characterized the third phase as the creation of conditions within the walled enclaves that will compel Palestinians to leave.

“Already 4,000 people have left Qalqilya in the past year,” stated the historian, whose articles range from the scholarly “Pruning Peasants: Private War and Maintaining the Lord’s Peace in Late Medieval Germany” to the political “Transfer’s Real Nightmare” which he co-authored with Azmi Bdeir and which appeared in CounterPunch.

The Big Picture began to dawn on Algazi last June, he said, as he observed how the Israeli tower-and-stockade surveillance is strangling Palestinians living in the so-called “Seam Zone.” This is the confiscated area between the Israeli side of the wall and the Green Line.

Tragically, he pointed out, most of the 12,000 Palestinians living in this no-man’s-land are 1948 refugees and their descendants, who have no access to schools, clinics or markets. They must apply for permission to remain in their unrecognized villages, which receive no electricity or water.

“The apartheid system thrives on details,” he stressed. “Exhaustive forms must be filled out by everyone over age 12. They ask such intrusive questions as what do you study, who is your teacher, why do you want to sleep in your village?”

A case in point, he said, is Khirbit Jbara, a village of 300 people whose children must cross a hill to get to a school in the next village.

“As many as 70 or 80 children must be ready at 7 a.m. to stand near a yellow gate,” he said, “where maybe the soldiers will come or maybe not. They must stand there in the rain or unbearable heat. The same thing happens to them when they return from school. And then, late at night, the army may come and wake up the people and warn them they can’t remain there much longer.

“The Wall has created the world’s largest open air prison without guards,” Algazi noted.

“But,” he emphasized, “a 650-kilometer-long wall is not infallible. If 3,000 people approach a gate, it simply can not be defended.”

It wasn’t until June 2003 that the Palestinian Administration began talking about the Wall, Algazi said. By July, the Wall became a major political issue, and this fall it was the main story.

“The Palestinian people were so absorbed in subsisting, they weren’t aware of the implications of the wall,” he explained. “As for the liberal Israeli middle class, it initially was in favor of a wall of pacification, assuming a wall was the solution to their security problems.

“In June,” he continued, “editorials about the Wall began appearing in liberal Israeli newspapers. By November, liberals had second thoughts, as they began to realize the wall signifies an apartheid state.”

Asked if he has a solution, Algazi replied, “Basically, I’m pessimistic. History has been against the Palestinians. But we must try to reduce the damage, save lives and make secure as much Palestinian land as possible so the people have a future.”

He suggested that people in Europe and the U.S. adopt Palestinian villages and send them books, money and letters.

“Adopt a refugee camp in the West Bank or support the Refusenik movement,” he urged. The latter includes 260 elite fighters, paratroopers and pilots who reject military duty in the West Bank and Gaza—five of them currently are serving prison terms.

His assessment of Sharon’s proposal to remove Jewish settlements from Gaza?

”It’s a classical Sharon ploy,” Algazi observed. “He is trying to gain international acceptance of the wall by posing as a hero of peace who is following the plan of disengagement. The military doesn’t like Gaza, so he’ll be making points with it as well.”

Gadi Algazi can be contacted through the Web site <www.taayush.org>.

Pat McDonnell Twair is a free-lance writer based in Los Angeles.