Anger and Tears at Israel’s Apartheid Wall, A Wound Slashing Palestine to the Bone

By Anne Gwynne


Dr. Haala Hanani (c) with two UPMRC drivers, Yasser (l), and Riy’ad, her courageous brother who got the author into the “closed zone” under the apartheid wall, with the Mobile Clinic in Qalqilya (photo Anne Gwynne).

TODAY ISRAEL’S attempt to murder, destroy and to break the will of the people of this Mountain of Fire—Jabal an-Naar—as Nablus is known, has escalated to an intolerable level, though we expect it to get much worse. Our lovely mountains are ringed with fire as in past millennia, but now it is the bright searchlights and floods of the illegal Israeli “settlements” and military camps which light up the night sky. We are completely encircled by them, and with their powerful American weapons colonists can see any one of us at any time and shoot us dead. And they do. The Siege of Nablus is tightening, with invasion, murder, maiming, arbitrary arrest and destruction increasing exponentially.

The Journey

We are hoping that, today, the UPMRC mobile clinic will get through to Qalqiliya—a city of some 45,000, enjoying an enviable climate, gloriously set across hilltops and sweeping down into fertile vales. We leave at 8 a.m. with the Women’s Clinic, directed by Dr. Haala Hanani. The dangerous road out of Nablus is via the horrible Beit Iba checkpoint, and today many jeep- and tank-points are positioned along the short way: it is clear that something sinister is afoot in Nablus. At Beit Iba there are five ambulances held on either side, and more arrive by the minute. The soldiers’ aggression is alarming. So we wait. I call another UPMRC driver, Feras al-Bakri, on my cell phone: “Where are you now?”

“I am at Beit Iba checkpoint—where are you?”

“Look in your mirror,” I say—and a few brief, light moments as our eyes meet in the mirror! Our driver, Riy’ad, wants to know the English words to describe the seemingly un-driveable surface upon which we are travelling, and I realize there aren’t any—surely this has never existed anywhere on earth before, but perhaps on the moon.

The Colonies

Then—we see a paved road!But, alas, it is not for us—it is what the soldiers describe to me as “a Jewish-only road,” solely for the use of the illegal colonists in the illegal colonies, dishonestly called “settlements,” which have mushroomed everywhere: Kefar Save, Ari’el, Qarne Shamron, Indumin, Korne, Ma’ale Shamron, Sheken, Ac’ale Shamron, Qedamiun, Homesh, Enav, Avne Hefez—the names of a few I noted. These are built on stolen Palestinian land and render the rest of the land unusable by the farmers who have tilled it for thousands of years—because the illegal usurpers, cozily called “settlers” by the U.S. and Israel, shoot at them if they enter their own fields. As if this were not enough, extensive areas along the road have been taken to build shopping malls and industrial parks—closed, of course, to Palestinians.

The town of Azzun, producing the best kalamantiina (clementine oranges) in the world, now completely walled-in and ringed with these illegals, has only one locked entry, behind which 18,000 people have lost their livelihood and land. Every sign and notice along this road is in Hebrew, because the whole area after the Sarra T-Junction is now clearly “Israel.” At the Azzun roadblock, incidentally, the IDF soldiers demand cigarettes and coffee as an “admission fee.” The choice is to give it or go back. All along the way, checkpoints appear literally from nowhere. Jeeps simply pull out of junctions with five or six Israeli soldiers jumping out, brandishing guns—all part of the plan to disrupt all aspects of normal life and destroy the potential of a future Palestine.

The Landscape

The “roof” of Palestine is a fertile area of outstanding natural beauty, a scented land clothed in self-effacing greens, the gentle olive everywhere interspersed with the darker tones of cypresses, billowing clouds of cherry and almond blossom, red roses growing wild, and fragrant wild thyme and sage, the prized za’attar and marrimiyya of Palestine—the last named for Mary, mother of Jesus. Under the trees is spread an emerald carpet scattered with narcissus and purple iris, crimson anemones and tulips, tiny white camomile and daisy, yellow buttercup and cowslip.

Sadly, of course, we cannot take pictures, for non-Jews can be strafed from helicopter-attack gunships for stopping—although I did get some really lovely ones through the windshield. They were later destroyed by the soldiers—could anyone but Israelis describe photos of flowers as a “security risk”? It’s just a pretext, of course, having nothing to do with security—they have spent a hundred years, after all, propagating the lie that this lovely, fertile land was an empty desert!

As we ride along this scenic road, three things I had not seen before come into view: Israel, with its “apron of concrete” 3 miles away; the Mediterranean Sea, 12 miles to the west; and a shocking, livid scar stretching as far as the eye can see—a wound that slashes its way up hill, down dale and across the landscape like the work of some crazy knife-man. It is the excavated foundation of Israel’s apartheid wall—a monstrous creation, born out of the Zionist greed for Palestinian land combined with a collective delusional paranoia that an unarmed people is going to “drive [them] into the sea.”

Qalqilya

Finally, after three hours, we reach Qalqilya, some 18 kilometers from Nablus, a gracious city with wide, tree-lined boulevards and large white buildings, hospitals and schools. Among the palms and tree-ferns of the main boulevard from the east the shops are almost all boarded up, and the whole area is deserted. We arrive at the clinic, which is modern and welcoming, warm and well-equipped. The women of Qalqilya have many health problems—pre-eclampsia and severe anaemia, and bacterial infections which have become chronic only because, with the unemployment rate at more then 80 percent, even simple, available treatments are unaffordable. In this “difficult situation,” as my friends so understate it, all the women are immaculate and perfectly presented—no mean feat when there is no water for most of the time, and little electricity.

The Wall


Israel’s apartheid wall dwarfs human life (photo Anne Gwynne).

I first saw The Wall on this warm, sunny morning, with the blue of the sky reflected in the glittering waters of the Mediterranean, lapping the shore with its millions of holidaying Europeans. The whole construction area is a “closed military zone,” but the medics and crew were determined that I should write about this “new horror on the earth.” So Riy’ad had to risk his life to take me (for he could be shot for approaching it), driving the ambulance at high speed to within a few yards of the wall, whereupon Sou’ad and I “fell out” of the side door while he made a 180-degree handbrake turn and effected a high-speed exit! I approached this outrageous insanity through a lake of sewage which the construction has dammed up, and through whose sticky mud it was almost impossible to stay upright. I am sick, my heart is aching, and I am very, very angry. There are no words which can adequately describe what is happening here—if anyone can find or create some, please let me know. Not even pictures can convey the reality.

This wall, built illegally upon Palestinian land without compensation, will be over 450 miles long, 26 feet in height above its base (six and a half feet below ground level) and nearly 500 feet wide. It has consumed more than 10 percent of Palestine’s most fertile and productive agricultural land, over a quarter of a million dunums already; when the wall is completed the figure will reach a million dunums. For 91 percent of its length it does not follow the so-called Green Line, so it isolates villages and towns in a no-man’s-land between Israel and Palestine to which there is no entry and from which there is no exit. The formerly prosperous city of Qalqiliya is completely encircled by the wall, with one single entry and exit gate for 45,000 people controlled by a teenage Israeli key-holder.

Like the colonies, there is no aesthetic sense here, no respect for the land. The utilitarian ugliness of the huge sheets of unrelieved concrete cannot be equalled. The wall here, I am informed, will have tunnels which will allow Israeli incursions at any time; in addition, it will be festooned with tons of razor wire and have gun-emplacements every 325 yards. Two of these towers, now equipped with electronic weapons which shoot at movement, point into the primary school compound. On either side of the wall there is a wide swathe of “confiscated” land, completely denuded, so that imaginary Palestinians can easily be seen.

Behind the wall is a high sandy hill commanding the whole area, from which an Israeli tank fires shells into the city: numerous missiles have fallen around and in the school yard. Many children have left because of nervous breakdowns, and others are suffering from stress-related illnesses. They have terrified nightmares, and bed-wetting and sleep disorders are common. Between the school and the wall is about 325 yards of devastated moonscape which has been used as a construction base—the land which the Israelis have stolen on “their” side of the wall is, naturally, undamaged, with the Palestinian farmers’ crops being harvested as Israeli produce.

Reflections

As one gazes across these beautiful hills clothed in diaphanous greens, this ugly monstrosity snakes across the landscape, a one-third-mile-wide wound which has slashed Palestine to the bone, standing stark and livid, bisecting the naturally unified landscape. It cuts a family off from its members, farmers from the land, neighbor from friend, and village from town. Significantly, Qalqiliya sits on one of the region’s three great aquifers, supplying 50 percent of occupied Palestine’s water. When complete, the wall will steal 89 percent of the available water supply as well as most of the country’s fertile land, condemning Palestinian farmers to a lifetime of poverty, with the land they have tilled for thousands of years within sight of their homes, but unreachable. It cannot be reiterated too many times that, while “security” is the pretext, the wall’s sinister purpose is to dislocate the people from the land and force them to leave: it is the culmination of the Zionist project which did not start in 2000, 1967 or 1948 , but was formulated in Europe 100 years ago and is now, as far as the Israelis are concerned, coming to fruition.

Our governments are not only allowing this to happen—they are paying the astronomical cost of this madness, billions of dollars of U.S. taxpayers’ money. Even knowing the statistics of the wall, to touch it, look along it, stand in its shadow where once there was sunshine, and photograph it—that really is something else. A 450-mile, $3.4 billion wall to prevent an occasional act of resistance? No, this wall is designed to make life here, already intolerable, even more so, in the belief that the remaining Palestinians will be forced through hunger and poverty to leave. The cold-blooded cruelty and calculation of it is sickening.

As I stand in the shadow of this preposterous edifice, whose concrete base is taller than I am, a scream arises in the depths of my being, a scream so big that it consumes me completely, so that there is no room for breath and my heart is bursting—a scream that I want to be heard in London and Washington and New York. But it cannot escape, for it is too big for my throat. Instead I weep bitter tears for the loss of the gentle life of Palestine.

Anne Gwynne is a 65-year-old grandmother and retired bank manager from Wales. She has worked with the Union of Palestinian Medical Relief Committees (UPMRC) in Nablus, from where she has reported for Pacifica Radio’s “Flashpoints” program. She can be reached at <gwynne_anne@hotmail.com>.