Israel’s apartheid wall aims at ethnic cleansing

The Daily Star

The Israeli construction of the West Bank apartheid wall is clearly a politically motivated maneuver intent on reshaping the West Bank, rendering impossible a viable Palestinian state, and with it any lasting peace through a two state solution.

In reshaping the West Bank and slicing off huge portions of Palestinian land east of the 1967 border, Israel has also annexed thousands of Palestinians ­ Palestinians it is now trying to expel through forceful expulsion but also through destroying any remaining quality of life within this isolated area of land.

On Oct. 2, the Israeli military released an order declaring all occupied West Bank land between the “security” wall and Israel’s pre-occupation 1967 border a “closed zone.” The order states that “no person will enter the (closed zone) and no one will remain there.” Free access to the closed zone will only be granted to “Israelis.” In this Oct. 2 order, General Moshe Kaplinski defines “Israelis” as any citizen of the state of Israel, resident of the state of Israel, and any one eligible to emigrate to Israel in accordance with the Law of Return, 1950. This means therefore, that while the 15,300 Palestinian residents in this 115 square kilometer area, or those in adjoining communities who own agricultural land here (180,000 people) must now obtain highly unreliable permits to validate their existence, any Jewish person from anywhere in the world is quite free to come and settle on this land.

By Mazin Qumsiyeh | Jordan Times, Monday, October27 ,2003

I HAD to witness first hand what Palestinians travelling in the occupied areas go through to really understand what this conflict is about and our role in it. On Oct.8 , we were going to leave from the West Bank town of Beit Sahour to get to the bridge connecting Jordan with the Israeli occupied West Bank. The normal driving distance for such a trip would normally be less than an hour. It took more than 10 hours and it had nothing to do with security. We started at4 :00am and at the first checkpoint, cars were being turned back. We lucked out and the soldiers decided to randomly let our taxi through to the section of East Jerusalem illegally annexed by Israel. No search of the car or of our documents was done. Hence, this random selection of cars to pass had little to do with security.

Everyone who visits and sees where these checkpoints, and now the apartheid wall, are and how they function knows they are not there for security. The Zionists themselves admit in their newspapers that denial of basic human rights is intended to achieve capitulation to classic Zionist objectives: to drive what remains of the Palestinians out of their homelands or restrict them to unconnected bantustans following the South African apartheid models. As early as1974 , the Allon plan set up this scenario of limited “autonomy” for the Palestinians on minimal areas of Palestine while Israel retains the fat of the land for the ever expanding Jewish colonisation project. All human rights organisations have condemned these colonisation practices and now this so called “security barrier”.

The “barrier” is a system of walls, fences, ditches and fortifications built not along the ceasefire lines of 1949 but snaking deep inside the Palestinian territories Israel occupied in1967 . International law considers occupation illegal, it considers settlements and colonies illegal, and it considers the action of preventing people from travelling within their own country (going to school, work and even hospitals) war crimes. This we are all clear on. As Bishop Desmond Tutu pointed out, it is not clear why we allow a foreign lobby to pressure our Congress to give unrestricted funding to racism, war crimes and grave breaches of basic human rights. What will it take for more Americans to wake up to what is being done in our name and using our tax money?