The wall five years on

21 July 2009

The Wall in the West Bank and East Jerusalem remains a barrier to Palestinian peace and prosperity, reports Catherine Weibel.

Five years ago this month the International Court of Justice (ICJ) delivered an advisory opinion stating that Israel's construction of the Wall in the West Bank and East Jerusalem was illegal and called for its immediate dismantling. At the time, I was working in New York City for an international organization writing many press releases about that Wall. Although I had never seen it, touched it, or witnessed the harm it was causing, I had read enough about it to get an idea of the suffering it would cause thousands of ordinary Palestinians.

When I first arrived in East-Jerusalem earlier this year to work with Oxfam, one of the first things I did was to go and see the Wall. Far from being dismantled, it has only continued to grow in length over the past five years. I was struck with a sense of the surreal as I stood in front of this huge ribbon of concrete winding its way between the hills, blocking out the horizon.

But nothing compares with the real thing, as I recently discovered after seeing firsthand the grave consequences that the Wall has on the lives of Palestinians. To mark the occasion, Oxfam released a collection of testimonies from across the occupied West Bank: Five years of illegality: Time to dismantle the Wall and respect the rights of Palestinians.

The first time I crossed back into East Jerusalem from the West Bank through the Kalandiya checkpoint, I found myself lost in a metallic maze of barbed wire fencing, floor to ceiling steel turnstiles, electronic detectors and iron bars. Unidentified voices told me through invisible speakers to place my belongings in an x-ray machine. I saw a human being only at the very end of the process, when I had to show my passport to a young Israeli soldier sitting in an armoured sentry box, looking bored and reading a romance novel.

For me it was just an exploratory Kafkaesque journey, but for the Palestinians all around me it was daily life. The procedure is particularly tiring for sick people who are in need of medical care in Jerusalem. Workers stand in line for hours every morning before being allowed to cross into East Jerusalem, provided they have a permit.

Sharif Omar is just one of those Palestinians. The 66-year old farmer who lives in Jayyous, a village located in the north of the West Bank, told us his story. His home is on one side of the Wall, while his farmland is on the other. It took him seven months to obtain a permit giving him the right to cross over to work on his own land. And it is only good for six months, when it will need to be renewed. His son Azzam, a businessman, was never granted a permit and cannot access the family land. Ironically Azzam is allowed to travel in Israel - he can go to Tel Aviv or to Haifa but he does not have permission to go to his family farmland located close to his house.

Such mind-boggling stories abound all along the Wall. Some 10,000 people whose village has been declared a "military zone" by the Israeli authorities need to obtain a permanent resident permit if they want to...live in their own houses. Another 35,000 Palestinians are trapped in "closed zones" - stuck between the Wall and the Green Line. Even if these Palestinians hold the right permit allowing them to cross through the checkpoints and gates, the doors can suddenly close without warning and no indication as to when they will reopen.

The Israelis I've spoken to have a different perspective of the Wall. "I like it because it protects us from attacks and suicide bombings", a young Israeli told me in a Tel Aviv café. "It makes me feel safer, I can go and have dinner in a restaurant without wondering whether something bad will happen to me."

This is an understandable sentiment. However, she did not seem aware that most of the Wall runs on land which does not belong to Israel, but to the Palestinians. The ICJ advisory opinion confirmed in its findings that the route of the Wall is not only based on security considerations, but is also being used to carve out space for West Bank Israeli settlements - which are illegal under international law - on the Israeli side of the Wall.

In short, many believe that the route of the Wall is an effective tool for the further confiscation and expropriation of Palestinian resources, such as land and water.

Some Israeli NGOs such as B'tselem, an Oxfam partner, try to raise awareness about all aspects of the Wall. They ask for the Wall to be re-routed along the 1967 armistice line - the so-called Green Line, the internationally recognized border between Israel and the occupied Palestinian Territory of the West Bank. They ask for the Wall to run on Israeli land, not on Palestinian land.

Sadly, the Palestinians whose lives are affected were unable to attend a packed press conference - in which Oxfam took part, along with several UN agencies - in East Jerusalem earlier this month on the fifth anniversary of the ICJ opinion. They were on the other side of the Wall, unable to enter East Jerusalem. But at least, I thought, their voices were heard through the testimonies published in Oxfam's publication on the effects of the Wall.

Yet five years on, I really wonder when someone will begin to listen.