Walled In

Walled In

“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall” wrote Robert Frost about neighbouring New England farmers who go out to mend the wall that separates their two fields. Frost’s wall is built by hand of natural stones, yet the poem reflects on the unnaturalness of such a barrier, nature’s disdain for the structure and questions the necessity of the divide at all.  One farmer believes in the wall and mantra-like repeats, “ Good fences make good neighbours”.

But the concrete abomination that runs across the landscape of the Palestinian Territories bears no resemblance to the stone dykes of farmland and even less to do with good neighbourly relations. It looms malevolently over the lives, land and future of the people of the West Bank with undisguised hostility. It corrals an entire people into such narrow confines that they must surely begin to feel a collective claustrophobia. Move a few hundred metres north, south or east and they collide with its impenetrability, even with their backs to the Jordan River, there is no safe, open space behind, but innumerable Israeli settlements poised to encroach.

A nine metre high wall, over 200 km long, on completion running to almost 700km requires reinforcement, watching and maintaining. The array of military support is staggering: watchtowers, checkpoints, roadblocks, a buffer zone of 30-100 metres, razor wire, surveillance cameras, ditches, and electronic fences. Overkill. Disproportionate.

However, it is an historical analogy that is most conjured by this penning in of human beings. To another time and place where, herded into one small area, a people were confined, forced to endure, deprived of all but the most basic of amenities, left to rot in the Warsaw Ghetto.  The profound irony of that particular parallel is not lost nor does it rest comfortably, but it is unavoidable. Layer by layer, day by day freedoms, dignity and the means of survival are being stripped from the people of the Palestinian Occupied Territories. The Wall separates and consumes. Separates them from their fields and consumes their land, separates them from their livelihoods and consumes their freedoms, separates them from their neighbours and families and consumes the place they call homeland.

The daily crossings require permits, visas, a lowered gaze, a passive countenance and even then there is no guarantee of traversing to the other side.  Agricultural gates providing access to fields and groves open and close at the whim of the military, stretching the endurance of farmers and jeopardising crops. Checkpoints manned by 18 year old Israeli conscripts already inured to the humanity of those wishing to pass, test the patience of queues of expectant, anxious people  needing to get to prayer, to work, to school, to family. Regularly the conditions for crossing change, one day a permit which granted egress is the passport to movement, the next day the same permit is viciously flung back in the face of its holder and the way barred. And this on their own land.

Nothing is certain except that nothing is certain.