The strategic wall in Zionist thought

By Adel Safty*

Last week, the International Court of Justice, ICJ, at The Hague began deliberations on the legality of the Israeli wall. Israel is boycotting the hearings, which Sharon contemptuously called "an international circus". He maintains that building the wall is a defensive measure. I think he is right.

He is defending a Zionist ideology, based on the violent displacement and dispossession of the Palestinians, and justified in terms of racial exclusiveness. As a symbol of Zionist thought, the wall is a continuation of the Zionist strategy.

In 1923, fascist Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky articulated the dominant feature of applied, if not publicly acknowledged, Zionist strategy. In an article entitled "The Iron Wall", Jabotinsky preached that force was the only way to overcome Arab resistance to the Zionist project of transforming Palestine into a Jewish state.

Jabotinsky's followers included Jewish terrorist leaders, and later prime ministers of Israel, Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, and Likudist leaders including Sharon.

Labor leaders, especially Ben Gurion, spoke of accommodation but in reality implemented the iron wall strategy as is now admitted by Israeli historians who documented the birth of Israel in a bloodbath of expulsion, brutalities, rape and massacres.

By the end of the "defensive" war of 1947-49, the Zionist forces had expelled 75 per cent of the Palestinian people. After the expulsion, as Israeli professor Israel Shahak has documented, Israel razed over 400 Palestinian villages to the ground.

The iron wall strategy dominated and excluded other peaceful alternatives. Hebrew University President Judah Magnes' call, in the 1940s, for a bi-national state for Jews and Palestinians had no place in Zionist thought.

Prime Minister Moshe Sharett's ideas, in the 1950s, for a diplomatic settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict had no place in Israeli politics. In effect, Zionist leaders feared peace and accommodation.

Sharon came to power determined to defiantly pursue the iron wall policy. His first priority, as recognised by Yossi Beilin, Israeli justice minister in the Barak government, was "to terminate the peace process".

The same night Sharon was elected, February 6, 2001, he called Prof. Arnon Sofer, a geographer at Haifa University who had been warning against the "the Arab demographic danger".

Sofer's maps

Sofer was asked to bring along maps which he had shown at an earlier conference attended by Sharon. Sofer had argued that the state of Israeli should unilaterally set its own borders to defend itself against the twin danger of a negotiated settlement and a future Arab majority in historic Palestine.

Sofer's maps split the West Bank into three electrically fenced cantons, one from Jenin to Ramallah, a second from Bethlehem to Hebron, and a third around the city of Jericho. The wall that Sharon is constructing now, Sofer says, "is exactly my map".

Ron Nahman, the mayor of Jewish colony of Ariel asserts that the plan has been in existence for a longtime: "...the map of the fence (wall)...is the same map I saw during every visit Arik (Sharon) made here since 1978. He told me he has been thinking about it since 1973."

David Levy, the Head of the Jordan Valley Council, expressed satisfaction that the wall "is a political statement, a statement of annexing the Jordan Valley under cover of the 'security fence'."

The wall project continues the same Zionist iron wall strategy of forceful dispossession and displacement. A UN report in July 2003 describes how the Israeli military dropped letters in Palestinian villages on the Zbuba side of the Green Line saying that land would be confiscated on irrevocable orders from "a high level".

Villagers had to show proper deed titles to their own land to apply for compensation to the Ministry of Defence. The villagers rejected the Israeli offer. On March 10, 2003, the UN report stated, "the bulldozers arrived to begin levelling land and orchards."

An Israeli military order dated and effective October 2, 2003 declared all the occupied West Bank territory between the "security" wall and Israel's pre-1967 lines a "closed Zone".

The order required Palestinians to obtain permits to continue to live in their own homes and to farm their own lands. It also prohibited any Palestinians from other areas to enter the zone, but this ban does not apply to Israelis and to Jews from anywhere in the world.

This means that Muslim and Christian Palestinians living in their own country are banned from moving freely in it, while Jews from anywhere in the world are given the right that is denied to the Palestinians.

Such blatant discrimination would be intolerable in western democracies, but is tolerated in the "only democracy in the Middle East", as the western media and scholars like to describe Israel.

That is not all. Israeli establishment figures such as historian Benny Morris, unwittingly borrowing Hitler's rationalisation for the final solution for the Jews, are openly arguing that ethnic cleansing of "inferior" cultures may be justified in the name of civilised progress.

Such racist negation of the humanity of the victim, violently displaced and dispossessed, is the real wall in Zionist thought that makes reconciliation and peaceful co-existence an elusive prospect. How much more shattered existence must the Palestinians suffer before Israel's western supporters are moved by their plight and face the reality?


 

*Prof. Safty is Dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at UAE University. He is author or editor of 14 books, including, From Camp David to the Gulf, and the forthcoming Leadership and Democracy (IPSL Press, New York, 2004).