One day we'll build a nice museum memorializing the U.N. as a well meaning but irrelevant relic of 20th century politics. Recently the U.N. General Assembly overwhelmingly passed a resolution ordering Israel to halt construction on a wall sequestering West Bank and Gaza. The United States opposed the resolution and Israel refused to comply.
Deputy Prime Minister Ehud Olmert declared that construction continues on schedule: "The fence will continue being built and we will go on taking care of the security of Israel's citizens," he said in an interview to Israel Radio.
If desperate times call for desperate measures, Israel must be desperate indeed to build a wall four times longer and twice as high as the Berlin Wall -- except that wall is too simple a term for this 403 mile juggernaut.
The concrete barrier is reinforced by -- hold your breath -- electrified fencing, two-meter deep trenches, roads for patrol vehicles, electronic sensors, thermal imaging and video cameras, unmanned aerial vehicles, sniper towers and razor wire.
This is not a wall, friends, but a high tech fortress. Not even India and Pakistan, bitter foes of 50 years standing, share such a highly militarized border.
The Berlin Wall, the cold war's symbol of catastrophic divorce, was a friendly garden gate in comparison. But protecting Israeli babies from crazed terrorists is worth the price, right?
Maybe -- but the security argument overlooks small observation. The U.N. resolution doesn't talk about Israel's right to build the barrier at all. For all it cared, Israel could outrival the Great Wall of China itself. Rather, criticism focuses on the devastating route of the wall.
The wall meanders into West Bank and Gaza, slicing off chunks of the territory promised to Palestinians for their state by the road map, Oslo and every other peace accord.
It encloses a new and expanded Israel: illegal settlements built deep into Palestinian territory. "Even the U.S., Israel's strongest ally, has objected to the proposed route because it cuts so far into the West Bank," notes a recent New York Times article.
Settlement activity is a key flashpoint in the Israel-Palestine controversy.
Israel has faithfully pursued a policy of building settlements on land it officially recognizes as Palestinian, usually after it has signed some kind of international accord. The settlements are then integrated to Israel proper via a massive infrastructure of super highways, municipal services and military outposts.
The highway system in particular carves the 15 percent of historic Palestine allotted to native Palestinians into isolated villages which are caught in and strangulated by this grid.
Nor is this a "natural" evolution of Israel's growth. Instead, it's grounded on a Likud strategy for occupying Palestinian territory, first outlined in a 1978 White Paper by the World Zionist Organization.
The paper describes a plan to construct "settlements and roads around the settlements of the minorities [the Palestinians], but also in between them," so that the West Bank could never form a contiguous land mass.
Scratch the wall's plaster, and you'll see the same policy at work. North of Qalqilya, the barrier separates several villages from their water wells and thousands of hectares of the best farmland.
Children wake up and find their school is now on the other side of the wall. Not to mention, the wall ignores the stated purpose of keeping Palestinians out; it deliberately encloses about 400,000 Palestinians, along with the settlements.
The cities of Qalqilya and Tulkarem are completely walled in, turned into open-air prisons.
The issue is about space, not safety. The two-nation solution or any other peace proposal simply won't work because one side is consumed by burning nationalist fervor: Israel desires all the land because it believes it has an exclusive right to it.
Ariel Sharon's solution eerily evokes that of his spiritual mentor, Ze'ev Jabotinsky. He was a man who believed that peace with Arabs was impossible. The following is in his own words:
"The sole way to such an agreement [between Israelis and Palestinians] is through the iron wall, that is, the establishment of a force that will in no way be influenced by Arab pressure. In other words, the way to achieve a settlement in the future is total avoidance of all attempts to arrive at a settlement in the present."
Zainab Cheema is a senior international studies major from Ellicott City, Md.
