We
watched Pink Floyd's The Wall in a small,
bare and shabby cinema called Semadar, The
Vine Blossom in the quaint German Colony of
Jerusalem. Emptied of ethnic Germans by the Jews in
1948, it still preserves its old stone houses roofed
with red tiles, gables with immured plaques quoting
Psalms inscribed in Gothic script, ivy creeping up
its masonry and the mysterious Templars' Cemetery
beyond heavy gate.
Semadar, named after an expression in the
Song of the Songs, was a favourite talkies' spot in
our Paradise Lost, nostalgia-bewitched pre-war
Palestine, when it was frequented by British
officers, and the young cosmopolitan gang of the
Holy City's best and brightest: Armenians, Greeks,
Jews, Germans and native Palestinians. Many
marriages crossing borders, religious affiliations
and political passions were formed in its romantic
small yard: a Sephardi Rabbi's daughter found
herself a Scots flier, and a Nashashibi, scion of
this noble Muslim Arab family, met a perky
Left-Zionist girl. Semadar has not changed;
it survived our Fall, the Partition, to become a
fixture of Amos Oz Jerusalem-based novels like
fossil ice survives global warming.
Semadar remained a decent if rundown place
for family outing in 1980s, the blessed days before
video, TV and computers took over our free time, and
we often went with the kids to the movies. However,
the Wall was a flop. In the middle of the film,
there is a horrifying shot of a mouth gaping to
devour you, the spectator.
This scary boneless but teeth-filled mouth covered
the whole screen towering above our heads. It was
too much for our seven-year old son, and he rushed
out with a piercing yell. But outside, the foyer was
plastered by posters with the same gaping mouth! It
took a few hours to calm him down, and this symbol
of the Wall, the dreadful devouring mouth, remained
buried deep in my memory.
It returned with a vengeance like a released spring
today, when I ran into the Wall after a beautiful
walk. For many hours we had driven and walked the
soft Biblical hills of the Highlands, waded high
green grass, picked purple lupines, crossed a brook
still full of water, and of friendly full-faced and
fully-dressed girls and boys who splashed each other
and us with youthful abandon, and passed by their
parents in the nearby village of Anata who were
preparing a picnic repast and called their cordial
salaams. We greeted a monk going down from his cliff
hermitage of St Chariton and received his blessing;
chased away a flock of four or five shy gazelles
with white-spotted crupper; lit a candle at a
Byzantine image of the Madonna in Taybeh village
church, where according to carefully preserved local
lore Christ spent his last days before the Passion.
We drunk their famous Taybeh draft beer in the
Stones, an airy two-tiered café in urbane Ramallah,
with a tweed-clad professor of philosophy from Bir
Zeit university, a wryly-smiling architect, a lapsed
Jew from England with an uncanny resemblance to the
younger Noam Chomsky, and a ravishing dark beauty of
a French-speaking Palestinian girl brought up in
Tunisian exile and schooled in Paris.
As we drew towards the Shepherds' Fields, we run
into the Wall. It cut into the tender Bethlehem
countryside like a colossal devouring maw, and
nature disappeared, marshmallow-like. Dozens of
Caterpillars were tearing at the hills, uprooting
fig trees and vines, crushing rocks for some
monstrous Margarita. They demolished old peasant
houses and medieval towers, and denuded the slopes
walked by the Virgin. The Wall was built like a wide
four-lane highway, flanked by 20-feet-high double
steel mesh fences, topped with high tension wire,
interspaced with cameras, sharpshooters' positions
and a few gates. It was the most formidable prison
camp perimeter fencing I have ever seen, and it
skirted the village houses tightly, like a tipsy
tango dancer holds his partner.
The peasants looked through the mesh on their olive
trees, still there, still in full modest bloom, but
already separated, removed, unavailable. The
peasants were locked in, as secure as in any jail,
beyond this Wall. Their fields, their pastures,
their springs of water were locked out. A gate was
guarded by an Israeli soldier; it connected them to
their livelihood, to their land, to their freedom –
to be opened or closed by army decision. Always
looking for a profitable angle, the army instituted
a two-dollar fee per person per time for opening the
gate. If these Palestinians wish to dally with their
olive trees, let them pay for the pleasure.
In some places the Wall was huge concrete
construction, stealing away the landscape, the view,
locking the villagers in an extended prison court.
But the mesh wall was even worse by affording a
tantalising sight of the land they once called
theirs. The Wall runs for hundreds and hundreds of
miles, surrounding villages, separating them from
their land, and devouring the beautiful nature of
Palestine.
This Wall was not a new invention. I have seen it
before. Not far from the sacred Mount Carmel there
was an Armenian village. It was settled by Armenian
refugees fleeing the Kurds' fury in 1915. The always
hospitable Palestinians helped them build their
houses and leased them the land, for these Armenians
were peasants from the shores of the Lake Van. In
1948 their village became part of the Jewish state.
The Jews did not kill them, did not expel them, they
just surrounded the village with a Wall, and
strangulated it. The living village lost its lands
and was turned into a prison with one always guarded
– by the Jewish army – gate. The Armenians lasted
ten years. In 1950s the last Armenian sold his house
for a song to the Jews and fled.
The Wall had a precursor: the system of
'for-Jews-only' highways. While even Haifa or Afula
has no bypass road, every Arab village has a bypass:
a broad highway encircling and limiting its
development. Hundreds of Palestinian houses were
demolished, thousands of acres devastated while
building the bypass grid by recipe borrowed from the
Hitchhiker's Guide to Galaxy. It was done for no
visible reason, as tiny Jewish settlements did not
need this multi-billion investment for 'security
purpose'. Moreover, newly-built roads were usually
blocked by the army. Now, with the Wall rising
higher and higher, the bypass network begins to make
sense: it was Stage One of devastation and
imprisonment.
The Wall will leave the olive groves in the hands of
settlers, wrote ever-so-rational Uri Avneri. But the
settlers do not need olives and do not intend to
till the land. They prefer to torch the trees. The
settlers are not the cause, but a rationalisation of
the cause: desire to depopulate Palestine and kill
its nature.
Could it be different? The presently implemented
programme of victorious Zionism was portrayed in a
1930s essay, The Iron Wall by Vladimir
Zhabotinsky. But the roots are deeper, for the Wall
is the utmost manifestation of the Jewish spirit and
it fits the Jewish state. There are dozens of words
for 'wall' in Jewish tongues, probably as many as
Eskimo have for 'snow'. Jews' sacred symbol is the
Wailing Wall; their favourite street is Wall Street.
The Egyptians, Babylonians, Christians and Muslims
build vertical pyramids, towers, cathedrals to
connect Heaven and Earth; but the self-deifying Jews
need no Heaven or Earth, and the first thing they
build – from London to Minnesota - is eruv, a
symbolic Wall to separate them from non-Jews. The
only extant inscription from the Jewish Temple
(destroyed forty years after Christ was tried in its
Walls) is not the Decalogue, or Ten Commandments, or
moral teachings, but a piece of a Wall with warning:
"Goy, if you cross this Wall, you will have to blame
yourself for your painful death".
The most important part of Jewish teaching is the
maxim, 'build a Wall around the Torah'. It enhances
every prohibition of the Law by a dozen of
additional prohibitions. A Jew is forbidden to
gather fruits on Sabbath, but 'the Wall' forbids
also climbing a tree, lest one be tempted to gather
its fruits. Well, what about fruitless birch or fir?
It is banned for the same reason: this Saturday you
will climb a birch, next Sabbath you will climb an
apple tree, and in a month's time, you will pick an
apple and commit a real transgression.
Sharon's Wall is a Wall around the Torah, for if you
let a goy wander freely he will sooner or later be
able to kill a Jew. Sharon's Wall is a Temple Wall,
for a goy who crosses it will have to blame himself
for the bullet of a sharpshooter. Sharon's Wall is a
Wailing Wall for Palestinians, and it is the Wall
Street for the Jewish building contractors. The
commanding voice is that of Jacob, but the hands are
the hands of Esau: the Wall is built by the sweat of
impoverished Palestinian workers, guarded by
Russians, paid for by Americans to jail their
brothers.
The contractors are into a Bonanza, a remake of
their previous endeavour, the fifty-feet-high Bar
Lev Wall, constructed on the shores of Suez Canal in
1970s and demolished by the Soviet-made water
cannons of the Egyptian Third Army of Marshal Sadat
on October 6, 1973. The only part of the Wall that
survived the 1973 war was the villas of the
contractors.
This Wall is the real Roadmap of the Zionists, for
when the Wall is completed, Palestine will be ruined
and its happy dwellers turned into refugees. But the
fate of Jews will not be enviable, either, for the
Wall is everywhere. Every shop, every restaurant,
every pub in once jolly Tel Aviv has its living
Wall: a Russian or Ukrainian boy imported to guard
it. For four dollar per hour they stop the bombers
with their bodies and are buried beyond the cemetery
Wall. We, Israelis, are frisked ten times a day, as
we go to the shop, the office, to work or to have
fun. There is no building you can enter without a
search. Thus the Holy Land has become a high
security prison for all its dwellers, Jews and
non-Jews alike.
It could be predicted. The Jews weren't locked by
evil strangers within the ghetto walls, wrote
Vladimir Zhabotinsky, they chose it as foreigners in
China chose to live in their separate settlements.
Fifty years later, Israel Shahak made another valid
observation: the walls of ghetto were breached from
outside, by the state, while the Jews weren't keen
to leave. The visible walls were breached, but the
inner walls remained. The Jewish state is enactment
of the paranoid Jewish fear and loathing of
stranger, while the Cabal policies of Pentagon are
another manifestation of the same fear and loathing
on global scale.
Not only individuals, whole societies and cultures
can be insane. This important discovery was made by
an American social scientist Ruth Benedict, a close
and admired friend of Margaret Mead and Franz Boas.
Her Patterns of Culture (1934) remains one of the
most widely read books in the social sciences ever
written. In this work, Ruth Benedict described
different Native American cultures and characterized
the Pueblo Indians as "placid and harmonious".
The Jewish social scientist Franz Boas provided her
with data showing "the self-aggrandizing,
megalomaniac character of the Kwakiutl", while Reo
Fortune proved the Dobu Islanders were "paranoiac
and mean spirited".
This last definition fits the Jews as culture to a
boot. What was this Cabal-instigated obsessive
search for WMD in Iraq if not a fit of paranoia,
fear of a cheated goy with an axe? Present Israel,
the country of perennial body search, is the
ultimate of paranoid societies, according to Ruth
Benedict. The US is succumbing to the same disease
under her present ruling clique of Leo Strauss’
followers: it builds walls and disarms far away
lands, as well as their own citizens, for the Jewish
paranoia is extremely contagious.
It is useless to fight the Wall, as it was useless
to fight the illegal settlements, as long you ignore
the cause. 'The Wall is in the heart', ubeliba
homa, sung the Jews as they conquered Jerusalem
in 1967. The Wall is at the heart of the problem,
and this is the Jewish state in Palestine. Young and
not-so-young peace activists at the hilltops along
the Wall still wave the slogan "Two States" at the
bulldozers, though the bulldozers implement the
dream of Two States, my nightmare: a Jewish state
and a chain of reservations for the Goyim, the
"Palestinian State". Whoever says, 'an Independent
Palestinian State aside the Jewish state', turns a
blind eye to the Wall. The Wall is an operation of
separating the Siamese twins, and only the strongest
one will survive it. Discussions of the Wall run
into sand in Israel: vast majority of Israelis, from
Labour to Likud, support it, while 'peace-loving'
Israelis are the strongest supporters of the
Devouring Maw.
The Wall mocks the innocent souls inflamed by the
Roadmap, another doomed plan to separate the Twins.
Sharon is not worried for it provides enough delays
to complete the Wall, it puts the onus of
peacekeeping on the Palestinian side, it gives him
full freedom of action in exchange for some empty
promises.
The peace activists hope to alter the course of the
Wall a bit here and there. But it won't help, for
the Wall will always separate people and their land.
Wherever you put it, it will separate the refugees
in Deheishe refugee camp from their houses ten miles
away in Deir a-Sheik. It will separate the
Christians of Taybeh from the Holy Sepulchre and the
Muslims of Yassouf from al-Aqsa. It will separate
the Jews from the holy sites. It will separate the
Highlands peasants from their working places in Tel
Aviv and Haifa.
Sharon's Wall, this unmitigated disaster, provides a
rare opportunity to observe the true nature of the
Jewish State, and to call for its dismantling. Not
the Wall, silly! The Jewish State.
------------------------------------------------------------------
An organisation that calls for it:
The Association for One Democratic State in
Palestine/Israel
L'Association pour un seul État démocratique en
Palestine/Israël
c/o Sami Aldeeb, docteur en droit
Chairman / Président
Ochettaz 17
1025 St-Sulpice, Switzerland
Tel. 0041 21 6916585 or 0041 21 6924968
E-mail:
aldeeb@bluewin.ch
Private web / site privé: http://go.to/samipage
Invitation to join us
Invitation pour vous joindre à nous
We are a group of Jews, Christians, Muslims and
Agnostics, inside and outside Palestine/Israel. We
created an Association whose aim is to promote by
peaceful means the establishment of one democratic
State in Palestine/Israel which will respect human
rights and the principle of non-discrimination based
on religion, gender, nationality, ethnicity or
language. We invite you to join our group by filling
the following statement and returning it to my
address:
aldeeb@bluewin.ch
Please send this message to all interested persons.
Nous sommes un groupe de Juifs, Chrétiens, Musulmans
et Agnostiques à l'intérieur et à l'extérieur de la
Palestine/Israël. Nous avons créé une Association
dont le but est de promouvoir par des moyens
pacifiques l'établissement d'un seul État
démocratique en Palestine/Israël qui respecte les
droits de l'homme et le principe de
non-discrimination basée sur la religion, le sexe,
la nationalité, l'ethnicité ou la langue. Nous vous
invitons à vous joindre à nous en remplissant les
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adresse:
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Prière d'envoyer ce message à toutes les personnes
intéressées.
I accept the bylaws and wish to be a member /
J'accepte les statuts et d'être un membre.
Name / Nom:
Address / Adresse:
Religion:
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E-mail:
Indications personnelles en deux lignes (curriculum
et fonction actuelle):
Personal indications in two lines (curriculum and
present function):
Thank you in advance / Merci d'avance
Sami Aldeeb, docteur en droit
Chairman / Président
Bylaws of the Association in English, Arabic, French
and Italian
Statuts de l'Association en Anglais, Arabe, Français
et Italien:
http://www.lpj.org/Nonviolence/Sami/OneState/Association.html
