[WCUSP] Fw: It's a "Wall" when it affects them personally

[Libby or Mort Frank]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ian Lustick" <ilustick at sas.upenn.edu>
To: <Recipient list suppressed:>
Sent: Thursday, February 01, 2007 9:49 PM
Subject: It's a "Wall" when it affects them personally


(Arutz Sheva is the website of the Gush Emunim
settlers of the West Bank.  On its website is
today posted a headline article which I paste
below. It condemns the Israeli
Fence/Security/Barrier/Wall as a "Partition
WALL," calling it a scar on the landscape that
makes the lives of those around it miserable and
destroys farmland and forests.  This is
fascinating not only because these are
condemnations of the Wall usually made by
Palestinians, and rejected by the Israeli right,
but because supporters of the barrier have always
insisted it should be called a "fence" not a
"Wall."  With the "Wall" quickly rising around
them, however, the settlers of Gush Etzion now
call it that.  Kind of reminds me of the Phil
Ochs song "Love Me I'm a Liberal."  In his
introduction to the song he defined liberals as
40 degrees to the left of center in good times
and 40 degrees to the right of center if it affects them personally.  IL)

GUSH ETZION'S JEWISH RESIDENTS POISED FOR MAJOR WALL PROTEST

Though Israel prefers to refer to it as a
security fence, the concrete wall that
politicians openly admit is a border is
tightening around a formerly complacent Gush Etzion.

A large terminal is nearing completion and the
once-scenic Highway 60, or Way of the
Forefathers, is now overshadowed by towering
concrete slabs, angled inward toward the 'Israeli' side.

Though an initial struggle against plans to
destroy a local forest to build the wall met with
success, local activism has fizzled out, with
municipality officials and Yesha Council mayors
assuring residents that they were fighting for
their rights in the Supreme Court and opposite
government ministries. Grassroots efforts have
focused on the opening of an alternate highway
connection eastern Gush Etzion to Jerusalem in recent month.

Now, with bulldozers working at full steam and
quiet towns like Efrat realizing that a
Palestinian state is being established meters
from there, the grassroots activist
infrastructure that has been constructed since
the Gaza Disengagement is preparing to flex its muscles.

A petition against the Partition Wall (a
description adopted by activists who believe its
purpose is not security, but rather to divide the
land) was circulated on Gush Etzion email lists.
The hundreds who signed, and those who declined,
thinking petitions to be a waste of time, are now
being called upon to join the veteran activists
and Land of Israel youth in standing up to the wall.

"The time has come," explains Women in Green's
Nadia Matar, an Efrat resident struggling to
galvanize her neighbors to action. "now that the
cement is really going up, people are beginning
to understand that it is not a security fence. It
is a Partition Wall and in the age of Kassam
rockets such a border only keeps us out, while rockets fly freely overhead."

A protest is set to take place this Tuesday,
February 4, at 4 PM near the northern entrance to Efrat.

Matar admits that many residents remain in
despair since the Disengagement. "The reaction of
most people to all the bad news is to turn off
the radio, stop listening to the news and
withdraw into their family and hope things will
pass," she explains. "That is exactly what our enemies hope we will do."

But residents say, in community email lists, that
perhaps opposing the wall is the equivalent of
"knocking our collective heads against the wall ­
literally," as one skeptic wrote.

Matar insists that activism, including protests,
even by a small number of people, works.
"Pressure managed to stop the fence in the Judean
Desert," she says. "There the bulldozers are now
silent. One of the lessons we learned from Gush
Katif is that the worst thing is to have a public
that continues with their daily routine and lives
in denial. Before the expulsion decrees there
were many other decrees that the leadership there
would tell the residents not to worry about ­
starting with fencing off Gush Katif. 'The most
important thing is to continue our daily life,"
they would tell them. A public that gets used to
these small things and doesn't rise up will not
be able to rise up when the big decree comes. That was our mistake."

Matar sees the current time as a critical one in
injecting the controversy over the wall into the
coming election. "We are in the final days of
this government and we must already start passing
on the message to the next MKs, ministers and
government that the first issue should be to stop this fence."

The Judean Desert fence was stopped through an
alliance with environmental groups. Matar is
satisfied with the alliance, as environmental
concerns are very much part of her objection to
the wall as well. "They wounded the land of
Israel," she says of the wall's architects. "When
I see them working, uprooting trees, destroying
forests and creating an unnatural route in the middle of Israel ­ it hurts."

Matar is confident that the battle will be won
and that the gashes carved out of the land by the
wall will be healed. "If the Berlin Wall fell,
then this one will certainly fall," she says. "If
we work hard enough, we can bring it down. Then
we will have a massive tree planting along the route."

"We all know Israel will be forced to remain on
both sides," says a neighbor. But Matar says the
money being wasted on the project is a matter of
life and death. "The 250 million shekels can be
used by Sderot," she says. "They are bleeding
already from their wall around Gaza ­ why build
another one using money that could help the victims of the first  one?"