The Wall in the West Bank and East Jerusalem remains a barrier to Palestinian peace and prosperity, reports Catherine
Weibel.
[Photo credit: Tineke D’haese]
Five years ago this month the International Court of Justice (ICJ) delivered an advisory opinion stating that Israel’s construction of the Wall in the West Bank
and East Jerusalem was illegal and called for its immediate dismantling. At the time, I was working in New York City for an international organization writing many press releases about that
Wall. Although I had never seen it, touched it, or witnessed the harm it was causing, I had read enough about it to get an idea of the suffering it would cause thousands of ordinary
Palestinians.When I first arrived in East-Jerusalem earlier this year to work with Oxfam, one of the first things I did was to go and see the Wall. Far from being dismantled, it has
only continued to grow in length over the past five years. I was struck with a sense of the surreal as I stood in front of this huge ribbon of concrete winding its way between the hills,
blocking out the horizon.But nothing compares with the real thing, as I recently discovered after seeing firsthand the grave consequences that the Wall has on the lives of
Palestinians. To mark the occasion, Oxfam released a collection of testimonies from across the occupied West Bank: Five years of illegality: Time to dismantle the Wall and respect the rights of Palestinians.The first time I crossed back into East Jerusalem from the West Bank through the Kalandiya checkpoint, I found myself lost in a metallic maze of barbed wire fencing, floor to ceiling steel
turnstiles, electronic detectors and iron bars. Unidentified voices told me through invisible speakers to place my belongings in an x-ray machine. I saw a human being only at the very end of the
process, when I had to show my passport to a young Israeli soldier sitting in an armoured sentry box, looking bored and reading a romance novel.
A block of new housing units in the Israeli settlement Har
Gilo [Photo credit: Photos: Tineke D'haese]
This is an understandable sentiment. However, she did not seem aware that most of the Wall runs on land which does not belong to
Israel, but to the Palestinians. The ICJ advisory opinion confirmed in its findings that the route of the Wall is not only based on security considerations, but is also being used to carve out space
for West Bank Israeli settlements - which are illegal under international law - on the Israeli side of the Wall.In short, many believe that the route of the Wall is an effective
tool for the further confiscation and expropriation of Palestinian resources, such as land and water. Some Israeli NGOs such as B’tselem, an Oxfam partner, try to raise
awareness about all aspects of the Wall. They ask for the Wall to be re-routed along the 1967 armistice line - the so-called Green Line, the internationally recognized border between
Israel and the occupied Palestinian Territory of the West Bank. They ask for the Wall to run on Israeli land, not on Palestinian land. Sadly, the Palestinians whose
lives are affected were unable to attend a packed press conference - in which Oxfam took part, along with several UN agencies - in East Jerusalem earlier this month on the fifth anniversary of the ICJ
opinion. They were on the other side of the Wall, unable to enter East Jerusalem. But at least, I thought, their voices were heard through the testimonies published in Oxfam’s
publication on the effects of the Wall.Yet five years on, I really wonder when someone will begin to listen.For more information, see the Oxfam report: Five years of illegality: Time to dismantle the Wall and respect the rights of Palestinians. More from the Oxfam Press Office at http://www.oxfam.org.uk/news
[ Any views expressed in this article are those of the writer and not of Reuters. ]
U.S. members of Neturei Karta, a fringe ultra-Orthodox movement within the anti-Zionist bloc, ride aboard a bus as the destroyed American International School is reflected in the window in the northern ...
![[Photo
credit: Tineke D’haese]](http://www.oxfam.org.uk/generationwhy/cgi/process_comp/photos/2009/07/wall.jpg)
![[Photo credit: Tineke D'haese]](http://www.oxfam.org.uk/generationwhy/cgi/process_comp/photos/2009/07/checkpoint.jpg)
![A
block of new housing units in the Israeli settlement Har Gilo [Photo credit: Photos: Tineke D'haese]](http://www.oxfam.org.uk/generationwhy/cgi/process_comp/photos/2009/07/har_gilo.jpg)
