What's Right isn't Always what's Legal (Ask Nelson Mandela)

A week or so ago I got a chance to be shown around Jenin, Tul Karem, and East Baq'ra.

East and West Baq'ra are separated by 25 foot cement wall. In fact that's not precisely accurate. Six houses holding 54 people from East Baq'ra are walled into West Baq'ra. The Israel government has kindly built a small checkpoint which is used exclusively (and may be used exclusively) by these six families who daily cross back into East Baq'ra for their kids to go to school, to visit neighbors, and generally be in their community. "Their houses are like hotels now, they only sleep there" our tour guide told us. If you follow the wall attentively you will see a house cut in half at its border and another where the huge security light fixed to the top of the wall shines straight into someone's bedroom. (Good luck going to sleep with that shining on you). The split house belongs to a man who's son and daughter-in-law up until a few years ago were his neighbors. A 300 foot walk is now a 150 mile trip one way to see his family.(He has to drive to Jerusalem, get around the wall and drive back) He is not permitted to spend the night so the total trip is 300 miles. And yet when Baq'ra's central market was destroyed in 2003 in order to build the wall, the city caught a lucky break. The wall was being built on the official green line. They won the fight that many many others have lost.

You see, originally Israel had built the wall so as to cut into the green line, into East Baq'ra, annexing five wells including the 2^nd biggest in the West bank. This well provides 60,000 people with water daily and would have been a monumental loss to thousands of Palestinians in the West Bank if Israel had succeeded in annexing it. Already Israel’s national water company Mekorot distributes water in a highly discriminatory way, giving Israel and its settlements 83%[1] of the water available from the West Bank aquifers, leaving just 17% for the Palestinian inhabitants. Much of that water rightfully belongs to Palestinians and yet they are forced to buy it back from the company that has essentially commandeered it from them. Thankfully in this case the sustained pressure and advocacy of the Palestinian Farmer Union in alliance with some steadfast international advocates (including an older lady who once told off a soldier for not allowing her to go teach the Palestinian kids that needed her on the other side of the checkpoint) bore the rare fruit of an Israeli High Court Decision which was implemented! (Although, just for kicks it seems, the night before the court announced its decision the army cut power lines for East Baq'ra…)

So, horray, the "security fence" (see "Apartheid Wall") was moved to its legal place. And still standing in front of a half demolished house and in the midst of the ruins of a once-thriving local market, seeing the almost comically hopeful geraniums lining the gray wall and hearing of communities ripped apart, I find it hard to celebrate.

I'm an advocate for international law. Part of my talking points on the Wall include the statement that if the wall was entirely built on the Green Line there wouldn't be an issue. But I'm not really sure that's true anymore. It turns out what's legal isn't necessarily what's right.

There's actually nothing right about this wall. There are so many ways of getting through it if one is determined that the security argument seems laughable. There have been so many attempts and successes and using the construction of the wall to annex water resources, agricultural resources and normalization of settlements that it seems almost intentionally bullheaded if one does not name these as the primary aim of the government in building this wall. Besides that is the ever-telling question of "Who profits from this?" I think perhaps my true and primary enemy in this world is the growing "security industry" which may as well be called "We will support every kind of exploitation and human rights violation as long as we can make a profit industry"

I think "love your enemies" in this case means that I need to do everything in my power to break that industry and if the CEO ends up in jail, or broke, or psychologically broken from guilt it will be my Christian duty to visit him/her, to help him/her out, to listen to him/her in love.

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[1] The Palestinian Hydrology Group – Water for Life. WaSH Monitoring Programm 2007/2008.