Israel's wall.

The building of a fence by the Israelis is the latest example of their failure to understand the consequences of their own policies, especially that of building settlements on land that does not belong to them.

The wall now being built is an act of desperation on the same scale as was the building of the Berlin Wall by the Communists, together with its electric fence which ran south dividing Germany into separate East and West states. It took fifty years before that wall came tumbling down, but down it came. So will Israel's. Meanwhile, it will aggravate, not settle, the issues which have long divided Israelis and Palestinians.

The facts about the wall are: one third--225 kilometres or over 130 miles--has been completed. It is being built on Palestinian land with no respect whatever for ownership, tradition or agricultural status. It cuts Palestinian land or villages into pieces, demolishes properties in its way, and snakes through vineyards and olive groves. Its aim is to provide protection for nearby Israeli settlements, all of them built illegally on occupied territory in either the West Bank or Gaza since 1967. These settlements, in turn, are connected to one another and to Israel itself by a network of "for Israelis-only" roads leaving the Palestinians behind barbed wire and surrounded, in towns and lands cut off from one another. Going to work or school means traveling through one or more of innumerable checkpoints which may open for an hour, or three hours, or perhaps not at all. The wall, too, has its own heavily guarded entrance points.

Construction of the fence has been speeded up in the hope of finishing it by mid-2005. It is a combination of high walls (some 25 feet high), electrified chain-link fencing, barbed wire, concrete guard towers, all armed with sensors to let guards know people are approaching. When finished, it will have stolen another 200 square kilometres from the ever shrinking land available to Palestinians. It will have placed 15,000 of them in Israel without anyone's asking their permission, and cut off hundreds of thousands from visiting family or towns, including Arab East Jerusalem, places which used to be only a few streets away.

The world is told that the wall is necessary to counter the Palestinian terrorism of suicide-bombers, a phenomenon of the now three-year-old intifada (uprising). The latter, needless to say, is "hard" terrorism. But its cause is the "soft" terrorism of the Israelis, the result of over 30 years of military control, theft of land, diplomatic duplicity, denial of rights, daily humiliation, forced unemployment, discrimination and the undermining of schooling, health and civil services by endless curfews. During the last three years one may add the traumatizing of Palestinians by targeted assassinations, helicopter missile attacks at midnight, bribing for information, arrests of thousands of prisoners, this in response to the traumatizing of the Israelis by Muslim suicide murderers.

Today the West Bank and the Gaza strip are concentration camps. The average Palestinian inmate of the West Bank lives on less than $2.00 a day and those in Gaza on less than $1.00. The million and a half Palestinians in Gaza receive 20 per cent of the water supply; the 5,000 Israeli settlers get the other 80 per cent. This cannot last and must not continue. Terrorism and counter-terrorism are both unacceptable.

Not anti-Semitism

Yes, I am aware that there is much anti-Semitism today and, yes, I agree wholeheartedly with Catholic Church teaching that this is unacceptable (see News in Brief under Vatican and Canada in this issue). But we had better learn to distinguish between Jews (ethnic), Judaism (religion), and Israel (state), difficult as this may be, not least because some Jews or Jewish organizations, e.g. the weekly Canadian Jewish News or the Jewish-owned National Post largely identify themselves with Sharon's Israel. If some of their writers had their way, any criticism of Israel would be classified as anti-Semitism.

Evangelical Christians 

Another point worth making is the erroneous identification of Evangelical Christians of present-day Israel and Jerusalem with the promised "new Jerusalem," the "new Zion," and the "new Kingdom" of Old Testament prophets. When Isaiah speaks of the "New Jerusalem," he is not speaking of a place on earth but of a place in heaven. The "new Israel" is not to be identified with today's state of Israel, but with the Kingdom of God brought about by our Lord Jesus Christ. He, in saving the world from sin and slavery, inaugurated the Kingdom of God which will have its fulfilment in eternity, not here on earth. Meanwhile, because the disciples of Jesus are here, the Kingdom of God is already on earth, but not of the earth.

MP Stockwell Day's political acceptance of Israel's "right' to the West Bank because it is the former Judaea and Samaria of the Old Testament--is wrong. Israel, the secular state recognized by the United Nations in 1948, has the rights of every other state but no more.

As Pope John Paul stated recently, what is needed is not the building of walls but the building of bridges.