The Hindu : An "Apartheid Wall'' in West Bank

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Jan 25, 2004

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An "Apartheid Wall'' in West Bank

By Aniket Alam

MUMBAI, JAN. 24. Wajih El-Ayassa remembers that day in 1948 when the Zionists came with their guns and threw him and his family out of their village of Zakiria. The land, where they had lived for centuries, had overnight become the territory of the new State of Israel. Living since, in the refugee camp near Bethlehem, he is now a witness to his land becoming "an open air prison" as the Israeli Security Wall comes up.

"It's actually an Apartheid Wall!'' exclaims Salim, a South African and member of a Palestinian Solidarity Group. "In all our days under apartheid we have never seen brutality as is daily experienced by Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip," he says. ``We never had fighter planes strafing Soweto nor had we tanks firing into unarmed people as we witness in the occupied territories of Palestine every other day," he says.

The Palestinians and their supporters, who have formed an international solidarity alliance, were in Mumbai to participate in the just-concluded World Social Forum and "tell the world what is happening to us."

The Israel Government is constructing a 700 km, eight-metre wall around the cities and settlements of the West Bank to regulate the movement of people. Much of the Wall has already been constructed and it will be completed by 2005.

"The city of Qalqilia has already been surrounded by this high wall with only one four-metre wide gate which is opened thrice a day for 30 minutes each time as the only access for the residents to move out or come inside. People have lost jobs since they can't travel freely, they are losing their agricultural land which they can't tend properly. They are living in what is an open air prison," says Mr. Ayassa.

When Israel was formed in 1948 it took 78 per cent of the territory of Palestine. "Ever since, through its policy of Jewish settlements, it has taken away almost half of what was left to us. We are living in congested ghettos with 3.5 million people in the 3,000 square km of West Bank territory and 1.5 million stuffed into a 300 square km of Gaza strip," says Mohsen Abu-Ramadan of the Palestinian Environmental NGOs Network.

``With this "Apartheid Wall" they are not only making us prisoners in our own land and destroying all possibilities of an independent Palestinian State, but they are also separating us from our water sources'', says Mr. Ramadan.

Salim, their South African friend, says that having experienced apartheid in South Africa and now having lived in Palestine he is convinced that Israel is a racist State, with racist laws, which discriminate between people on the basis of religion. "With this `Apartheid Wall' they are creating `Bantustans'," he says, referring to the Apartheid South African Government's policy of creating dependent "homelands" for the blacks.

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