Celebrating Berlin While Enabling Israel's Apartheid Wall

The 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall highlights both the inherent thirst for freedom and proclivity to hypocrisy ingrained in the human condition.

As people across the world are joining to celebrate the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, there is reason for joy and despair.

In Berlin, celebrations included the stacking and subsequent toppling of 1,000 8-ft tall foam domino tiles along the path where the wall once stood. 

In the US, the German Embassy coordinated a campaign with the motto "Freedom Without Walls" to promote awareness of the historic day in an event intended to target college students across the country.

And In the town of Qalandiya in the West Bank, a group of masked Palestinian activisits united to tear down a two-meter cement block of today's Berlin Wall - Israel's ever-expanding "separation fence" which has divided families from each other, Jews from Muslims and Israelis from Palestinians.

Israel began building its "barrier" -- which stands at twice the height of the Berlin Wall and more than four times the length -- in 2002, citing security reasons. 

Berlin's wall ran for 155 kilometers. Israel's is expected to reach at least 650. The average height of the Berlin Wall was 3.6 meters. The fenced portions of Israel's wall reach 6 meters, and the cement portions reach 8.

As world leaders converged on the German capital to celebrate the anniversary, Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel praised the courage of East Germans.

"Many played a role. But it would not have been possible without the courage of the people in the former East Germany," she said.

But in the West Bank the courage that spurred the 100 protestors that broke through the wall at a military checkpoint in Qalandiya was obscured by tear gas grenades launched from the Israeli Army and silence among Western leaders. 

If there is anything to be learned from Berlin, it would be that walls do not protect, they divide; they do not prevent, but incite. If western policy makers would muster a fraction of the courage that the protesters in Qalandiya displayed and challenge Israel's misguided rerunning of history by implementing resolutions made by the International Court of Justice to dismantle the "illegal" wall, a practical and productive step towards a just peace would be within reach.

Anything short of that is for show, rather than for shalom.

Last summer, President Obama stuck a note on another famous wall in Israel, the Wailing Wall. Among the few sentences he had included was, "Give me the wisdom to do what is right and just."

But it may be wiser in this instance to turn to history rather than to God to know what is right and just.

As George Bernard Shaw famously concluded, "If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience."

 

Follow Ahmed Shihab-Eldin on Twitter: www.twitter.com/hamoods

Comments

[kidolympic]

One day we may be building homes inside the walls; lots of walls as homes. Like the homes built on top of bridges. I suggest you to read, Man and his Symbols/1964

[misaacm]

So, Ahmed, tell me why don't the Palestinians go east instead of west? If there is a fence preventing the Palestinians from traveling west into Israel, constructed after the Palestinians sent suicide bombers to Israeli restaurants, why don't they instead exit the West bank via Jordan? I traveled to Jordan from Israel earlier this year, no problem. I know that Palestinians are obsessed with going to Israel, but they have lost that privilege by embracing terrorism. But for all your fulminating against the fence, why don't you go the other way? Or is it perhaps that Israel is not the only entity preventing "right to freedom of movement"?

[Sentientbeing09]

Palestinians arent going anywhere.

[zermatt]

This Israeli wall serves an undeniably legitimate purpose: to keep out suicide bombers who have the annoying habit of crossing over into Israel and blowing up buses, shopping malls, gas stations, cafes, discos, pizza parlors, Passover seders, and whatever else they can take with them.
Comparing the barrier erected by Israel to the Berlin Wall misses the point entirely. The Berlin Wall was intended to keep its own citizens in, not interlopers out.
As the old saying goes, good fences make good neighbors, or from Israel’s perspective -- and from the perspective of any other nation that might find itself in an analogous position -- good fences clearly make less destructive neighbors.

[lbsaltzman]

Israel could have accomplished the same aim by building the wall on its' own borders, instead of using the wall to steal more Palestinian land. Israel could have ended the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza many years ago and be now living in peace, and not need a wall. Palestinians don't launch the attacks they do on Israel for no reason. They attack out of intense frustration after over 60 years of Israeli criminal behavior. One can argue that their tactics have not been effective, and no question there has been some acts of terrorism, but nothing excuses the intense state terrorism that Israel has imposed on the Palestinians.

[StCuthbert]

Saltzman, there's nothing magic about the Green Line. It's an arbitrary line that came into existence because that's where the fighting stopped in 1948. The wall does not have to be along it, and if the wall goes into the West Bank it is *not* stealing land. The West Bank does not belong to the Palestinians, thus it cannot be stolen from them.

Regardless of how compelling the reasons on for Palestinian violence (and I have a hunch the explanations you cited are reasons you made up that have no basis in why the Palestinians *actually* commit crimes), the Israelis are equally compelled to protect themselves from that violence. Hence, the wall.

[mulegino]

Things like freedom of movement and the recognition of inalienable rights are, tragically, rarities in the history of the world. The U.S. regime and its client/sidekick /partner in crime preach tirelessly about respect for human rights, the enjoyment of freedom, and being beacons of democracy-which of course, in translation is rendered human rights to be violated and supressed, freedom to make war, and a beacon illuminating hypocrisy and double standards in a so called "democracy".

[StCuthbert]

The Palestinians used their "right to freedom of movement" to kill 900 Israelis during the Second Intifada, leading directly to the construction of the security fence. Do you think the Palestinian right to freedom of movement supersedes the Israeli right to live?

[Ahmed Shihab-Eldin - Huffpost Blogger]

Lets not play the number game. This isn't about whether Israelis killed more Palestinians or vice versa.

Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and the right to live. That is the only way to answer your question.