“They’re Building A Wall”: Settler Colonialism and the Separation Barrier in Occupied Palestine
By Tyler Durbin
Abstract
Despite international consensus declaring the separation barrier in Occupied Palestine to be illegal, Israel has continued this geopolitical project unchallenged. Historical context illuminates how the barrier continues Israel’s longtime settler colonial desires and objectives. Examination of the judicial decisions of the International Court of Justice and Israel’s High Court of Justice on the separation barrier, and their following political developments, finds that judicial activism in Israel was minimally successful in mitigating the worst effects of the separation barrier. The result, however, was a barrier seen by Israel as humanitarian and proportional, allowing it to withstand domestic and international criticism from its engagement in the international crime of apartheid. Analyzing the barrier through a settler colonial lens of containment, apartheid, and spacio-cide reveals that Israel’s project was motivated by a political desire to protect illegal settlements in the Occupied Territories, confiscate Palestinian land, and prevent the future creation of a viable, sovereign Palestinian state.
Keywords
Palestine/Israel, separation barrier, international law, settler colonialism, Zionism
“Is it for this that we have established a country? Is it for this that we have gathered from every corner of the world, the survivors of regimes that persecuted us, discriminated against us and denied us every possible right simply because our origin, in order to establish a state whose army will implement a discriminatory regime over millions who are not us?”
– Michael Sfard, Israeli human rights lawyer, The Wall
Introduction
Seventeen years after the International Court of Justice declared the Israeli separation barrier in the West Bank to be illegal under international law, Israel has continued this settler colonial project relatively unchallenged (Patel). For scholars and activists, the barrier symbolizes a dialectic of “an ever-radicalizing Palestinian struggle and an ever-deepening Israeli oppression, causing ever-growing levels of human misery, mainly—but not only—among Palestinians” (Yiftachel and Yacobi 139).
Extending throughout the West Bank of the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), the planned route of the barrier, which includes sections already constructed, under construction, and awaiting construction is some 435 miles long—more than twice the length of the Green Line, the internationally recognized border between Israel and the West Bank (Backmann 4). In fact, 85 percent of the separation barrier has been constructed in the West Bank, without consultation of the Palestinian Authority (PA). This development has led to over a decade of legal challenges to the barrier’s legitimacy, as many have argued that the construction amounts to Israel’s de facto annexation of the seam zone, the area between the Green Line and the barrier in Occupied Palestine (Sfard, The Wall 327).
Over the years, a variety of terminology has been used to reference the separation barrier, such as ‘apartheid wall’ or ‘security fence.’ Although I may utilize any of these terms, I will mainly refer to the structure as the separation barrier because “it constitutes a physical system” for the separation of Israelis and Palestinians made up of “a series of wall; barrier; electric fences; and security zones of barbed wire, ditches, motion sensors, and surveillance cameras” (Sfard, The Wall 260; Backmann 3). Utilizing a number of theoretical concepts from a framework of settler colonialism, this essay will perform three primary tasks: a historization of the separation barrier’s development; an analysis of the barrier’s legality and the implications of its judicial challenges; and an exploration of the barrier’s function, including its effects on individual Palestinians, the possibility of a future Palestinian state, and the ongoing colonial occupation of Palestine.
Historical and Theoretical Context
It is necessary to know an abbreviated history of Palestine and Israel in order to analyze Israel’s contemporary occupation activities and geopolitical desires, including the separation barrier project. The history of Zionist colonization of Palestine is a history of settler colonialism. After the Ottoman Empire disintegrated following World War I, Palestine “became a distinct entity under British control” (El-Hasan 11). Though challenged at times by various factors, Zionist settlement in Palestine, beginning in the late nineteenth century, succeeded in the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 (“Zionist Settler Colonialism”).
In 1947, the newly formed United Nations passed a plan to partition historic Palestine into two separate territories and states, one for Jews and one for Arabs. Despite Zionist Jews only owning some 7 percent of the land by the partition plan’s passage, the UN outlined that 55 percent of historic Palestine would be allotted for a Jewish territory (El-Hasan 11, 16). The partition plan was thus rejected by Palestinian Arabs who had lived in that territory for generations (El-Hasan 12). After the State of Israel was declared in 1948, an ensuing regional war resulted in Israel taking control of 78 percent of historic Palestine, with the rest—including the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip—under the control of neighboring Jordan and Egypt (El-Hasan 13). Scholars estimate that between 1947 and 1949, roughly 750,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled due to the war—an event that is known to Palestinians as the Nakba, or the Catastrophe (“Fact Sheet”).
Zionism in Palestine has viewed “the control of land [as] a zero-sum contest fought against the indigenous [Palestinian] population” (Salamanca et al. 1), in which:
the territorial limits of settler sovereignty are liminal—indeterminate, ambiguous, and pending—at least until the frontier is closed and final borders are established. Israel, though, has been unable to close the frontier and delimit final territorial borders, which has resulted in the indefinite character of the ‘occupation’ and the continued exercise of unbounded territoriality, particularly in the West Bank. (Hughes 1)
In Israel and Palestine, as in places like the Americas, settler colonialism results in both the dissolution of Indigenous societies and creation of new colonial society upon the land which it targets; “settler colonizers come to stay: invasion is a structure not an event” (Wolfe 388). In his text on settler colonialism, theorist Patrick Wolfe illustrates this “destroy to replace” condition—in which destruction is not limited to murder or genocide—through the words of Theodore Herzl, the ‘pioneer’ of Zionism, when he noted, “If I wish to substitute a new building for an old one, I must demolish before I construct” (qtd. in Wolfe 388).
The settler colonial logics that informed Zionist geopolitics before and after 1948 continue to exist in Israeli society. In the 1967 War, Israel militarily occupied the last fifth of Palestine, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip—the area that came to be known as the Occupied Palestinian Territories (El-Hasan 17). As Lorenzo Veracini has theorized, a settler colonial project succeeds “only when it extinguishes itself—that is, when the settlers cease to be defined as such and become ‘natives,’ and their position becomes normalized” (28). However, Veracini argues that while Israel has succeeded in its settler colonial project pre- and post-1948, it has struggled since 1967 because “whereas Zionism during the 1947–49 war was able to expel the majority of the Palestinians from within the borders of what became Israel proper, in 1967 the population living in what remained of Palestine did not leave” (29).
Without the possibility of expulsion and to avoid extending citizenship to Palestinians, the state continued military occupation and began encroaching further on Palestinian land (El-Hasan 22). Starting in the 1970s, the Israeli government allowed the formation of Jewish-only settlements in the Palestinian Occupied Territories, which are illegal under international law, making future withdrawal increasingly difficult (El-Hasan 21). However, Palestinians continued to resist and negotiate for the establishment of a sovereign state of Palestine within the Occupied Territories, even though no attempt to establish a two-state solution has succeeded. Following the 1988 mass protests and uprisings during the First Intifada, negotiations led to the Oslo Peace Accords which again failed to establish a sovereign Palestinian state (El-Hasan 19). In lieu of sovereignty, the Accords created the Palestinian Authority, a self-governing entity which received “only limited [civil] autonomy on a few parcels of occupied land [in Gaza and the West Bank] separated by Jewish-only settlements and Jewish-only roads” (El-Hasan19). The Oslo period also fractured the West Bank into three areas under different authority: “A) Palestinian control; B) Palestinian civil control and Israeli military control; and C) full Israeli control” (Schewe). In these different areas, separate laws and institutions governed Israeli settlers and Palestinians, accentuated with severe inequality. By 2017, more than 200 Israeli settlements had been established in the West Bank where more than 620,000 Israelis currently reside (“Settlements”).
The analytics of settler colonialism remains relevant to understanding contemporary Israeli occupation activity in the West Bank, particularly in relation to the separation barrier. As David Lloyd notes:
Precisely as the [colonizer] becomes more established, the rigor of the divisions, the state of apartheid, between the settler and the [colonized] becomes deeper, to the extent, as we know, of the construction of walls and barriers, separate areas for residence and movement, and tightly controlled Bantustans. The ‘iron wall’ that was for Ze’ev Vladimir Jabotinsky a metaphor becomes eventually [realized] in concrete form. (67)
The Second Intifada and the Separation Principle
In 2000, just months after yet another failure to negotiate a two-state solution, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s provocative visit to the holy site al-Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount triggered a period of Palestinian demonstrations and Israeli military suppression which came to be known as the Second Intifada, which was much bloodier than the first. Between 2000 and 2006, just under 1000 Israelis were killed in Palestinian attacks or bombings and roughly 3,400 Palestinians were killed by Israeli military operations (Gordon 197; Backmann 25–26). In the wake of this violence, Sharon’s administration initiated the separation barrier, claiming that it was necessary “to prevent the infiltration of terrorists, forbid the entry of clandestine arms and explosives, and protect the lives of 6.7 million Israeli citizens” (Backmann 25–26). Netzah Mashiah, head of the Ministry of Defense and director of the construction, framed the barrier as “temporary,” stating that “the length of time it stays up depends on how the Palestinians work toward peace . . . it can stay here five minutes or five decades” (qtd. in Backmann 49).
Under the guise of protecting its citizens against suicide bombings and other terrorist attacks, Israel advanced a settlement plan that built a separation barrier mainly inside the West Bank. To construct the barrier, the Israeli military issued orders to seize private Palestinian land—a process that began even before the earliest government resolution approved the barrier (Sfard, The Wall 268). Although the barrier was framed as a temporary and necessary security measure, the depth of its planned route inside the West Bank shows how it was and is a settler colonial apparatus, “a political weapon to confiscate land and thus constrict Palestinian space” (Gordon 212). The barrier’s construction to the east of many illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank makes them easier for future annexation. Israeli human rights attorney Michael Sfard maintains that Israel’s separation barrier system “may hold the title for the most cynical manipulation of pain caused by suicide terrorism” (The Wall 260). Today, about twenty years after construction began, the separation barrier operates more as a permanent reality for Palestinians rather than the temporary solution it was promised to be.
Echoing Agamben’s analysis of the state of emergency, the separation barrier symbolizes a state of exception, wherein the state’s temporary suspension of the law becomes permanent.
Echoing Agamben’s analysis of the state of emergency, the separation barrier symbolizes a state of exception, wherein the state’s temporary suspension of the law becomes permanent. In this way, when the allegedly temporary exception “is both the method and the law, the military can portray every action as a response to emergency and Israeli civilian society can ignore every evil” (Weizman, “Hollow Land” 239–239). A manifestation of a key policy shift, the barrier was a part of Sharon’s broader disengagement plan within the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). By the time Sharon’s administration came into power:
the contradictions of Israel’s regime have grown to a point where they [could] no longer be reconciled or ignored without escalating international and local costs. This [required] a major tactical change in order to maintain the Israeli ethnocratic system. [Sharon’s newest] steps [represented] a new phase, a new method, to pursue an age-old goal of Zionism: to maximize the Judaization of Palestine while maintaining Israel’s image as a ‘normal’, democratic nation-state. (Yiftachel and Yacobi 140)
This change in the way in which Israel managed its occupation of the OPT is manifested most clearly by the separation barrier system.
Prior to the First Intifada, Israel controlled all aspects of Palestinian life under occupation. According to Israeli scholar Neve Gordon, the Oslo period signified a transition from a colonization principle to a separation principle—a change that should not be mistaken for a “withdrawal” of power but instead understood as power’s “reorganization” and “the continuation of the occupation by other means” (200). Whereas the colonization principle is guided by biopolitics, or the power to manage and maintain life, the separation principle has been characterized by an abandonment of life, or the sovereign power to let or make die (2). The Oslo period demonstrated this shift toward the separation principle when Israel shed its biopolitical responsibility to administer the lives of Palestinians by ‘subcontracting’ that role to the Palestinian Authority while retaining full control over security. In contrast to the colonization principle, the separation principle is solely interested in the resources in a colonized territory, and not the people on it. This is demonstrated by Israel’s military attacks on the PA and its’ infrastructure during the Second Intifada, rendering its own subcontractor totally dysfunctional. In the ongoing period of separation, Palestinians represent the homo sacer: one who may be killed without due process and without the killer being punished (Hanafi 167).
Figure 1. A map of East Jerusalem in 2007 shows the separation barrier in red and the Israeli West Bank settlements in purple, with Palestinian built-up area in peach. The Israeli-extended Municipal Boundary, showing the extent of the Green Line, is shown in green.
The Barrier’s Judicial Challenges and Legitimacy
Law in the Occupied Palestinian Territories remains a hierarchical quagmire of various layers and jurisdictions; different sections of the territory operate under multiple legal authorities including laws inherited from regimes prior to occupation, Israeli military law, Israeli administrative law, Palestinian Authority laws, and international laws (Sfard, The Wall 44). For decades, Israel has maintained the position that the OPT are ‘disputed’ territory, and therefore not applicable to the international laws of occupation, despite that the majority of the international community recognizes Israel’s activities as occupation. Ever since barrier planning began in 2002, legal institutions have had a significant influence on the barrier’s reception, route, and construction—both on the international stage to determine legality and within Israel’s internal court systems to resolve conflicts.
International Cases and Opinions
The separation barrier first received international attention and deliberation in 2003. In a special UN report, the barrier was found unlawful because it operated as de facto annexation, caused grave harm to Palestinian rights, and failed to offer a legitimate reason for its deviation from the Green Line, particularly because the Israeli settlements protected by the barrier are illegal. A United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolution followed the report demanding Israel dismantle any part of the separation barrier that deviates from the internationally recognized border, but the United States, a longtime supporter of Israel and its occupation, invoked its veto power.
On December 8, 2003, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution requesting an advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice (ICJ) “which does not have the enforcement power of an operative order” but “could cause Israel significant diplomatic difficulties” (Sfard, The Wall 283). The ICJ ruled on the separation barrier as a whole and focused on the Israeli settlement concerns, reiterating the international community’s stance that the illegal settlements cannot be a justification for the barrier’s deviation from the Green Line (Sfard, The Wall 300). Finding that 80 percent of Israeli settlers would reside within the fenced and walled area, the ICJ argued this demonstrated a political motivation to create a fait accompli where the seam zone is under Israeli control. The advisory opinion was 64 pages long and had five conclusions: first, the separation barrier system violates international law; second, Israel should dismantle the barrier and undo legislation and regulations concerning it; third, Israel should pay reparations for the damages the wall has caused; fourth, all states should recognize Israel’s barrier construction as illegal and not aid them; and fifth, the UN General Assembly and Security Council should consider how to end the illegal situation (Backmann 198). Eleven days after the ICJ submitted its advisory opinion, the UN General Assembly adopted resolution ES-10/15 which demanded that Israel and all UN member states comply with the legal obligations outlined in the advisory opinion and requested that the secretary-general establish a register of damage caused. However, UN General Assembly resolutions are not binding, and the Security Council never voted on the content of the advisory opinion after its release. The ICJ’s advisory opinion represented the international consensus on the legality of Israel’s separation barrier system, isolating Israel in its defiance of international law.
Israeli Cases and Opinions
Within the State of Israel, legal challenges concerning the barrier were heard by Israel’s High Court of Justice (HCJ), the administrative bench of the Israeli Supreme Court that considers direct civilian petitions against state authorities. As planning and construction took place, many petitioners took issue with legislative orders decreed by Israel’s military commanders in the OPT, such as those for the confiscation of Palestinian land in order to build the separation barrier. In making a decision, the HCJ has the power to issue injunctions, mandatory orders, and other commands that force the state and local authorities to take or cease action (Sfard, The Wall 40). In this way, the HCJ has been an instrument for regulating the occupation and alleviating the worst effects of military violence, however the Israeli state misconstrues this fact to argue that “[they apply] the rule of law fairly and indifferently in all cases, including those of occupied Palestinians” (Weizman, The Least of All 76). In order to understand how the HCJ has either protected or damaged human rights, “one must examine the Court’s role in strengthening or weakening the occupation as a legal and political entity” (Sfard, “The Price” 37).
In examining barrier construction cases, the HCJ sought to balance security concerns of the Israeli state and military on one side and the rights of Palestinians on the other. In opposition to the International Court of Justice’s examination of the barrier as a whole, the HCJ preferred a section-by-section analysis which evaded the question of the barrier’s overall legality. One early and prominent case began with a petition from Palestinians of Beit Sourik, a village just north-west of Jerusalem. The villagers petitioned because the Israeli military’s planned route would leave 43 percent of their cultivable land on the western, Israeli-side of the barrier (Backmann 134). The HCJ’s role in this case was to judge two questions: whether the military commander had the power to seize private Palestinian land to build the separation barrier and whether the barrier’s route was lawfully set. In a familiar argument, the petitioners claimed that the military was motivated not simply by security but by a political desire to envelop illegal Israeli West Bank settlements into Israel—a de facto annexation—among the other harms it brought the villagers. On the first legal question, the HCJ reiterated Israel’s position that the seizure of private Palestinian land is allowed for security purposes, as granted by 1907 Hague Regulations and the Fourth Geneva Convention, and therefore rejected charges of annexation (Sfard, The Wall 294). Regarding the second question, the HCJ sided with the petitioners’ argument; the original route was not lawfully set because it caused irreparable harm to Palestinian villagers, their rights, and livelihoods. The legal challengers offered an alternative route proposal that addressed the proportional limits of security concerns and Palestinian rights better than the military’s original route. Proportionality became a defining feature in Israeli legal challenges to the separation barrier, a methodology that was meant to “[balance] the accrued common good of one population against the lesser evil done to another population” (Weizman, The Least 73). In 2004, the HCJ struck down 75 percent of the military’s route (some 18 miles of the barrier) in light of plausible alternatives to accommodate Palestinian petitions. However, seven months later, the Israeli military proposed another route that would cut off the Beit Sourik villagers from seven square miles of their land. When the villagers petitioned again, the court maintained the military’s second route (Backmann 134).
Israeli courts, such as the HCJ, not only listen to the petitions from Palestinians but also those of begrudged Israeli settlers. Such was the case when the Israeli settlers from the village of Alfei Menashe petitioned the HCJ because the original 2002 route would have left their Israeli-only settlement outside of the barrier. In its decision, the HCJ ordered a re-route to include Alfei Menashe in the enclave, but the new barrier split apart two Palestinian towns, Qalqilyah and Habla (Weizman, “Hollow Land” 231). The Association of Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) offered legal aid to the Palestinians affected by this decision. Their argument borrowed those of the recent International Court of Justice advisory opinion: the barrier’s re-routing was unlawful because it caused a disproportionate violation of Palestinian rights, failed to meet a genuine security need, and amounted to de facto annexation. On the topic of Israel’s obligation to protect the rights of settlers like those in Alfei Menashe, the ACRI stated that “military need serves the occupying power or its forces, not its citizen [settlers] who choose to relocate to the [OPT]; their protection should not involve impingements on the rights of the occupied population” (Sfard, The Wall 305). In its September 2005 ruling, the HCJ rejected the totalizing view of the barrier, maintaining that a segment-by-segment analysis was necessary to consider the military’s concerns of security. Once again citing the 1907 Hague Regulations and the Fourth Geneva Convention, the court maintained the security justification for land seizures and rejected only certain parts of the barrier to appease both Palestinian petitioners and the Israeli public (Sfard, The Wall 311–312).
Criticizing Israel’s High Court of Justice
According to British Israeli scholar Eyal Weizman, there are significant issues with the HCJ’s application of international laws of war, such as the 1907 Hague Convention, to the situation in Palestine and Israel. These laws are not translatable to Palestine and Israel because they:
[presume] separate and defined states. Symmetrical wars between state actors can be long but tend to have clear beginnings and ends. In contrast, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, like other past and present colonial conflicts, is an ever- and always present asymmetrical, low-intensity conflict between a state and quasi-state actors. (“Hollow Land” 239)
In effect, the HCJ’s rulings allowed military and security needs granted under the Hague Convention, despite this law’s questionable applicability, to be proportionally prioritized over the rights granted to the occupied Palestinian population under the Fourth Geneva Convention.
When completed, 85 percent of Israeli settlers will have the barrier separating them from the areas of the West Bank populated by Palestinians. It was only due to legal challenges that the seam zone was slimmed from an estimated 16 percent of the West Bank’s land to 8 percent (Sfard, The Wall 327). Overall, the judgements issued in cases such as those of Beit Sourik, Alfei Menashe, Zufin, and Bil’in were exceptions because they provided some level of relief to Palestinian petitioners. In this way, the court system’s creation of ‘lesser evil’ alternatives lead to what Eyal Weizman sarcastically calls “the best of all possible walls” (The Least 65). The end results were final barrier routes marked with the HCJ’s seal of approval, demonstrating how legal activism against the barrier has helped Israel maintain legitimacy on the separation barrier project as a whole (Sfard, The Wall 329). The metric of proportionality in the application of international law creates “elastic zones of discretion” where the lesser evil argument is used to “subvert the law’s absolute provisions and subject them to malleable cost-benefit calculations” (Weizman, The Least 91). While some individual redress were made for Palestinian villages through legal challenges, the process resulted in the further legitimization of the barrier and expansion of Israel’s occupation of the OPT, despite dissenting international legal opinion (Weizman, The Least 65).
While some individual redress were made for Palestinian villages through legal challenges, the process resulted in the further legitimization of the barrier and expansion of Israel’s occupation of the OPT, despite dissenting international legal opinion.
Containment, Apartheid, and Spacio-cide
The separation barrier has resulted in a series of material harms to Palestinians and constitutes a broader ‘containment’ strategy by the Israeli state. Through the imposition of a permit regime, Israel has constrained freedom of movement and left many sections of the West Bank inaccessible to Palestinians. Whereas Israelis can travel through the seam zone at any time, Palestinians are only allowed legal entry at checkpoints if they have received a military-issued permit—documentation that can take up to a year to obtain. As a result, the seam zone is governed by a framework of separation and national-ethnic discrimination, which amounts to de facto and settler colonial annexation of the land for Israeli use and ownership (Sfard, The Wall 269).
Likewise, the separation barrier has ravaged the Palestinian economy and caused widespread suffering. From 2000 to 2007 the unemployment rate in the West Bank rose from 15 percent to 17 percent. In 2008, close to 800,000 residents of the West Bank required UN food assistance. Further, the Palestinian GDP declined 10 percent between 2006 to 2007, and another 10 percent between 2007 to 2008 (Backmann 139). The barrier also has increased religious discrimination: a UN document from September 2008 found that 60 percent of Palestinian Muslims attempting to enter Jerusalem to go to the al-Aqsa mosque during Ramadan were denied access (Backmann 139).
The result of the separation barrier system is a strategy that maintains Jewish demographic majority, maximizes the separation of and disparity between Israelis and Palestinians, and furthers Israel’s settler colonial goals through de facto annexation and the possibility of de jure annexation in the future. The barrier’s massive deviation from the Green Line underscores that a major objective is to create ‘facts on the ground,’ such as structures that protect settlements, that essentially redraw the border between Israel and the West Bank. The route “aims to mitigate the consequences of Israel’s massive settlement project, whose goal has [always] been to colonize the land without incorporating the occupied inhabitants into the Israel demos” (Gordon 217). Ultimately, the separation barrier functions as a system of containment.
Many concepts and theories have been used to describe and understand the separation barrier’s role in the ongoing colonial occupation of Palestine. The unilateral imposition of the barrier to demarcate ethnocratic lines and distinctions has drawn claims that Israel is moving closer to or has already reached apartheid (Yiftachel and Yacobi 141). Unfolding without overt declaration, ethnic stratification deepens both through outward expansion into the Occupied Palestinian Territories and the inward exertion of legal control over Palestinian citizens of Israel. This has even been described as spacio-cidal, because it “targets land for the purpose of rendering inevitable the ‘voluntary’ transfer of the Palestinian population, primarily by targeting the space in which the Palestinian people live” (Hanafi 159). Demonstrated by the issuing of land seizure orders, this settler colonial process of spacio-cide is an attempt to seize and ‘Judaize’ as much land as possible, and isolate Palestinians into the smallest space possible through containment. Moreover, the separation barrier symbolizes the way in which the law is used to legitimate this colonial violence. International law, Israeli law, and the systems of courts are not spaces outside of the conflict, but rather battlegrounds internal to it. Weizman describes this as lawfare, when the law is used as a weapon of war, as a “strategy of using, or misusing, law as a substitute for traditional military means to achieve an operational objective” (The Least 92). Drawing from Walter Benjamin’s observations on military violence as “primordial and paradigmatic of all violence,” Weizman shows the separation barrier’s violence has also embodied a lawmaking character (The Least 92).
The containment strategy has profound effects on the longtime aspiration for a future Palestinian state. Instead of a complete strategy of separation, the barrier created an archipelago of isolated areas that would mean any future Palestinian state would be split into small sections that are landlocked and contained by an Israeli state (Weizman, “Hollow Land” 227). Prioritizing retaining areas of high Jewish presence and shedding responsibility for high Arab populated areas not only reifies ethnic divisions and separation, but it concentrates Palestine into three to five main regions almost completely closed off from one another (Gordon 216). The legal processes’ consideration of proportionality ‘forensically engineered’ the separation barrier. If it does mark the territory of a future Palestinian state, it would be the first time in history humanitarian lawyers co-designed the borders (Weizman, The Least 77). When alternative routes of the barrier were approved to alleviate some Palestinian harm, the end route was seen by Israelis as a banal feature of participatory design rather than as “a part of the same instruments of brutal violation, repression, and dispossession” (Weizman, The Least 77). Alternatively, containment can also be understood as a strategy to prevent a Palestinian state from coming to fruition in the first place; indeed, the separation barrier creates contradictions in any future two or one state solutions (Hanafi 163). Israeli Prime Minister Sharon’s senior advisor, Dov Weisglass, admitted to this motive, saying:
the meaning of the disengagement plan is [to freeze] the diplomatic process with the Palestinians . . . When you freeze the political process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state and you prevent a discussion on the subject of refugees, borders and Jerusalem . . . The vast majority of [Israeli] West Bank settlers will stay in their place forever . . . This whole package called ‘the Palestinian state’ has been removed from the daily agenda for an unlimited period of time. (qtd. in Yiftachel and Yacobi 141)
Whether a future Palestinian state remains an unimaginable reality or a potential possibility, Israel has utilized the separation barrier for a geopolitical strategy of containment that maximizes the settler colonial interests of Israelis over the rights and sovereignty of Palestinians.
Whether a future Palestinian state remains an unimaginable reality or a potential possibility, Israel has utilized the separation barrier for a geopolitical strategy of containment that maximizes the settler colonial interests of Israelis over the rights and sovereignty of Palestinians.
Figure 2. The Trump Administration’s 2020 “Vision for Peace” Conceptual Map shows the proposed territory for a future, non-sovereign Palestine.
Conclusion
Michael Sfard recalls Abraham Heschel’s words, that “In a free society, some are guilty, all are responsible” (qtd. in Sfard, The Wall 11). He connects this distinction between guilt and responsibility to the Jewish notion of tikkun olam, which means repairing or healing the world. The process of engaging in healing is only possible if all take responsibility, regardless of the culpability or guilt of oneself. What does tikkun olam mean or look like with regard to the separation barrier? At the very least, it begins with a recognition that the separation barrier is not merely a benign, temporary security feature but a geopolitically motivated infrastructure of control, whose function is to expand colonial acquisitions and contain, isolate, and restrict Palestinians. In a 2007 hearing, Sfard and the HCJ President Beinisch debated the use of certain language to describe the barrier in court; when Beinisch asked if it was necessary to use the word ‘apartheid,’ Sfard replied, “If I don’t use it, will it disappear?” (Sfard, The Wall 333).
This word has not disappeared from conversations surrounding Israel’s continuing occupation activities. In January of 2020, the Trump administration unveiled its “Peace to Prosperity” vision for a future Israel and Palestine, in which the proposed future state of Palestine was completely subsumed by Israel. This plan also proposed that the “physical barrier should remain in place and should serve as a border between the capitals of the two parties” (“Peace to Prosperity” 17). The document’s introduction cites Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s 1995 speech on the Oslo II Interim Agreement which, similar to the Trump administration’s vision, argued for an Israeli-controlled Jerusalem alongside the formal incorporation of the largely Jewish areas in the West Bank and Jordan Valley (Fayyad). This plan would leave the “remainder of the West Bank [and Gaza]” under Palestinian control, in something “less than a state” (Fayyad). The Trump administration’s vision for Israel and Palestine’s new borders eerily resembles the existing routes of the separation barrier and lays the foundation for future Israeli annexation of some 30 percent of Palestinian land in the West Bank. In this way:
the Trump plan has given Israel the green light to turn the temporary occupation into permanent annexation, thereby achieving its true goal of changing the paradigm of the two-state solution. It’s intended to leave us with an apartheid state in which some people have rights and others do not. If this becomes the baseline, it will not be a recipe for peace but for permanent, perpetual conflict. (AbuZayyad)
Recently, the application of apartheid to the Israeli occupation of Palestine has only become more common, both among state officials and human rights organizations. The former Israeli ambassador to South Africa referred to the Trump administration’s plan as a “new Bantustan map” (Liel). In January 2021, the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem called Israel’s “regime of Jewish supremacy” apartheid (“A regime of”). Three months later, Human Rights Watch also released a report finding that Israel’s activities in the Occupied Palestinian Territories “amount to the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution” (“A Threshold Crossed”). Israel’s discriminatory policies and practices in the OPT and its own country are numerous and pervasive, and the separation barrier project is simply one aspect of the greater apartheid system. Still, it remains a key instrument for furthering Israel’s settler colonial interests, through asserting its control over the territory between the Mediterranean Sea and the River Jordan.
“A wall made of bricks, but bricks can be broken.
When the people of Zion have finally awoken,
And said no more walls! No more refugees!
No more keeping people up on their knees.
And in the history books, will someday recall,
Before apartheid was ended, they were building a wall.”
– David Rovics, “They’re Building a Wall”
Definitions
West Bank: A Palestinian region near the Mediterranean coast, bordered by Jordan, the Dead Sea, and Israel. It is part of the Occupied Palestinian Territories, which have been under Israeli occupation since 1967.
Occupied Palestinian Territories (OTP): A term referring to the Palestinian regions, including West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza, that have been occupied by Israel since 1967. Other names for the area include Occupied Palestinian Territory or Occupied Palestine.
Palestinian Authority (PA): The non-sovereign, semi-autonomous Palestinian governing entity in the West Bank. It was established in 1994 as a part of the Oslo Accords negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization, which was intended to be an interim body until a sovereign, independent Palestinian state was established.
Apartheid: After the end of the apartheid system in South Africa, an international law was passed against the crime of apartheid. The law defines apartheid as policies and practices of racial segregation and discrimination, which include inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them.
Zionist/Zionism: Zionism is a political ideological movement for the establishment, development, and protection of a Jewish nation in what is now Israel. Zionism emerged in the late 1880s during an era of heightened European antisemitism and sought the creation of a Jewish state in historic Palestine. Zionist leaders understood their making of a Jewish majority territory would necessitate the ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Palestinian population.
Intifada: Either of two popular uprisings of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip aimed at ending Israel’s occupation of those territories and creating an independent Palestinian state. Also spelled intifadah, Arabic intifāḍah (“shaking off”). (Araj and Brym)
Bantustans: As a structure of the South African apartheid system, the Bantustans were territories established by the South African government, controlled by the white colonial population, for the permanent removal, separation, and concentration of the Black population in White South Africa.
Fait accompli: A term referring to the circumstance in which a thing has already happened or been decided before those affected hear about it, leaving them with no option but to accept it.
Palestinian citizens of Israel: After the 1948 War, around 150,000 Palestinians remained inside of what became Israel’s internationally recognized borders. Today, there are approximately 1.6 million Palestinian citizens of Israel, comprising about 20 percent of the total Israeli population. Though Palestinian citizens of Israel can vote and participate in political life, they face a web of institutionalized discrimination and exclusion.
Tikkun olam: A phrase which has come to connote social action and the pursuit of social justice. It has origins in classical rabbinic literature and in Lurianic kabbalah, a major strand of Jewish mysticism originating with the work of the 16th-century kabbalist Isaac Luria.
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Author
Tyler Durbin is a Jewish American writer and senior at the Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies at Western Washington University. His concentration major is in Law, Diversity, and Justice: Critical Jewish Studies, with minors in Holocaust & Genocide Studies and History. He has been a member of WWU's Students for Palestinian Equal Rights during his time at Western, and after graduation he intends to pursue graduate studies in human rights and international law.