Reply #31: Voices from Behind the Entombment Wall

[RJnAbbysNana]

Crying in the Wilderness
Voices from Behind the Entombment Wall
By WILLIAM A. COOK
October 12, 2005


"Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself." (1984, George Orwell)

Orwell wrote 1984 immediately following World War II and published it in 1949. He had the model for its reality readily at hand, indeed, the above wording paraphrases the words of Hitler as he calculated how to make the "Party" the controlling force in his fascist world. He implemented his world with walls, identity cards, tattoos, laws, internment, torture, and forcepain, humiliation, fear, and torment wrought by treachery.

I stood with a group of colleagues surveying this strange, surreal scene -- the narrow stone and gravel road butted against the chain-linked fence topped with rolls of barbed wire, sixty yards of bulldozed land, stripped now of its trees and plants, turned into a virtual private highway for IDF forces, enclosing electrified fencing, blocking access to farm land and groves, a wall of fencing that carved miles upon miles of land out of this small town north west of Jerusalem encircling settlements recently constructed in this Palestinian land ­ haunted by the realization that this wall, this entombment wall, had been condemned as illegal by the International Court of Justice, that the United Nations had upheld that ruling with a resolution condemning the wall, and understanding that it violated the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, only to see it flare out in both directions as it snaked over and around the hills and valleys as far as the eye could see. I stood marveling at the minds of humans who could design such an instrument of torture that confiscates in its steel and cement reality 58% of the West Bank (www.pchrgaza.org/files/Reports/English/sharon.htm, 5/11/05).

I stood there and realized, that despite the action of the ICJ and the UN, the wall existed, a defiant and colossal villainy perpetrated against the world communities, done with a blandness of arrogance that Donald Rumsfeld could appreciate, even as the state of Israel seeks a seat on the United Nations Security Council (Daily Times, Pakistan, 5/6/05), a body that it obviously rejects with aloof contempt and finds irrelevant.

At that moment, a group of children appeared, some on bikes, others running beside them, coming down that beat-up road toward the fence. An engineer, our interpreter for this visit, spoke to them. They immediately fanned out over the road in front of the fence looking intently for something ­ that thing was a rock on which blood stains were still visible, blood stains from a brother of one of the kids who had been shot at that place not long before. He still lived, recovering as we spoke. But they wanted to show us one of their homes back up the road and to the left, a home that sat on land that now bordered the fence, much of their land annexed for the fence. The family had just received a notice that they must pull down their sheds and out buildings because they were too close to the fence, buildings that had housed chickens, turkeys, goats, sheep, and cows since the '50s, buildings that were constructed of bits and pieces of tin and boards, weathered, scarred remnants scavenged from the debris that lay everywhere in sight. But if they moved the buildings, where do they house the animals; whose land do they annex?

And so we gathered there on that rise that looked out over the fence that abutted a shanty that came too close to a fence recently completed by the IDF that had 60 yards of stripped roadway and fence to protect from the chickens and donkeys. The absurdity of the situation could not cloak the sense of desperation on the face of the owner or hide the anger that swelled in the chest of his worker and friend as they sat under a tree, the only protection from the blistering sun, talking to us, asking in wonderment why they were responsible for the closeness of the fence; why those with such power should want to destroy a family with 11 children; why, when they had taken so much of their land already, would they force them to tear down the only protection they had and lose the only land they had to shelter their animals and feed their family? Why? What had they done to the Israelis?

continued here..........

http://www.counterpunch.org/cook10122005.html