Once upon a time, it was only a ring of rubble. A powerful foreign empire swept into the region, blowing Jerusalem's inhabitants into the East like dandelion fluff. Decades later, a new generation returned to the Holy mound and its city, in shambles and left vulnerable by gaping holes in its wall. According to the book of Nehemiah, a different kind of prophet came to Judea and drew the people together. In fifty-two days, it says, they were able to restore the wall and a sense of identity.
I drew a stone from upstate New York out of my bag and touched it against the wall in Jerusalem. I later learned that the Ottoman Turks built this incarnation of the wall in 1541 but the symbolism of the gesture was not lost. At one time, that little stone laid in a jar of water with 25 others like it. When I read Nehemiah, I am inspired by his unwillingness to be told that his goal is unreasonable, nor be intimidated by the self-interested people who are trying to prevent the refugees’ return. Wall’s function, by itself, may have been security but the function of building the wall was greater still: the refugees worked together and learned how to live together again. Nehemiah instituted reforms, evident in chapters 5, 9, 10, & 13. Within the parameters of the re-established Jerusalem, people were held accountable for their actions.
My readers are intelligent enough to know what walls can do. There doesn’t need to be a breakdown of the difference between a boundary, a buffer and a barrier. Anyone who reads this blog can smell the comparison coming, too. I stood by the Southwest corner of the Jerusalem Wall and looked over my shoulder. Across the valley was the concrete gerrymander. The cement serpent. At that moment, it looked most like a giant millipede quietly eating the decay it makes. Three days later, I looked at it from a different hill-top. From there, I could also see a Palestinian neighborhood completely enclosed by barbed-wire fence. The check-point there is walking-only, so that all of their Israeli-registered cars never go more than a kilometer. They carry their groceries and gasoline—everything—on foot. They are not Bedouin: all of them have to work jobs in Jerusalem to survive. In other words, if they want to keep their ID cards they must be indentured servants.
Walls can be good for your health. They prevent you from freezing in the winter, seeing your Dad naked or the organelles from leaving your cells. The Old City Wall has that cellular quality, with gates like pores and so many disparate, Holy apparatuses folded tightly into its cytoplasm. It defines an area and part of a community. The other wall reminds me of an amoeba. It severs communities by swallowing the arable land and leaving Palestinian villages behind or stretching itself around historic sites and leaving businesses stranded. Its route is no accident: it forms a tourniquet at the very point that Manger Street and Hebron road would converge, asphyxiating Bethlehem’s commerce. More than twenty years ago, the Jerusalem Municipality started offering property tax-breaks to Palestinians who moved past a certain point to the East. When the opportune moment arose, Israel built the wall just West of this building-boom and retracted the municipal limits: no more ID cards for them. “We are dealing with very intelligent people,” said our tour guide, Hammod, “there are people who sit in offices all day and think of ways to make Palestinians’ lives impossible.”
“Look over the wall and you will see people slaughtering each other,” joked Hammod. The other tourists flinched a moment before they realized: the wall bisected an East Jerusalem neighborhood. “Why here? The people on the other side are the same as on this side. There are more than 40,000 people who come to work in Israel illegally everyday. Israel has the best surveillance technology available, so they know. If this wall is for security, why would they let that happen?” The wall is hardly a source of security. One day, I passed through the check-point with relative ease, while the soldier in the booth yacked on her cell phone and apathetically waved me through. Two days later, the guards were performing monkey business with the electronic turn-styles; they would turn on the green light but not unlock the gate or unlock and relock the gate quickly. The little green light would flicker and another Palestinian would push against the gate, still locked. Clack. That day, the same guard just HAD to see my VISA stamp. Why? The wall is an intentional obstacle to anything that is not idiot tourists and cheap labor. As I hear Zoughbi say, repeatedly: “Israel wants to have cake and eat cake too.”
The politics of walls is not new. Walls are good for obscuring. They can create the needed illusion of danger when Israel wants to keep tourists funneled into the Nativity church, so they never get the chance to identify with Palestinians. The Zionist Christians can play pretend-promised-land and never feel the guts of what Jesus had to say, refusing to go beyond the walls. Some walls are not physical. Relenting in curiosity, I read about the Old City Wall on a Jewish History website. It advised visitors to “stay to the main thoroughfares in the Muslim Quarter,” as if it were dangerous or undesirable when, I know, the only quarter of the city that feels different is the Jewish one. On the other hand, the gerrymander makes it easy to forget how close Bethlehem, East Jerusalem and Ramallah are to each other; all of those Palestinians are kept far apart when they could be less than an hour away from united. “Some Jews are waiting for the Messiah, still; good luck to Him, here—I hope He has a permit to get through the checkpoint.”
Before we lapse into clichés about breaking down our ‘barriers’, consider the possibility of your home being breached. You build a new addition onto your house to accommodate more family. The court confiscates the key to the new addition, since it was built without a permit. One day, strange people show-up with said key and start to live in the new addition—with the intention of taking over your entire house and property if you ever leave. I bore witness to this situation. This is what I describe as parasitic Settler behavior. The problem is not walls but the intentions behind them. It would be impossible for me to imagine that the wall is for safety, even if they dress it up with a pretty facade whenever it passes through a Jewish neighborhood. Walls are for containment but containment is not always right. A significant point in the New Testament, for me, is when the temple curtain is reported to have torn from ceiling to floor, symbolically opening the Holy of Holies so that everyone could be sanctified.
The Holy of Holies was breached, violently, when the second temple was destroyed by Roman forces. Presently, it is re-sanctified under another faith—the same faith that built the current version of the wall. The temple mound is now home to a golden dome, built over a stone rising to meet Mohammad or a ruined temple alter, depending on how you look at it. Unfortunately, when I tried to visit I found that a new barrier had been erected. “It’s closed. Muslims only!” That would be one thing coming from a Muslim but is quite another coming from an Israeli Defense Force soldier, not a Muslim himself. If that smells like ‘fish’ to you, you are not alone. The closest I got to the dome was a photograph I took from the top of Al-Quds University. Fittingly, there is a line of barbed-wire partially obscuring its gleam.
Many promise that they will have a piece of the apartheid wall on their mantel someday, just as chips of the Berlin wall have scattered to all ends of the Earth. Other than a truck-sized section removed every few kilometers for farmers, I disagree. Any wall left inside the green-line when justice is served (and it will be) should remain as a monument—both to the hypocritical bigotry of Israel and the persistence of Palestine. Even now, the Wall is filling with artwork. The Palestinian Authority should be able to sell sections of the wall to artists who meet their criteria and I would like to see one-hundred percent of the proceeds go to education. I never want a Palestinian parent to buy a book again. Post-secondary, too: I want students from Scotland, Brazil, Taiwan (I don’t care) to compete for scholarships to come study in Palestine. While we are at it, I would like to see the tiles taken from the ‘garden’ portions of the wall and put-up around the courtyard at Bethlehem University, Al-Quds U., the international café in Ramallah, and other legitimate walls around the West Bank. As long as the snake is slain, make snake-skin boots.
