The Wall
I was staring at the tall gray Wall, imagining the cement between the concrete slabs slowly melting. Blood red ants crawled out from between the cracks as the towering monoliths rocked back and forth.
Steadying myself, I looked up and saw a real high-resolution surveillance camera aimed at me, likely recording the biometric patterns on my awestruck face. A bird flew overhead.
What a lark! What a plunge!
As I learned yesterday on my tour of East Jerusalem, the Wall goes by many names. The Israeli government calls it the “Security Wall.” Most Israelis refer to it as the “Separation Wall,” although for most Israelis the Wall doesn’t practically separate them from anything. Jewish settlers who live beyond the Wall in the West Bank can travel freely to West Jerusalem and the rest of Israel proper. In fact, the Wall mostly separates Palestinians from Palestinians, looping around East Jerusalem, territory that Israel annexed to itself in violation of international law. In light of these facts, another name suggests itself: the Annexation Wall.
Whatever you want to call it, the International Court of Justice ruled in 2004 that the Wall, then half completed, was illegal under the Geneva conventions and constituted a political, not security measure. The Court ordered that Israel dismantle the barrier immediately, calling on the US to ensure that Israel uphold its ruling. Instead Israel has continued construction with unwavering US backing.
My name is Zak Witus and I live in a rogue state.
A few days ago, my program facilitator Karen was driving me into Area C of the West Bank—the zone under full Israeli control under the Oslo Accords. I was riding “shotgun,” as they used to say in the Wild West, gazing out the window up at the Annexation Wall. Here, the concrete extended up and then stretched diagonal over the road, sort of like the top of the fence that surrounds home plate on little league baseball diamonds. It felt somehow less menacing—it reminded me of home, driving down I-696 in metro Detroit.
We passed into Area C without anyone blinking an eye.
On this rainy winter day, Karen was taking me to see the Tent of Nations, a farm in the West Bank where I’ll be working for two days a week during these next five months. Although Karen has been to the farm many times, getting there proved to be a challenge. We discovered that the dirt road that had previously connected the main road to the farm no longer existed. In just the past few months, a new road had suddenly been built, apparently to service the new Yeshiva. We drove down this new road, parked the car by the boulders blocking the rest of the way to the farm, and then walked the remaining half-mile through the cold wetness.
“On a clear day, if you look out to your left, you can see the sea,” Karen told me.
At the farm I met George and Dawid, the two middle-aged Palestinian brothers who run the place. (George is actually in his 60s, but his smile makes him look much younger.) Dawid immediately offered me coffee and cake, which I accepted, and accepted, and accepted. Later, at 3:30AM, I’d wake up with a splitting migraine headache, produced by the overdose of caffeine, low atmospheric pressure, and the mental constrictions of the Occupation.
Jewish-only Israeli settlements surround Tent of Nations. If you stood on the roof of the corrugated steel structure that is Dawid’s office, you could turn in a circle and see Neve Daniel, Rosh Tzurim, and Efrat on the nearby hills. Noticing the apparently immanent strangulation, you might ask, “How does this Palestinian farm still exist?” Unlike most Palestinians trying to assert their claim to parcels of land in historic Palestine, George and Dawid possess written documentation to support their land rights. Back in 1917, in the twilight of the Ottoman Empire, George and Dawid’s grandfather decided that he’d had enough of city life in Bethlehem and wanted to return to the land, so he went and bought 200 acres (roughly 809 dunams) from another Palestinian Arab, receiving a deed to the property sanctified with the Ottoman governmental stamp. Armed with this document, Dawid and his family have successfully fended off the Israeli government’s attempts to expropriate their family property, winning legal victories all the way up to the Israeli High Court. Tent of Nations continues to face costly legal battles initiated by the state, but the family nonetheless has fared far better than most of their compatriots, who lack the text for their territory.
Huddled in Dawid’s office, I shared with Dawid and George my bit of experience working at Buffalo Street Farm on the Eastside of Detroit this past summer. I told them about how I learned to prune and train grapevines, weed, water, harvest, plant, etc. They told me that they had a vineyard, but lacked the water to grow H20-intensive produce, like tomatoes, berries, or peppers. Turns out, Tent of Nations is entirely off the grid: no phone, no electricity, no water network. They do have acres of olive trees, though.
“I like olives,” I tell them.
On the ride back down to Jerusalem, I gazed absently at the Wall like a baby in a car seat, remembering how my dad used to take me to Red Wings hockey games at Joe Louis Arena when I was younger — maybe 7 or 8 years old. Those hockey games, and the trips to Lafayette Coney Island afterward, were basically the only times in my youth that I left the suburbs and ventured into Detroit proper. I remember standing behind the goalie’s net — my dad could get very good seats through his connections in the metro legal community — and I would bang my little fists against the glass whenever the hockey players would body up against the boards to fight over the puck. I finally find myself on the other side of the glass now. Or maybe I was already on the ice and I’m only just realizing it.
In any case, I am here now, typing on my MacBook, banging my head against all matter of walls — glass, concrete, textual, political — and I’m seeing in the reflection of my computer screen the blood pouring from a crack in my gray forehead, the Apple camera recording all, but revealing nothing.
Yet I am determined not to let the wall break me. Like Rabbi Arik Asherman told our group the other day, we activists often feel ourselves in this head-banging situation, sometimes nearly ready to quit, until one day, usually when we least expect it, instead of the Wall breaking us, we break the Wall.
I just hope concrete understands metaphor.
