The wall and the dismemberment of Palestine

Abstract

Israel’s construction of a separation wall through the West Bank and East Jerusalem represents the latest stage in Zionism’s attempts to resolve its ‘native problem’. By confining Palestinians to a series of disconnected cantons, it deprives them of political and territorial contiguity. But the wall also embodies a demographic rationale: it is the threat of a majority Arab population under Israel’s charge that determines the wall’s route and its exclusion of areas where Palestinians are concentrated. The logic is one of a unilateral imposition of Israel’s borders, bound up with the deferral of final status negotiations with the Palestinian Authority. Thus marginalised, the Authority is reduced to a ‘Palestinian state with provisional borders’ - not a sovereign state, but a municipal provider of services. Following the finding of the International Court of Justice on the wall’s illegality, the challenge for the Palestinians is how to develop an effective strategy of resistance to the wall and the occupation of which it is part.