Transcript for the Piece Audio version of RN Special 1-hour Documentary: The Barrier

In the summer of 2002, Israel began erecting a barrier to seal off the occupied Palestinian territories. The move followed a series of Palestinian suicide bombings in Israel. The 700-kilometre structure is due to be completed by late 2005. Israel calls it a security fence. Palestinians call it The Wall.

GINGER:
Radio Netherlands, the Dutch International Service, presents “The Barrier”, a special one hour documentary. The program is produced and presented by Eric Beauchemin.

QALANDIA CHECKPOINT

The Qalandia checkpoint, 11 kilometres north of Jerusalem on the West Bank. Dozens of taxis are waiting in the hot sun to transport people to towns and cities in the northern part of the territory. Cars on both sides are backed up several hundred metres. Hundreds of people are shuffling through turnstiles to get in. I make my way in the opposite direction. It’s a quiet time of the day: after only a few minutes’ wait, I empty my pockets and pass through the metal detector. An Israeli soldier checks my passport. And then, I’m on the other side.

SOUND UP

Like the other checkpoints in the occupied territories, Qalandia separates a Palestinian town from another Palestinian town or village. But Qalandia is also different from many other checkpoints: to the west, a concrete wall, 8 metres high, stretches for as far as the eye can see. Soon, the eastern side will be closed off too.

SOUND / SAMI

A few hundred metres away, I meet Dr. Sami Ass’ad, an orthopaedic surgeon in his 50s. The Wall lies in his backyard.

SAMI-1 0’35”
Well, I can show you something. It’s in my bedroom. Before the Wall, it was all green and you can see all the things to Jerusalem. And suddenly I have two and a half floors now in front of me, so I plant this…2.5 floors of Wall you mean Yeah. It’s the wall. 2.5 floors, so I plant this so I can cover my window. You see it. It’s like a green fence. My bed is just next to it. When I woke, I just see this and not see that because it’s really very painful for me.

CD 228.494-16 (0’50”)

SAMI-2 0’48”
One month before they made the Wall, a bulldozer, a military bulldozer came and it just destroyed all the trees who had been planted since 40 years ago. And they made it a desert for me. It was about 100 or 120 trees had been destroyed in two hours. My family was proud of it. We were just having our own forest and suddenly in one night or one day, it’s just everything is gone. They didn’t talk to me. Just they’re having their gun, well asking us to go away and we didn’t know what to do. Palestinian people are living on the other side, and there are no Israelis. The first Israeli is living after the Wall is about 15 kilometres from here.

SHEARER-1 0’12”
I think it’s very clear, certainly from our point of view, that nobody could ever say that Israel shouldn’t build a barrier on their own land to stop whatever coming across. I mean, I think that’s every country’s right to do that.

Almost everyone, including most Palestinians agrees with David Shearer, the head of the United Nations agency coordinating humanitarian affairs in the occupied territories. The protests and condemnation of the Wall – most recently by the International Court of Justice in The Hague – stem from the fact that the barrier doesn’t follow the Green Line, recognised by the international community in 1949 as the border between Israel and the West Bank and Gaza.

SHEARER-2 0’41”
85% of the length of the barrier is not on the Green Line. It’s actually running into Palestinian areas. That’s the issue for us, and where it does come into Palestinian areas it brings people into enclaves. It stops people again getting to their markets, to their schools, the hospitals. It creates enormous humanitarian problems. There’s going to be at least 4 to 500,000 people living in the West Bank but that will be living within one kilometre of the barrier which means in some way they are going to be affected, whether they’ve got family or friends or their fields or their agricultural land or whatever is on the other side. The barrier has an enormous impact basically on people’s lives.

ABU DIS CHECKPOINT

Another checkpoint, this one in Abu Dis in eastern Jerusalem. Abu Dis used to be part of the city. Now, it’s cut off by the Wall. But there’s a small gap in the concrete barrier and thousands of Palestinians pass through it every day on their way to school or work or to visit family and friends on the other side.

IDF

Israeli border police monitor the crossing, but not as closely as in Qalandia. The gap in the Wall is less than half a metre wide. Children, mothers with babies in their arms, old people with canes…everyone has to climb up several uneven concrete blocks to get through the opening. Every morning and evening, there are human traffic jams here. Israeli soldiers often climb up the blocks and stop everyone. The Israelis say the closures are for security reasons. But most people who come through here every day have been stopped so many times that the explanation has lost all meaning.

ABU DIS CHECKPOINT – ACTUALITY
Why did they close it? He said that was a restriction from an officer and that’s it. And how long will we be here? He said he doesn’t have an idea. I told him we have ? and he doesn’t have an idea. Everybody’s closed. We’re never going to pass. Well if it’s any consolation, as a foreigner, there’s no…I don’t go through either. Well, it seems that we are all foreigners. Nobody is local.

Along with dozens of other people, we finally decide to go through the yard of a nearby monastery. Part of a metal fence there has been torn down and we manage to slide down a 2.5 metre lamppost, leaving the women and the less physically fit behind.

SOUND
If there’s no choice, there’s no choice. I’ll hold it for you. No that’s OK. Be careful, be careful. Don’t worry. That’s it.

Every day, 16-year-old Yussuf, who lives in Jerusalem, passes through the Abu Dis checkpoint – known to Palestinians as “The Gate” - to attend one of the best schools in the area.

YUSSUF
Sometimes the Israeli soldiers stop us at the Gate. They check our bags and ask us our names and we have to show them our identity cards. They humiliate us. And sometimes we’re late for school because there’s so much traffic. In winter, the ground is wet. When we jump from one side to the other, we often slip off the stones. And nothing is organised there. People are trying to get in and others are trying to get out. And lots of people cut the queue. How long does it take you to get from there to here? Usually it takes me about half an hour, but if we have problems it takes longer. How long did it take before the Wall was built? It used to take me about 10 to 20 minutes.

SOUND – SCHOOL

SAMI-3 1’01”
On all the world, we just say, you just say well, I’m 15 kilometres from my work or 20 kilometres from my work. Well, everyone here is counting it by the checkpoints. I’m two checkpoints from my work or three checkpoints from my work,. A Palestinian, he knows exactly what does it mean. Because sometimes it’s closed so you can’t go to your job. And you can imagine well, if you are just in the morning and two or three hours walking or standing in the sun in a long queue and humiliating and with everything, and how you can arrive and you just see your patients? And sometimes you feel that you are already exhausted and you want to come back from the first checkpoint. And this is what is happening now.

For some, it’s just too much. 8-year-old Ahmad was born with spina bifada, an incomplete closure of the spinal column. He’s paralysed from the waist down.

SOUND WALKING

Ahmad uses a brace and a walker to move about. The only school in his village is spread out over three different buildings on different levels and separated by a road. So when Ahmad started attending kindergarten, his mother sent him to a school adapted to his needs in Bethlehem, 5 kilometres away. But now Ahmad’s village, Wallaja, is being cut off by the Wall.

AHMAD’S MOTHER
Two years ago when the situation was different in Wallaja and the roads were not closed completely a taxi would come pick Ahmad up from the house. I would carry him down the stairs, put him in the taxi. The taxi would then take him to school and then bring him back in the afternoon and I’d pick him up from the taxi and bring him up to the house. And how long did that take? Ahmad could leave the house at 7. By the time the taxi picked up all the other students, he’d be at school at 7:30 and when he finished at 12 o’clock, he would be back home at maximum 1:30, when the taxi had dropped off the other children.

AHMAD
What was it like when you first started going to school in Bethlehem? When I was at kindergarten, the taxi would come to the house and pick up and take me to school. It was easy. And what was it like at school? We studied subjects like Arabic and math and we had exercises and we had different subjects and I liked going school.

To close off Ahmad’s village, Israel dumped earth and boulders on one of the village’s access roads. There’s only one other road out of Wallaja: cars and pedestrians have to pass through a checkpoint there called DCO which is only open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Because of the long delays at the checkpoint, every morning, one of Ahmad’s family members pushed him in a wheelchair to the earth mounds and carried the 30-kilo boy on their back over three big mounds to a taxi. In the afternoon, one of them would go back to bring Ahmad back home.

AHMAD’S MOTHER
He was in Bethlehem from kindergarten, 1st grade and 2nd grade. In third grade, I had to move him back to Wallaja because I didn’t have the financial means to continue paying a taxi to take him and to bring him back. How much was it costing you? It cost me 150 shekels a month on transport alone. So that’s $40 a month. That’s other than the school fees that were 250 dinars because it was a private school. Does 150 shekels represent a lot of money for you? Of course it’s expensive when you consider that there’s no other source of revenue. 150 shekels for a family that has no income, that has other expenses – electricity and water, the school fees for Ahmad, his brothers and sisters in other schools, and also for his medication and treatment and the pampers because he needs to wear pampers. / I’m always worried if he gets sick at night and I have to take him to the hospital. There’s no way for me to get out. The DCO closes at 7. There’s no other way out. I can’t get out and take my son to hospital. So this worries me.

Ahmad’s mother is not the only one who’s worried about getting medical treatment for her family. Many places that are being cut off by the Wall are also being cut off from medical services, says David Shearer of the United Nations.

SHEARER-5a 0’59”
In Abu Dis, which is home to 30,000 people, they had three hospitals within 2 or 3 kilometres of them. The barrier, the physical concrete wall, will stop them from getting to those hospitals and they will now have to travel about nearly 20 kilometres down to Bethlehem in the south where the hospital is going to be overrun by 30,000 new people. Now to get to that 20 kilometres on a very bad road, they have to go through a checkpoint which they have to get out, walk through the checkpoint. So the idea is not to be too sick when you get out to go to hospital. Of course, if you’re an emergency patient, you can go in an ambulance and go straight through. But if you’re going for a simple heart check-up or a blood pressure check-up and you need to go to a hospital, you literally have to plan quite a long time in advance in sense to go there. This is going to be a serious issue as the barrier is completed because at the moment there are little holes where people can sneak through. But as soon as that is sealed shut, there’s going to be some major issues, I think.

AMBULANCE

Even ambulances and medical personnel are being affected by the Wall and the checkpoints, as I discovered one evening with the Palestinian Red Crescent Society. A woman in labour needed to be rushed to hospital. Before the construction of the Wall, it would have taken her 5 minutes to get there. Now it takes over half an hour.

AMBULANCE

Before entering Jerusalem, we were stopped by border police at a checkpoint …a violation of international humanitarian law.

AMBULANCE
Come, come with me. They want to write our ID numbers, everything. And it maybe takes a lot of time. Maybe she will born now with us. It’s very difficult. It’s very urgent. We must go quickly because in any time she will do it. So even though your lights are flashing and you’ve got an urgent case, there’s nothing you can do. You simply have to wait. We can’t do anything. // Let’s go.

When we finally reached the hospital, the woman’s husband and father were already there: they jumped through the gap in the Wall in Abu Dis. The woman was rushed in and gave birth, but there have been dozens of cases of women delivering at checkpoints or en route to hospitals. No one knows how many people have died because of these delays.

SAMI-4 0’46”
I only travel in the West Bank. But they are still checking. When I’m going to Ramallah, I’m checked. When I’m going to Bethlehem, I am checked. It’s nonsense. It’s just because they wanted us to suffer. They wanted us to be tired, to be exhausted and everyone just to sit and not to give, for doctors, for teachers, for everyone not to do his work. And this is also destroying relationship, the social relationship, economic relationship, everything is just destroyed. And I think this is the aim of the occupation. Just to destroy us.

SHEARER-3 0’27”
The poverty rate in the Palestinian territories has gone from 22% to 55% in the space of four years. We have increased the amount of food delivered 10 times. The unemployment rate has gone from 10% to close to 40%. So all of these things have been caused by these various blockages and obstacles, and while they have a security purpose, they also have a downside in terms of Palestinian lives.

SCHOOL SOUND

The Wall is also tearing families apart. Terry Boullata is the head mistress of a primary school in Abu Dis. She’s a resident of Jerusalem and so holds a special permit enabling her to get back and forth across the Wall. Her husband is from Abu Dis. The Israeli authorities now consider him an inhabitant of the West Bank. So he has to get a special permit to go to his home in Jerusalem.

TERRY 3’08”
When there is total closure his permit becomes invalid so he stays at home and can you imagine that even when the permit is valid, after 7 o’clock he’s living illegally with me and the kids in the house? What happens when the Wall is completed because this checkpoint will then be closed, I assume. Yes, and that’s the nightmare that we are all afraid of. My husband already started thinking to move out of the house. So me as a Jerusalemite, I have to stay in the house in order to protect my residenceship, according to the Israeli regulations, and my husband will move inside Abu Dis and so we are going to be separated from each other. The other night, I don’t hide it, we started even discussing the issue of the children, that the children might stay with him for three nights and they will stay with me for four nights. And I’m not the only person with such an example. I have a friend for example, Abu Leilah. His wife is from inside Israel and they got in love while they were studying in Italy. They came back. She’s an Israeli citizen even. She’s a Palestinian Israeli citizen. They got married. They have two children, two girls. Now the wife and the children, they live inside Israel and the husband, at one point, although he had a permit, he was picked up from the car with his children and put in a jeep and they threw him into the middle of Ramallah. And since then, it’s been like two years, he’s living separately from his wife and his children. And they come to visit every two weeks, three weeks. But what kind of a marriage is this? And it seems that this is going to happen with me. This is going to happen with all the neighbours who are living in my neighbourhood. They keep the lie that they are separating me from the Israelis. I’m not being separated from the Israelis. I’m already separated from the Israelis 5 kilometres from here.

SHEARER-4 2’02”
For the most part, the Wall that runs through Jerusalem is running between Palestinian and Palestinian areas. They’re not in fact between Jewish Israeli areas and Arab areas. As a result, there are hundreds and hundreds of cases where the mother and father will be on one side and the children will be on the other. There will be a wall running between the two of them. The system is that people who have been living in Jerusalem, in an area that was in the municipal boundaries of Jerusalem, have got Jerusalem ID cards which account for about 230,000 Palestinians. Everybody else to the east and the West Bank have West Bank ID cards which means that they have to get a permit to come live in Jerusalem. Now, where the barrier is going to go currently, it will mean that about one-third of those 230,000 people approximately – it’s very hard to calculate – will be on the West Bank side of the Wall. So whereas they used to have complete free access to hospitals, schools, all those sorts of things, now there will be a wall separating them from the services that they are entitled to. On the other hand, there are people living in Jerusalem with a West Bank ID card who need a permit to stay there but don’t have a permit. Therefore legally they can’t move around. They can’t access services. They can’t use the schools or the hospitals, but they will have real problems in reaching the West Bank where they are supposed to be because the barrier is going to be in their way. What’s also happening now is people are very scared of being on the West Bank side of the Wall. People are crowding into Jerusalem in order to stay on the Israeli side of this wall.

PACKING SOUND

WADI-1 0’23”
This is the kitchen. If you are moving into a new apartment, this is the most important part, the most important room. The kitchen. Yeah. It’s a fairly small kitchen. Yes, my wife is happy about this actually because she says now, I won’t be able to help her cooking which is good because she claims I mess things up more than I help her.

PACKING SOUND

Wadi Razzouk is one of those who’s moving to Jerusalem. I first met him the day after he discovered that the Wall was being built around his neighbourhood, Bir Nabala, in northern Jerusalem. Now, four months later, as he unpacks his family’s belongings, he still mourns his flat in Bir Nabala.

WADI-2 1’41”
I heard about it in the media, but it was sudden. All of a sudden we saw blocks being erected in the middle of the road. The road was destroyed. It was very traumatic. Tell me about your house there. I bought it in 1997 but we moved in only after I got married two years ago. It’s a very spacious, modern apartment in a 7-story building. 140 square metres. Five big rooms, a huge kitchen, two verandas and two bathrooms. I never believed that I would live in it only for two years. I thought that this will be my house for the rest of my life. And I thought I would only leave my apartment as a dead person, hopefully 70, 80 years old. Now I’m only 37 years old and I’m having to move into a smaller apartment, pay $450 dollars as rent every month while I’m still paying the $550 mortgage for my apartment in Bir Nabala. So that means that most of your income goes to pay these two apartments? Yes, two-thirds of my salary goes to paying for these two apartments. Luckily my wife works as a secretary at a foreign consulate. We will live. It’s unfortunate for those who cannot afford it. My sister, who lives on the other side of the Wall, in Ar Ram, isn’t well off. She’s not working. She’s a housewife. And her husband’s income is not good enough for them to rent an apartment in Jerusalem.

SOUND – DOG

77-year-old Mustafa Rabat has no intention of moving. He lives in Wallaja on a steep hill, guarded by a ferocious dog. On the other side of the hill is a Jewish settlement. The Israeli authorities have surrounded his property with a metal fence, covered with barbed wire. On the other side of the hill, another segment of the Wall is being erected.

SOUND WALL

RABAT
10 years ago the settlement started being built. Two years ago they completely closed us off with barbed wire and fencing. Is there any way for you to get out of your house now? Two years ago we were able to get out of our house by going through the settlement. We used to have a gate that would lead us through the settlement and onto the main road. Two years ago they closed this gate and the only way of getting out of our house is down this steep hill that you came up. And when did they start putting the barbed wire around the house? One year ago the fencing was put all around us, very near to my house. Did they give any explanation for that? They don’t ask our opinion, and they don’t tell us they’re going to put something or they’re going take something off. They just put it and we have to live with it. The Israelis want you to leave, right? They came and they suggested that he leaves. They told him that they would build him a house anywhere else, wherever he wanted, that they’d do anything for him to leave. And he told them that’s out of the question. / When they came, they told me that the road would be closed after the wall is built, that I will have no way of getting out so that I’d better leave now. And still you don’t want to leave. I have lived a long life and I’m not willing to leave my land now. And whatever they do, even if they put up gates I’ll break them down. I’m not willing to leave my land.

SAMI-5 2’05”
Were there any protests against the construction of the Wall here? Yeah, there were a lot of protests against it and they used to come from this street, you know, above on the hill and they were throwing stones in the Wall. Well, I don’t know if they are harming anyone – a stone will never harm a Wall actually – but the soldiers, they were just shooting and there are many who had been killed in this hill, in this area. About 9 had been killed here. 9 children actually because the oldest was 12 years old. And they were just kids, you know, throwing stones. It doesn’t hurt anyone. It doesn’t hurt even the Wall. But the soldiers doesn’t want any protesting. And they feel they are just facing military stones maybe. It’s like this since four years.

CD 228490-42

SAMI-6 1’53”
We have to be careful. And I can show now, I have an office here near, just an extension to my house, where I see emergencies at my house. Many times I got bullets inside it. You can see here. You see. Oh yeah. This is bullets. And this is broken because every time I just repair and then they do it. There are bullets just going now. It’s live bullets. But no one in your house has been injured yet. My wife was injured. Really? Yeah. My wife was injured in the head. She was very lucky that she was down a little bit, kneeling down kneeling down, so it came just injuring the skin of the skull. And she was in the house. Yeah, it was in front of the house, here. You see that tower. Yeah. Yeah, they just shoot. So that’s life. Well, that’s the occupation actually.

SOUND IDF

I have spent hours at checkpoints like Qalandia, Abu Dis, and Eretz, the only crossing into the Gaza Strip, which is already completely sealed off by a fence. I’ve walked along the Wall and read the graffiti, much of it in Arabic, but there are also simple messages in English like “Stop the Wall”. Gradually, Palestinians and Israelis are growing further apart. But there’s one thing almost everyone agrees on: the Wall is ugly. The mayor of Jerusalem has even launched a competition to beautify the concrete slabs dividing the city. When I mention this to Dr. Sami, he snorts and says the competition only applies to the Israeli side of the Wall. Besides, he says, it doesn’t address the real problem.

SAMI-7 1’57”
This wall is hurting them exactly as they are hurting us because they are living inside the Wall, exactly as if I’m living inside the Wall. And this is also in their heart, in their feelings. This is going to be a wall inside both of the people. Is this what you think or is this what you’ve heard also in your conversations with Israelis? Exactly as the soldier who is just here in the checkpoint, he’s doing wrong and I know that he knows that he’ s doing wrong and with violence. And when he’s just hurting or humiliating a mother with a child or an old man, a Palestinian old man, he will go to his house and will do the same. Maybe not all the time, but at least it will be inside him, so it’s corrupting their society with the occupation. Do you think that you will see this wall come down in your lifetime? Yeah, I think it will not last. I’m sure that it will end soon because this is an abnormal thing and abnormal things died very soon, actually. It’s a weak thing. Any abnormal creature or something is weak, and I can’t count with years actually. I can’t count with history. I hope it will be soon actually because I hope to see it coming down, as I saw it when they built it. And when it comes down, will you replant all your trees here? I will keep on planting. Every time, every day I’m planting new thing, and I hope next winter, it will also, when we have the rain, we will have more green here. It will be green. It will be green.

CD

GINGER:
You're listening to “The Barrier”, a special documentary from Radio Netherlands, the Dutch International Service, produced and presented by Eric Beauchemin. If you'd like to comment, e-mail us at letters@rnw.nl. We'll be back in a moment.

GINGER:
Welcome back to “The Barrier”, a special documentary from Radio Netherlands, the Dutch International Service.

TEASERS
The barrier represents a somewhat disorganised attempt to find a way out of a difficult situation. – Josh 0’09”
It’s just like a knife in the landscape. I think it’s a disaster. – Idit 0’04”
We are getting the results. There is not 100% insurance that there will be no terror. – Mashiah
I think it’s a bad thing. I feel like in a ghetto. – Yael 0’03”
It seems very stupid for me to build walls. You build a fence. You have to tear it down some day. – Shay 0’07”

SOUND – AFTER SUICIDE BOMBING IN JERUSALEM

The aftermath of a Palestinian suicide bombing in Jerusalem that left 15 dead and 130 injured in August 2001. In the past four years, over 1000 Israelis have been killed…more than 6000 wounded in Palestinian attacks. An Israeli friend makes cynical remarks to me whenever we get stuck in traffic jams behind busses – the suicide bombers’ favourite target. The subject keeps coming up, even when I don’t ask. For people in this tight-knit society, the memories of the bad days in 2001 and 2002 are all too fresh.

BOMB BLAST 228476-77 [0’03”]

While I’m in Jerusalem, there’s another suicide bombing. 3 people are killed and 17 wounded. An Israeli attorney, Daniel Seidemann, explains that this has been people’s reality for the past four years.

SEIDEMANN-1 0’48”
We’re sitting here on the 10th floor in my office in downtown Jerusalem. My kids go to school 200 metres away from here. My wife works another 200 metres away. And in our own private Bermuda triangle, we’ve had 10 suicide bombers. It’s very interesting. The Israeli public, in the convulsive terror up until a year ago, craved fence. And the craving for a fence, I think, was based mostly on psychology and is very understandable psychology. The first intifada destroyed the credibility of the greater Israel movement. The second intifada destroyed the credibility of the peace process, and people are desperate for something to do that will get us out of this, you know. If only we now put up a fence, things will be better.

SOUND – BUILDING FENCE 228494-16 [0’40”]

In June 2002, the Israeli government approved the 2 billion dollar security fence project. Work began shortly afterwards. So far 150 kilometres of the 700-kilometre barrier have been erected. The Israeli Defence Forces, the IDF, regularly organise tours for foreign journalists. Major Barry Spielman meets us near Highway 6, the busy motorway that runs close to the Green Line between Israel and the West Bank.

SOUND – ROAD

IDF-1 1’36”
You need to look at the fence as a zone, OK? We call it the seam zone. But it’s not just the fence. The fence is part of an apparatus which goes across about 10 yards, which includes the following things. On one side – let’s call it the Palestinian side – you have barbed wire and signs that you just saw a couple of minutes ago that warn that people that to walk in this direction, you’re endangering your life. In other words, there shouldn’t be any people that are innocent that are crossing it because they’ve been told very clearly that this place is off-limits. Past the barbed wire, you have yourself a ditch in many cases which will prevent cars from going across. Then you’ll have a dirt road which is similar to the road that you see along borders in which you can track if people walk across. Then you’ll have an asphalt road, and the asphalt road will be there so that our army patrol can drive across. Remember that the fence is part of an overall security doctrine: our army is operating on the other side of the fence. It’s not a border. It’s not meant to be a border. It can be moved. Then following that you’ll have another dirt road and then following that you have your electronic fence, not an electric fence. You do not get electrocuted if you touch the fence, but it’s an electronic fence which will give a signal which is picked up in a command and control centre like the one you saw and immediately people know, we know where it is. And then there’s all types of other things, such as cameras that are located in various different places that have an overall view of it. That together is the entire seam zone and the army is going to get there and the intention is to stop potential terrorists across the fence because once he gets across the fence, and there’s nothing between him and our civilian population, just like it was the situation before there was a fence. Unless there’s a miracle, he’s going to blow himself up and kill people.

SOUND – ROAD

IDF-2 0’35”
You said that 3.8% of the fence is walled. Can you describe what this wall consists of? How high is the wall and I also see that there are watch towers there. There are several watch towers along the way. I don’t know how high it is. I think 8 metres it could be. But it’s not small. It’s pretty high. But it’s only along the area here of which Qalqilya borders Highway 6. The area that it doesn’t border Highway 6, on this side and north of it, there’s no wall. It goes back to a chain-linked fence. The wall has only been put in the place where it’s absolutely necessary. And it’s not paranoia. From these apartments here, the people shot across the way and there were casualties over here.

SOUND – ROAD

SOUND – DRIVING 228496-56 [0’30”]

This is the only glimpse most Israelis ever get of the security fence, but from the Israeli side here along Highway 6, it looks more like an earthen embankment used along many motorways to block traffic noise. I’m on my way north to visit Yael Ben-Ya’acov, one of the few Israelis who has to deal with the security barrier on a daily basis. She lives together with 200 people in Mevo Dotan, a Jewish settlement in the far north of the West Bank. When I arrive at the security fence, IDF soldiers advise me to wait for the army escort that leaves every hour. There are a few kilometres of olive groves before the road climbs up the hill on which Mevo Dotan is located. Over the past four years, four settlers have been killed on this road, the last one only four months ago.

YA’ACOV-1 0’29”
At the beginning, 1987, they’ve started with stones, so we changed the windows of our cars from glass to plastic. And now we are going with cars – not my car – but there is a car here in the settlement that is armed against bullets. And then they start to put bombs on the road. So then we will go with tanks and then we will go.... Where will it end?

Yael Ben-Ya’acov is one of the people who founded Mevo Dotan 27 years ago. For over a year now, she and the other settlers have had to pass the security fence whenever they leave Mevo Dotan.

YA’ACOV-2 0’31”
It is not convenient for me to live behind the fence. Just a week ago, my son was here with his children, and 5 minutes before the escort was, one of the children needed something. So they had to wait one hour more. And from time to time, you come and the road is closed. And you have to wait by the fence for an hour or two or three hours if the road is closed, and you cannot go in. It’s not convenient for me. I have also civil rights!

A few years ago, when the Israeli Ministry of Defence was planning the route of the fence, many of the residents of Mevo Dotan asked for their settlement to be included on the Israeli side of the barrier. But Ya’acov disagreed. She feels that Mevo Dotan and the rest of the West Bank belong to the state of Israel.

YA’ACOV-3 0’46”
I think that Mevo Dotan should be included in the state of Israel. I am a citizen of the state of Israel, and I want to be part of the state of Israel. What does the security fence represent for you? Isolation. People that are committing suicide, they cannot be buried with everybody in the cemetery, but they bury them near the fence or behind the fence. Why? Because they did something that is wrong. My feeling is now that I’m behind the fence because they made a barrier between me and between my friends living in Shaked and other places.

The man in charge of the security fence project is Nezah Mashiah. I meet him at the Ministry of Defence headquarters in downtown Tel Aviv.

MASHIAH-1 0’20”
The route was planned and designed by Central Command of the Israel Defence Force, after they find the route that is best for protecting Israeli citizens. At the end of the day, the government approved all the route of the security fence.

It is this route which has been condemned by Palestinians, some Israelis and much of the rest of the world. In July, the International Court of Justice in The Hague ruled that the Wall – the term it used in its advisory opinion to the United Nations General Assembly – was illegal. Some sections of the barrier have been built on Israeli land, but 85% of the structure is on the Palestinian side of the 1967 Armistice Line. I ask Mr Mashiah why.

MASHIAH-2 0’37”
It’s an issue for agreements between Israel and when it will be Palestinian State. Now it’s under security. When it will be needed – if it will be needed – fence can be moved. People, we can’t raise them from their graves and be alive again. Fence can be moved. We moved fence after peace agreement with Jordan. We moved fence after peace agreement with Egypt. We moved fence after getting out from Lebanon. We moved the fence. It’s not a big issue. For peace, moving fence is nothing.

But in the meantime, the barrier and the Jewish settlements throughout the West Bank are creating irreversible facts on the ground, and growing numbers of Israelis are worried. One of them is Professor Gadi Algazi, a historian at Tel Aviv University and a peace activist.

ALGAZI 0’41”
The Wall can be demolished, but it is built in an agrarian context. It’s not the Berlin Wall, which means that within three years it can destroy the income and the way of life of village communities. Palestinians are directly affected, losing their access to the lands, losing access to water, to water wells, losing the possibility to move about, destroying whole networks of the flow of people and of merchandise. It’s a system of control. It’s a system of expropriation that is sold or presented as a means to achieve personal security for Israelis. It has nothing to do with it.

Only a minority of Israelis would agree with Professor Algazi’s views. But they are gaining ground in some circles, even in Israel’s military establishment. Earlier this year, four former heads of the Israeli intelligence service declared their opposition to the security fence. It was an unheard of public disavowal of government policy. The courts too are getting involved. In February of this year, a group of Israelis from the town of Mevasseret Zion, near Jerusalem, joined the inhabitants of neighbouring Palestinian villages such as Beit Surik and Biddu in petitioning Israel’s High Court to move the fence. Hagai Agmon-Snir was one of the people involved in the case.

HAGAI-1 0’52”
We decided – it was a very brave point by then – to join the petition to the Supreme Court, and 30 of us came to my house and we just signed a petition and joined the appeal to the Supreme Court and that’s where the story starts. Why did you feel so strongly about it, you yourself? We were thinking that one important thing in stopping terror is to make the residents of Beit Surik not so miserable because what they were planning to do at Beit Surik was closing them in a ghetto without their agricultural land. We are talking about people who work, who are really farmers and from a very quiet village who were not involved in terror in all these years, the meaning of that will be that they will be involved in terror. So even from the security point of view we emphasized that it’s a very wrong route.

It was an argument that impressed the High Court judges, particularly since Israelis were making it.

HAGAI-2 0’52”
It took the court almost two months to work on the story and analysing it for themselves. I must say that we were surprised to see that the Supreme Court – it was a very rare move in Israel – the Supreme Court didn’t agree with the Ministry of Defence and agreed with us eventually. Everybody was shocked about it. It was a great surprise. In Israel it was very hard to make people understand that there’s two issues to speak about: one of them is if there’s a need to have a fence or a barrier or whatever name you want to call it and a second issue: what is going to be the route. And whenever someone was talking about changing the route, people say oh, you are against the fence. And we succeeded to make this differentiation, to make people understand that we need to talk about the route and it’s another issue to speak about the fence, and the Supreme Court agreed with that.

SOUND – OUTSIDE

The court’s ruling sent shockwaves through the country and forced the Ministry of Defence to review the route of other segments of the barrier. This has left many settlers up in the air, as I heard from Joshua Ben-David. He lives in Peduel about 40 kilometres from Tel Aviv.

BEN-DAVID 0’25”
We’re located in a village that really overlooks the entire coastal plain and Ariel Sharon himself used to come out and visit and talk about the strategic importance of this area in preventing attacks on the coastal plain of Israel. So we alternate between being pretty certain that we will be included in Israel and being not at all certain. Do you want to be in? I’m an Israeli.

HASHASH-1 0’12”
I say now that when we do our barriers around our villages, we get ourselves into a ghetto and I think it’s a bad thing.

Yael Hashash is another resident of Peduel.

HASHASH-2 1’04”
I think we have to fight for our land. I really think we have to fight our land. I feel that it’s my land, and it will be very bad to us or to our families or to relatives who live on the shore if we gave up here. But when you say fight for the land, which land, up until where? To my opinion for everywhere the Jewish stay. Everywhere. There are settlements throughout the occupied territories. Does that mean fighting up until the Jordan River? I wish that we doesn’t have to do it. I really wish. But today when we saw the way they fight us and they kill our families and our men and our relatives, I think we have to fight. They don’t let us any other choice.

Hashash’s belief that war against the Palestinians is the only solution represents a minority view. But tensions within the right-wing of Israeli public opinion have increased because of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s plan to pull all the settlers out of the Gaza Strip, which Zionists consider part of Judea and Samaria, the historical land of Israel. Seth Mandell is one of those who opposes the withdrawal. He’s the director of the Coby Mandell Foundation in Jerusalem. The foundation is named after his son, who was murdered three years ago by Palestinians in a cave 500 metres from the family home.

MANDELL-1 0’18”
As a result of the fence, 700 families in the Gaza Strip are being evacuated. Some would call it ethnic cleansing. That causes a tremendous amount of anger amongst a wide swath of the population who supports them. There’s somewhere around 7000 people who are going to be affected by it.

He fears that the disengagement plan and the fence are part of a much bigger scheme.

MANDELL-2 1’01”
The root of the security fence is what’s called the demographic problem. And clearly, what they want to do is have as many Jewish citizens of Israel on the Israeli side of the security fence as possible. But when you look at other settlements in the West Bank, these are not included with in the fence and at the same time, there are Israelis there and there are no plans to move them. I think that’s true in the short run. I think that many of those communities will be on the other side of the fence, and I would not be confident that as time goes on, those communities are also not moved to the Israeli side of the fence. I don’t think this is the end of the process. I think this is the beginning of the process. It may take a few years, but I believe that probably most of the settlements that are in the outlying districts will be in fact evacuated in the long run. That’s going to have a tremendous effect on the community. There’s no question about it.

SOUND – MOSQUE

It’s in Jerusalem – the cradle of Judaism, Christianity and Islam – that the barrier faces the biggest challenges.

SEIDEMANN-2 0’16”
Israelis and Palestinians in Jerusalem are akin to Siamese twins that share vital and less vital organs. And the actual attempt to create a physical separation barrier is always going to be a very problematic choice.

Danny Seidemann deals with the consequences of the fence on a daily basis. He’s an attorney who specialises in relations between Palestinians and Israelis in Jerusalem.

SEIDEMANN-3 1’02”
The route of the fence in Jerusalem is based on a number of conceptions and all of them are problematic. One of the conceptions is the municipal line as determined by Israel in 1967 unilaterally and not recognised by anybody else, and much of the fence in the Jerusalem area follows that once fictitious line. Now people don’t live according to this dotted line on the map. So we’re separating Palestinian from Palestinian and kids from their schools, workers from their places of employment, and much of the fence was determined and its route in a way that was oblivious to the complexities on the ground. Other parts of the fence have been determined to establish an Israeli sphere of influence over greater Jerusalem, to consolidate our hegemony over the public domain. Other parts of the fence – and this is a case that is pending and very problematic – the route cuts deeply into the city of Jerusalem in order to put some 30,000 Palestinians on the other side of the fence in order to reduce the number of Palestinians in the city.

As I look out from the window of Seidemann’s 10th story office, I can see how the fence and the settlers are changing the make-up of what has long been known as:

SEIDEMANN-4 0’03”
Jerusalem, the undivided capital of Israel that will never be re-divided and that’s one word.

Traditionally, the western part of the city was Jewish, the eastern part Arab. But for over a decade, Jews have been settling in the eastern part of the city, and settlements are being built behind them, deep in Palestinian territory. Where the settlements go, so does the fence.

SEIDEMANN-5 0’27”
One of the things that I think we have forgotten, I think, is that a credible ceasefire is much better than any physical barrier. Palestinians will always be able to hurt us, so that the fence is not going to be effective in Jerusalem in the long run. It may stabilise the situation of a critically wounded patient, but it won’t get us better. As a tool is legitimate, as an ideology it’s folly.

HAGAI-2 0’47”
It’s unbelievable, but there is no real way to finish the Wall in Jerusalem right now that will really be maintainable, which will be something that people will be able to live with for a while, for a few years. And this is something that the Ministry of Defence may not formally agree, but they understand it very well. There is no correct way to put the fence. It’s a wall in Jerusalem, to put this wall in Jerusalem. So what does that mean in the longer term for Jerusalem? It’s a very good question. You know, we succeeded to make the situation so complex, sometimes because we wanted to make it complex. Some of the idea of the settlements was to complicate the situation. You know, now we say it’s very complex, but we made it complex in some sense.

SOUND – CHECKPOINT

Most Israelis have never crossed checkpoints like this one to see what it’s like on the other side of the fence. Seidemann regularly has to to consult with his Palestinian clients. But the fence is making even business contacts between Israelis and Palestinians increasingly difficult.

SEIDEMANN-6 1’02”
I’m not allowed to visit Bethlehem. They’re not allowed to visit Jerusalem. So when we meet, I go to the checkpoint between Jerusalem and Bethlehem and flatter the border patrol guards so that they will let me meet in the 200-metre space between the northern part of the checkpoint and the southern part of the checkpoint, and I will stand under the glaring sun. I say would you like to come into my conference room? Can I offer you a cup of coffee? There is no neutral meeting ground where Israelis and Palestinians can really meet. I represent 20,000 residents in the northern part of the city who live inside the city of Jerusalem but outside the fence. When I visited the neighbourhood in order to examine their problems and to meet with the residents, I was detained on my way back for illegally entering my nation’s capital.

SOUND-CHECKPOINT

SEIDEMANN-7 1’35”
There are almost a quarter of a million Palestinians living in Jerusalem and most of them are going to be on the Israeli side of the fence. The Palestinians of East Jerusalem have not participated in any significant numbers in the violent, deadly aspects of the intifada. And that’s not because they are Israelis. It is because there is a delicate ecosystem here. It is my fear that by building the fence the way we are, we are preventing the suicide bomber from coming into the city from outside at the expense of radicalisation of the population of East Jerusalem. And if indeed my forecast is correct we will miss the placid days that we had in 2000 to 2004 where hundreds of people were killed here in Jerusalem. We’re living on the edge of a volcano.

SOUND – NEWSCLIP

On Monday, there was another suicide bombing in Tel Aviv: 4 people were killed, including the 16-year-old suicide bomber. More than 30 were injured.

SOUND UP

Many Israelis, particularly young people, tell me that they no longer read the newspapers, watch the news on TV or listen to the radio. They’re too tired of the violence, the anger, and the politics. Idit is one of them. She’s a 35-year-old architect who lives in Tel Aviv.

IDIT-1
Even the wall in Berlin had a meaning. It was really obvious from one side. And here there is no difference between both sides of the wall. They took tge map. They sketched a line and built the wall. It has the same people, I mean the same culture on both sides.

REVITAL-1
My name is Revital. I’m an Arab-Israeli, and I live in Jaffa, it’s nearby Tel Aviv. I think this wall protects them psychologically. It doesn’t protect them physically. They want to believe it. They know inside that it doesn’t work, but they want to believe it and that relaxes them for now. So it’s OK. I can understand it of course because I go in the bus every morning where I can be in a bombing. He won’t see that I am Palestinian or Arab. I have the same danger here. I live this danger.

IDIT-2
The Israeli government has to give answers to the people of Israel to give them security, to give them solutions, and they really don’t know [laugh] what to do. It’s a problem. It’s a problem because we are this round of terrorism, we really can’t end it.

Tommy is 26 and lives in Tel Aviv.

TOMMY
We just paranoid. You know, Israeli people in 50 years, we just got very paranoid here, after the Holocaust and everything. It’s really difficult to build a country in 50 years when you are surrounded with all of this anger. I think we need therapy here. We need some big psychology, like aliens that will come here [laugh] and do counselling. Or maybe we need to smoke a lot of pot here, the Palestinians and the Israelis.

REVITAL-2
I think Israelis prefer something that they know, and it’s war. If you see all the leaders in Israel, in the 20 or 30 years, they are all generals. So you may say that it’s the army that controls Israel. It’s the army. They hit, we hit, and when I say we, I mean Israel because I’m inside Israel but I have family in Palestine. I have friends. and it’s very difficult for me to see that they are killing each other because we are family.

IDIT-3
A lot of people that talk about territories, I think that they miss the point because it is better to live in a small country but better life than have more land and to suffer – I don’t know – let other people be without land, without country. We could have lived really happy. Maybe I’m too romantic person, but I really feel that’s not the way.

SHAI-2
My name is Shai and I’m 32. You get to see it when you live here that all the actions here is like taken from Hollywood movies, to make it spectacular. It’s the Holy Land. It has to be like with the Hollywoodland. It has to be with a lot of fighting and a lot of blood and a lot of tears and a lot of drama and tragedy.

ANOTHER BRICK IN THE WALL 64783 [1’02”]

You know, when I was a kid I liked very much the band Pink Floyd and the Wall, the famous record. I grew up on this material. It seems very stupid for me to build walls. You build a fence, you have to tear it down some day because there are people here. They are living here. There will always be people here. And they have to find a solution to live together, you know. They don’t have to. They will because there is no other way. I don’t see other way.

GINGER:
“The Barrier” is a special presentation from Radio Netherlands, the Dutch International Service. It is produced and presented by Eric Beauchemin. If you’d like to comment, e-mail us at letters@rnw.nl.

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