Spotlight

Join the Apartheid Wall Campaign

By PENGON*

Under the coordination of the Palestinian Environmental NGOs Network (PENGON), a number of Palestinian NGOs [non-governmental orgnizations] and grassroots organizations are joining their efforts against the building of Israel's Apartheid Wall. The Apartheid Wall Campaign has just completed a detailed, report including maps, data, background, photographs and links about the Apartheid Wall. Report No.1 can be found here.

Contrary to worldwide news reports, the Apartheid Wall (also referred to as the "fence" or "security fence") which Israel is currently building in the northeast of the West Bank, as well as in the Bethlehem and Jerusalem areas, will not mark the 1967 border, also known as the Green Line, but amid some of the most fertile land in Palestine. This latest unilateral offensive will be a further exercise in Israel's annexation of lands, destruction of agriculture and property, and violation of human rights.

The first phase of the wall, in the northern West Bank, is to be some 115 kilometres long and 8 metres high and is to include electric fences, trenches, cameras, sensors and security patrols. The wall in its entirety is to cover at least 350 km, roughly encircling the West Bank. In this first phase, at least 15 villages will be trapped between the Apartheid Wall and the Green Line. Another minimum of 15 villages will have most of their lands confiscated, in that the residential areas will be on the east of the wall, and the agricultural land to the west. To date, over 100,000 dunums have been confiscated for the entire wall. If the Apartheid Wall is completed, close to 10 per cent of the West Bank will have been confiscated for its construction. Israeli government officials have stated repeatedly that the Apartheid Wall will be completed in less than one year from now, and therefore are "working" daily in meeting their deadlines and goals.

After two years of siege, the Apartheid Wall is a further, brutal escalation of an already unbearable reality for Palestinians in the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The reference in the international media to a "fence" being placed to separate the "two sides" should be seen more as a cynical, unrepresentative use of terms than any real reflection of the wall itself, both in its massive physical structure and its implications on the lives of tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of people. The separation rhetoric, which should remind everyone of the Afrikaans word for separation - "Apartheid" - is not a reflection of real geographic or a historic physical divide between two peoples, but rather is a reference to Israel's continued campaign of forcible, unilateral separation and expulsion plans that disregard national or economic sovereignty for Palestinians. The wall just furthers the "bantustanization" of the West Bank into hundreds of small, dependent entities that cannot sustain themselves and that are more akin to small, disconnected open-air prisons surrounded by Israeli military checkpoints and settlements, than anything else.

The Apartheid Wall Campaign looks to coordinate Palestinian efforts in order to stop the Apartheid Wall and highlight the role of the Apartheid Wall in Israel's control of Palestine. The campaign sees international advocacy as fundamental in its hopes to stop the wall and shed light on the occupation.

The campaign is bringing together organizations such as the Palestinian Agricultural Relief Committees (PARC), the Palestinian Hydrology Group (PHG), the Union of Palestinian Medical Relief Committees (UPMRC), LAW, the Applied Research Institute - Jerusalem (ARIJ), the Land Research Centre (LRC) and the Society for the Development and Protection of the Environment, as well as local grassroots efforts and actors in the various localities affected by the wall. The campaign brings together NGOs and local groups and movements in order to best answer to the needs of those affected by the Apartheid Wall.

The Apartheid Wall Campaign will have its own website in two weeks time, which will be here.

*Palestinian Environmental Non-Governmental Organizations Network.