The Politics of the West Bank Wall

In 2002, the State of Israel started the construction of a separation wall surrounding the West Bank. The 30-foot-high concrete barrier together with electrified fences is expected to be 425 miles long when completed. It could have been just a physical barrier among so many others already existing from North Korea to the US/Mexican border, but the separation wall between Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories is a much more complex issue. Constructed on Palestinian lands, confiscating or isolating up to 15 per cent of the Palestinian territory upon completion, ¹ declared illegal by the International Court of Justice in 2004, ² the wall has been justified by the State of Israel through the right to defend itself, as the ultimate security measure to protect Israeli citizens from terrorist threats. For the Palestinian population, the wall is the last instrument used to reduce their mobility to the minimum or, more exactly, what is left over in terms of mobility for a selected few, the others being locked in their land since the early 1990s. Without minimising the importance of these social, legal and geopolitical considerations, this chapter aims to address the issue of the separation wall in some of its psycho-anthropological dimensions mostly through its impacts on daily life, coping mechanisms, perceptions and representations. ³ It will focus first of all on the way the wall is experienced in terms of redefinition or annihilation of identity, space, time or as a means of symbolic violence. Those aspects are neither exclusive nor exhaustive but will give an insight into the impact of the culture of war on Palestine and Palestinians. The second part will focus on the perceptions of the wall, the background and understanding of the politics of walling. The last part will focus on representations on the wall - graffiti, drawings - done by Palestinian, Israeli or International artists/activists. Finally the conclusion will consider how much the current situation can be considered as 'spaciocide' (destruction of space) and in some more specific cases 'urbicide' (destruction of cities) ⁴ and on the implications that those two engaging concepts may have for activists and for scholars willing to understand and to respond to the making of the wall.