From
Hague To Mas'ha
By Tanya Reinhart
16 July , 2004.
Countercurrents.org
The
International Court of Justice has determined that Israel has
the right, and indeed the duty, to
protect the life of its citizens
but that the measures taken are bound nonetheless to remain in
conformity with applicable international law. The Court found
the present route of the separation fence or wall to be a serious and
egregious violation of international law.
In an interview
given last weekend, Israeli Chief of Staff Moshe (Bogie) Yaalon
contested the applicability of international law. Such a system was
appropriate for the conditions of World War II, he declared, but not
for the present war on terror. Apparently, as Yaalon envisions
it, in this war the armed forces are bound only by their own law. Indeed,
a battle is being waged in the world today over the status of international
law. While the US and Israel are agitating for its nullification, the
rest of the world understands that international law, as the framework
that governs the conduct of states, is a necessary apparatus for the
preservation of society. Even if it does not always function perfectly,
without international law there is a danger that large segments of the
human race will simply be wiped out, as we Jews learned through our
own terrible experience during World War II.
The International
Courts ruling lists the numerous articles of the Fourth Geneva
Convention that the present route of the barrier violates, noting that
there is also a risk of further alterations to the demographic
composition of the Occupied Palestinian Territory resulting from
the
departure of Palestinian populations from certain areas (paragraph
122). In simpler language, the Court is warning of transfer.
The word transfer
evokes the collective memory of trucks arriving in the middle of the
night to transport Palestinian villagers across the border, which happened
in a number of places in 1948. But transfer on that model is not possible
in todays world. Now transfer must be accomplished more slowly
and surreptitiously. The current barrier cuts off 400,000 Palestinians
from their source of livelihood and imprisons them in isolated enclaves.
With no means of subsistence, they will be forced to leave those enclaves
over the next few years to seek employment at the peripheries of West
Bank cities and towns. In this way, sections of the West Bank that border
on Israel will be cleansed of Palestinians. In Qalqilya
and Tul Karm, where the fence was completed a year ago, it is already
happening. It would have been possible to build the fence on the Israeli
side of Qalqilya, as the original plan proposed. That is a much shorter
route, and would have been easier to guard and protect than the present
line, which surrounds Qalqilya on all sides and cuts through West Bank
territory. But the builders of the barrier along its present route were
guided not by security considerations but rather by the old vision of
redeeming the land and purifying it of Arabs. The only difference is
that today it is possible to hide this behind talk of a war on terror.
A year ago, the
wall extended from Tul Karm and Qalqilya to the town of Masha,
near the Jewish settlement of Elkana. Like others before them, the people
of Masha were expected to sit and watch as their olive groves
their source of income for centuries were transferred to the Israeli
side of the wall. But the people of Masha united to show that
another way is possible. They erected protest tents next to the route
of the bulldozers and called upon Israelis to join them. For months,
Israelis and Palestinians sat together in the path of the wall that
was being built day by day. Nazeeh Shalaby, a farmer from Masha
who lost all his land, was the moving spirit in the camp. Until
you arrived, he told me this week, I didnt have any
idea that there were Israelis who want to live with us in peace.
The protest camp
at Masha didnt succeed in stopping the wall. The encampment
was evacuated and the army used live ammunition on the Israeli protestors
who climbed and shook the fence. Gil Naamati of Kibbutz Reim
lost there his knee. But now the International Court has ruled that
Israel must immediately dismantle the sections of the wall that have
been built inside the West Bank and move them to the Green Line. This
should begin at once with the dismantling of the wall at Masha.