When I was writing the Israel/Palestine chapters in The Colonial Present the vast, wretched landscape of occupation and repression was numbingly new to me (though it shouldn’t have been). I found little help from mainstream geography, with some honourable exceptions, and I vividly remember my first visit to the West Bank with Steve Graham,Eyal Weizman and others. You would think I would have been prepared: I’d certainly read everything I could lay my hands on.
But nothing prepares you for the enormity of the occupation, its monstrous violence and everyday humiliations, and the sight of the wall snaking across the landscape – what Ariella Azoulay and Adi Ophir call ‘the Monster’s Tail’ – remains one of the most appalling impositions I have ever seen. Neither was I ready for the iron-clad violence of the Qalandiyya checkpoint, whose enclosures, grills and bars that would not have been out of place…
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Hi Rashid, There is no doubt in my mind that the wall is a monstrous indignity to those who want peace to happen between Palestine and Israel. Israel built it, firstly to reduce incidents of terror such as bombings and infiltration attacks on citizens. But today it defines a new Green Line and gerrymanders the future Palestinian state. It is a sad statement about a post-1967 war settlement between Israelis and Palestinians that never happened and continues to victimize Palestinians who want a legitimate state of their own. Yet it has done what Israeli security intended….removing the constant threat of bombing incidents within the country’s borders. And the wall has “legitimized” the Israeli settlement movement, the tail that wags the dog and keeps any future of peace at arms length.
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