Responding to the protests, the Israeli Supreme Court February 29 ordered a one-week halt to construction of the wall in an area where it would envelop eight villages. It would lock 30,000 Palestinians into their villages, and they would lose thousands of acres of land.

A Supreme Court hearing the following week is expected to make a final ruling on this section of the wall. Israeli defense minister Shaul Mofaz complained that “there are many areas where we are not doing the work owing to statutory legal problems.”

On February 23 protests erupted at Deir Ghsun, Bethlehem, and Qalqilya, where a crowd of 5,000 rallied at the structure that encircles the city and cuts off many residents from their farm and water supply. In Abu Dis, Palestinian Authority prime minister Ahmed Qurei told protesters, “We say to the judges in The Hague: Listen to what the Palestinian people have to say. They won’t compromise on their rights.”

Hundreds of Palestinians and supporters gathered the same day in The Hague, chanting, “The wall must fall,” and “No justice, no peace.” Supporters of the Israeli state staged a counter-rally.

Palestinian Authority (PA) representatives at the court are calling for the barrier to be dismantled or shifted to follow the Green Line—Israel’s boundary with the West Bank before Tel Aviv seized it in 1967. Among the governments that have sent representatives to testify in support of the Palestinian case are those of Jordan, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Cuba. According to a February 23 Reuters report, the PA “expressed disappointment that most of the Arab League member states did not submit briefs to the court on its behalf.”

As of the end of February, the Israeli government is a quarter of the way through the construction of the 400-mile wall, which will redraw the map of the West Bank—a 2,270-mile territory that is home to nearly 2 million Palestinians—and extend Israel’s claims to Palestinian land.

Since the 1993 Oslo Accords, portions of the West Bank have been ceded to the PA, which was established under the same agreement. In the decade since, settlement activity and Israeli military infrastructure in the nominally PA-run territory have expanded.

When complete, the “security fence,” as the Israeli government has dubbed it, will be more than four times longer and in parts much higher than the Berlin Wall. John Dugard, special reporter of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights in the Occupied Territory, noted last summer that in places the fortified rampart is 26 feet high. Mostly, he said, “it takes the form of a barrier 60 to 100 meters wide, which includes buffer zones, trenches and barbed wire, trace paths to register footprints, an electric fence with sensors, a two-lane patrol road and guard towers at regular intervals.”

At the heart of the project is a substantial Israeli land-grab. Tel Aviv aims to block the possible formation of a viable Palestinian state. The barrier’s route will cut off 15 percent of the West Bank, effectively extending Israel’s border throughout those areas. In those same areas live 80 percent of all Israeli settlers in the Occupied Territories, who are spearheaded by rightist opponents of Palestinian self-rule who have acted as a vanguard of Israel’s expansion into the West Bank.

Already some 11,400 Palestinians who fall on the “Israel” side of the wall have been entirely separated from PA schools, health care, and other services. They will also have to apply for permits to continue to live in their homes.

The wall is reinforcing the deep blow to West Bank economic life already dealt by years of Israeli incursions and siege. The first stage of work in constructing the wall is being done in the Jenin, Tulkarm, and Qalqilya districts—three of the richest agricultural areas on the West Bank.

These moves are exacerbating an already deep economic crisis in the occupied territories. Palestinian unemployment is close to 40 percent, and a decline in resources has resulted in a deterioration in health care and a growth in malnutrition among children.

Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon has rejected negotiations with PA leaders, calling it “a government of murder and lies.” He told the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper, “It will be impossible to reach any agreement with this government.”

In a December 18 speech to the Herzliyya Institute of Policy and Strategy, Sharon said that Israeli planners would draw fortified “security lines” conforming to the wall to isolate Palestinians in the West Bank—a policy that he called “disengagement.”

While claiming the scheme is temporary, Sharon said in the same breath that Tel Aviv would “strengthen its control in those parts of Eretz Yisrael that will constitute an inseparable part of the State of Israel under any future arrangement.”

Meanwhile, Israeli troops raided three banks in the West Bank city of Ramallah February 26 and seized over $8 million from 400 institutional, charity, and individual accounts.

Amin Haddad, the head of the Palestinian Monetary Authority, said the raids were an “unjustified ungrounded daylight theft at gunpoint by the Israeli army from two Jordanian banks operating in Palestine, as well as the Arab Bank and the Cairo-Amman bank.” Among the accounts pillaged were the Islamic University in Gaza and the Zakat Committees, which oversee small donations to the poor required of every Muslim.  
 
 
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