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Imagine living caged. Imagine a huge wall being built around your home. Imagine this wall destroying trees and causing homes to be demolished. Possibly yours. What would you do?
The Israeli Wall has been comdemned by the UN, and yet it is still being built. The Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign’s most recent map of the Wall’s path, finalized November 2003, reveals that if completed in its entirety, nearly 50% of the West Bank population will be affected by the Wall through loss of land, imprisonment into ghettos, or isolation into Israeli de facto annexed areas .
Israel maintains that the Wall is a temporary structure to physically separate the West Bank from Israel and thus to prevent suicide attacks on Israeli citizens. However the wall’s location, (in some places reaching up to 6km inside Palestinian territory), and projected length, (currently 750km, despite a border with Israel of less than 200km), suggest it is more realistically an additional effort to confiscate Palestinian land, facilitate further colony expansion and unilaterally redraw geopolitical borders all the while encouraging an exodus of Palestinians by denying them the ability to earn a living from their land, reach their schools or work places, access adequate water resources, or reach essential health care. (http://www.palestinemonitor.org/factsheet/wall_fact_sheet.htm/)
A DYING GHETTO
(Exerpt from Chris Hedges' Wall of Horrors)
Qalqiliya is a ghetto. It is completely surrounded by the wall. There is one Israeli military checkpoint to let people into the West Bank or back home again. Only those with special Israeli-issued permits can go in and out of Qalqiliya. It is not the Lodz ghetto or the Warsaw ghetto, but it is a ghetto that would be recognizable to the Jews who were herded into walled enclaves by Pope IV in 1555 and stranded there for generations. Qalqiliya, like all ghettos, is dying. And it is being joined by dozens of other ringed ghettos as the serpentine barrier snaking its way through up and down two sides of the West Bank gobbles up Palestinian land and lays down nooses around Palestinian cities, towns, villages and fields.
Construction began on the barrier in 2002 with the purported intent of safeguarding Israel from suicide bombers and other types of attacks. Although it nominally runs along the 1949 Jordanian-Israeli armistice/Green Line that demarcates the boundary between Israel and the Palestinian-held West Bank, around 80 percent of the barrier actually cuts into Palestinian territories --at some points by as much as 20 kilometers.
If and when the barrier is completed, several years from now, it will see the West Bank cut up into three large enclaves and numerous small ringed ghettos. The three large enclaves will include in the south the Bethlehem/Hebron area and in the north the Jenin/Nablus and Ramallah areas.
B'tselem, a leading Israeli human rights organization that documents conditions in the occupied territories, recently estimated that the barrier will eventually stretch 703 miles around the West Bank, about 450 of which are already completed or under construction. (The Berlin Wall, for comparison, ran 96 miles.) B'tselem also estimates that 500,000 West Bank residents will be directly affected by the barrier (by virtue of residing in areas completely encircled by the wall; by virtue of residing west of the barrier and thus in de facto Israeli territory; or by virtue of residing in East Jerusalem, where Palestinians effectively cannot cross into West Jerusalem).
I stand on Qalqiliya's main street. There is little traffic. Shop after shop is shuttered and closed. The heavy metal doors are secured to the ground with thick padlocks. There are signs in Hebrew and Arabic, fading reminders of a time when commerce was possible. There were, before the wall was built, 42,000 people living here. Mayor Maa'rouf Zahran says at least 6,000 have left. Many more, with the unemployment rate close to 70%, will follow. Over the tip of the wall, in the distance, I can see the tops of the skyscrapers in Tel Aviv. It feels as if it is a plague town, quarantined. Israeli officials, after a few suicide bombers slipped into Israel from Qalqiliya, began to refer to the town as a "hotel for terrorists."
There are hundreds of acres of farmland on the other side of the wall, some of the best farmland in the West Bank, which is harder and harder to reach given the gates, checkpoints and closures. There are some 32 farming villages on the outskirts of Qalqiliya, cut off from their land, sinking into poverty and despair. Olive groves, with trees that are hundreds of years old, have been uprooted and bulldozed into the ground. The barrier is wiping out the middle class in the West Bank, the last bulwark in the West Bank against Islamic fundamentalism. It is plunging the West Bank into the squalor that defines life in the Gaza Strip, where Palestinians struggle to live on less than $ 2 a day. It is the Africanization of Palestinian land...
If the barrier is being built for security, why is so much of the West Bank being confiscated by Israel? Why is the barrier plunging in deep loops into the West Bank to draw far-flung settlements into Israel? Why are thousands of acres of the most fertile farmland and much of the West Bank's aquifers being seized by Israel?
The barrier does not run along the old 1967 border or the 1949 armistice line between Israel and the Arab states, which, in the eyes of the United Nations, delineates Israel and the West Bank. It will contain at least 50% of the West Bank, including the whole of the western mountain aquifer, which supplies the West Bank Palestinians with over half their water. The barrier is the most catastrophic blow to the Palestinians since the 1967 occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.
The barrier itself mocks any claim that it is temporary. It costs $ 1 million per mile and will run over $ 2 billion by the time it is completed. It will cut the entire 224-mile length of the West Bank off from Israel, but because of its diversions into the West Bank to incorporate Palestinian land it will be about 400 miles in length. A second barrier is being built on the Jordan River side of the West Bank. To look at a map of the barrier is to miss the point. The barrier interconnects with every other piece of Israeli-stolen real estate in Palestinian territory. And when all the pieces are in place the Israelis will no doubt offer up the little ringed puddles of poverty and despair and misery to the world as a Palestinian state.
Yesterday was a pretty bad day, first i thought i was going to my computer back finally but apple did a screw up and fixed the wrong thing... so now 5 more days without my computer, than i got in an argument with my dad, those are never fun time. BUt i am so glad to have a very special person close to my heart and he always makes me smile and laugh on the worst days. I love him so much! So thanks Aaron. You always know how to make my days better and brighter. Today seems to be a calmer day though. I am going to be pretty much in my room most of the day and avoid the outside world for today.
On a brighter side its almost my birthday! Finally the big 1 8!
Also sorry for the very late uploaded i really wish i had my computer back. OH also when we went to the store yesterday i checked my computer and photoshop was still there!!! YAY!
I hope all my flickr pals are having a good week.
xoxoxo
Today a long walk of 14.3km including a wrong turn in the blazing sun (but keeping mainly under the trees), starting at Stokenchurch and out through the Wormsley estate back through Penley Woods via Ibstone.
The Chilterns at its finest!
Walkabouts 2025 .... flic.kr/s/aHBqjBXsk2
Just before sunset on the Heidelberg Castle in Germany
Check out my YouTube Channel for all of my videos I make during my travels, like Timelapses to some of my pictures!
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Waikiki’s Fort DeRussy back when it still had residential cottages on the waterfront. The complete lack of sand in this area and ocean clear up to the seawall are remarkable. The reef in the foreground is next to the catamaran pier at the neighboring 1955 Hawaiian Village Hotel. White cardboard mount “Kodachrome Transparency Processed By Kodak” slide produced between 1958 and 1959 and date stamped Mar 59.
Photo details
- Throw net fisherman on the reef, foreground
- Fort DeRussy Officers quarters above the seawall, top left
- Fort DeRussy beachfront parking, top right corner
We've experienced three straight days of fog. Out in the country you feel like you are driving through a cloud (which you are!) and can't see more than a few car lengths in front of you...
From my walk today - view from the park of castle Krapperup, NW Scania, South Sweden.
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Some guy with a Target shopping cart stripped the trail lighting underneath Highway 101 on the Guadalupe River Trail just north of San Jose International Airport.
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