Israel Matzav

Good fences make good neighbors

Canadian poet and essayist David Solway looks at some of the walls that countries around the world have built to protect themselves and questions why only Israel's 'security fence' is controversial.

[UN 'Human Rights Commissioner Navi] Pillay, like most of her duplicitous ilk, also has nothing to say about the palisade being built by the government of Thailand, which is higher and longer than the Israeli barrier, to cordon off two million Muslims living in the south of the country. She has nothing to say about the “wall of shame” dividing Morocco from Western Sahara (1,500 miles), the electrified fence between Botswana and Zimbabwe (300 miles), and the soon-to-be-completed, ten-foot-high barrier along the entire border between Saudi Arabia and Yemen, built by the Saudis to discourage terrorist infiltration!

As Alan Dershowitz points out in The Case for Peace, security barriers have also been erected by India, Cyprus, and even by the United Nations, which installed a security barrier to protect Kuwait from Iraq. The United States is justifiably constructing a fence along its southwestern border with Mexico to prevent the influx of illegal immigration. The wall that India is now completing to seal off its border from Bangladesh is one of the most impressive of the lot: it is three meters high and 2,500 miles long. Nor, for that matter, has its righteous indignation against the Israeli fence prevented the UN from constructing a security fence of its own around its headquarters in New York City. Oddly enough, no mention is made of the wall built by Egypt to check the flow of Gazans into the country. And while we’re at it, let’s not forget the Great Wall of China, celebrated as one of the Seven Wonders of the World and now a major tourist attraction, whose original purpose was much like Israel’s.

Both the American and Israeli fences have been compared to the Berlin Wall, an accusation which misses the point entirely. The Berlin Wall was intended to keep citizens in, not interlopers out. That was a wall that vindicably had to be torn down, as President Reagan exhorted Mikhail Gorbachev. But after the reunification of Germany, the UN — and, of course, the EU and the bristling legions of “rights” organizations — have been predictably silent about every other barricade in the world except, to a limited degree, America’s, and to a much vaster extent, Israel’s. The Big Satan and the Little Satan are plainly committed to defending the boundaries of their respective hells, which for one reason or another people insist on entering.

Adding to the devil’s brew, EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana has been consistently critical of the Israeli barrier, the most likely reason being that it spares Jewish lives. Naturally, there is not a word from Solana, a Spaniard, about the fences built by Spain with EU funding and over Moroccan objections around Ceuta and Melilla, the Spanish enclaves on the North African coast, to keep out Arab refugees. Nevertheless, as we have seen, complaints continue to abound from juridical and governmental institutions about the security fence separating Palestinian farmers from their fields. These organizations refuse to recognize that, absenting the fence, Palestinian terrorists are determined to separate Israeli citizens from their lives, which is obviously a matter of no importance.

Read the whole thing.

The title of this post comes from Robert Frost's poem Mending Wall, parts of which Solway sprinkles throughout the article. Here's the punch line from the poem:

Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me~
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."

Indeed. Good fences make good neighbors. And the 'international community's reproaching of Israel over the 'wall' has nothing to do with the 'wall's justification and everything to do with the 'international community's visceral hatred of Israel and Jews (and in the case of the United States, its hatred of anyone that counts itself as a friend of Israel and Jews).

The picture at the top is from the Great Wall of China.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 10:01 AM