Last year Belfast’s bus company introduced double-deckers to the city. What a wonderful innovation! Just pay your £1.10, climb to the top of the stairs and you have a wonderful view of a fucked-up society. This new elevated viewpoint allows one to peek over the many “peace walls” which segregate Belfast into Catholic and Protestant ghettos. On your way into town, rather than reading the paper or texting a friend, you can while away your time seeing what “the other lot” are up to.
Ten years on from the first paramilitary ceasefires, my fair city is a place at once different, at once the same. The British Army, with their foot patrols, their helicopters and their checkpoints are long gone. The police have swapped land rovers for Ford Escorts. Down by the River Lagan what was once a waste ground is now dotted with new office buildings and entertainment complexes. The city centre and the university area are awash with venues where one can eat, drink and be merry. TV ads in the Republic push Belfast as the place to go for a weekend break. (A break from what? Sanity?)
Elsewhere though the bitter divisions which led to 30 years of conflict are all too visible. Dozens of walls divide Protestant from Catholic especially in the north and west of the city. One of the cemeteries even has an underground wall lest the dead should start mixing. Six years on from the Good Friday Agreement some of the walls are actually being built higher. For all the shiny economic development and the cuddly security “normalisation”, the walls are tangible evidence that Belfast is still a deeply sick and perverted city.
No group is seriously suggesting tearing down the walls. On both sides they are seen as a necessity, however unfortunate, to protect against sectarian attack. They provide a level of protection, both real and psychological, which people living in flashpoint areas still need. Of course we all say “one day the walls must come down” but we all know that that day will not come soon. It has become a cliché to point out just how inappropriate is the name “peace wall”. Belfast divided will never be at peace, to paraphrase a republican slogan.
In another of the world’s divided societies, we see the emergence of another poorly named wall: Israel’s “security barrier” in the West Bank. This monstrosity currently being built has nothing to do with Israel’s security needs and everything to do with Israel’s territorial wants. The planned route of the wall snakes for miles into the Palestinian territory. It cuts off Palestinian cities from their rural hinterland and isolates framers from their fields and their markets. For those Palestinians soon to be trapped between Israel on one side and the wall on the other life will quickly become untenable.
The wall also encompasses the large settlement blocs like Ariel and Etzion. Places like these are referred to in Israel as “consensus settlements” i.e. both left and right agree that Israel must keep them in any future peace deal. Viewed in this context, it is easy to believe that this wall is in fact a land grab by the Sharon government. Once completed, the barrier will be, in Moshe Dayan’s words, “a fact on the ground”. Having spent billions of dollars of US taxpayers’ money building the wall, the Israelis will not spend billions more tearing it down again. After all, that’s no way to treat an “ally”.
If and when final status negotiations ever begin, the Palestinians will be presented with a fait accompli: west of the wall will be annexed to Israel, east of the wall will be on the table. Even then the Israelis will demand huge swathes of land for roads, settlements and military bases east of their barrier. The Palestinians will be left to rule Hebron, Jericho, Bethlehem, Ramallah, Nablus, Jenin, Qalqilya and Tulkarm as Bantustans. These cities will be Palestinian-ruled islands in a sea of Israeli sovereignty. Final status will look an awful lot like Oslo; Israel on top, the Palestinians in cages.
Of course this isn’t the official version you’ll hear from the Israeli government or their supporters in Washington. The line from them is that the wall is protection against Palestinian suicide bombers. But, if this is the case, then why build a wall which encroaches onto land which the rest of the world says should be part of a Palestinian state? Why not just build along the Green Line?
The wall is not designed to bring about security; it’s designed to bring about ethnic cleansing by stealth. By building a barrier which literally dissects Palestinian life, Israel hopes to make life so difficult that many Palestinians will emigrate. It’s nice clean ethnic cleansing without all that nasty mass murder stuff which looks so bad on CNN and can get you a one-way ticket to The Hague.
When faced with criticism of their wall, the Israeli government sometimes points to the walls in Belfast as justification. Up goes their all too familiar wail of victimisation. Why, they ask, does the world not also condemn the walls in Belfast? This is a deceptive argument. Those unfamiliar with the two conflicts will see the obvious similarity in the two cases – a wall is built to stop people killing each other. The differences though less visible are far more telling.
The walls in Belfast exist with the support of both sides; they are seen as a necessary evil. In the West Bank the barrier is being imposed by one side against the will of the other. In Northern Ireland, the walls were built along existing dividing lines. In Palestine the wall is creating a new line of demarcation to the advantage of one side and the detriment of the other.