The Wall: CTRL + ALT + DELETE (cont’d)
Dion Nissenbaum posted this photo on his blog, Checkpoint Jerusalem, today:
(See our posting on 5 December here mentioning this particular graffiti comment– CTRL + ALT + DELETE — just on the Ramallah side of the Qalandia checkpoint.)
Because the woman and the child are in the foreground, the photo is a bit foreshortened. You could get the impression that The Wall here is short — but it’s not. It’s about 30 to 50 meters away, elevated up on a little hill — and it’s massive.
Dion titled his posting: “Sometimes a wall is really a wall…” And he wrote: “As pretty much anyone taking the time to read this blog well knows, language is one of the main battlegrounds in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict … I thought about this tonight when I was checking out this story in Haaretz about graffiti artists who spray-painted a falafel recipe on the side of Israel’s concrete wall near Ramallah. The lead for the story reads: ‘For the rest of the recipe, turn over the wall’, reads a falafel recipe spray-painted on Israel’s imposing West Bank separation fence Tuesday, in a lighthearted but serious protest against the hardships it causes Palestinians’. Separation fence? It is entirely true that the vast majority of this controversial project is made up of high-tech fencing and that only about 5 to 10 percent is made up of sections of the 25-foot-tall concrete slabs. (Though the fence is relegated to largely rural areas while the wall encloses the major Palestinian population centers along the Green Line…) That is why, after much debate, many journalists refer to the network of walls and fences, somewhat obliquely, as the ’separation barrier’. Pro-Palestinian activists derided it as the ‘Apartheid Wall’. Hard-line Israelis often opt for ’security fence’. But, in this particular case, this isn’t Tom Sawyer and his friends painting picket fences; it is artists painting on towering concrete slabs. Look up just about any definition of ‘fence’ and it will say something like ‘a barrier enclosing or bordering a field, yard, etc., usually made of posts and wire or wood, used to prevent entrance’. In this case, it is really more accurate to call it a wall”… Dion’s blog is here.
This structure it is so imposing that whenever I see it, it hits me right in the solar plexis, and knocks the breath out of me. For this reason, the policy of this blog is to call it The Wall.
Tags: The Wall