Save the Children Warns of New Displacement Along Israel's Divider Wall

There is a growing channel of research exploring whether there's a relationship between border security and hunger. Nowhere is this question so critical as in Gaza and the West Bank where Israel constructed a security wall to separate Israeli Jewish communities from Palestinian Arab Muslim and Christian communities. Save the Children, a humanitarian aid agency with a strong record of political impartiality, has just released a new report showing how the divider wall, which was constructed not only along the dividing line, but in a winding meandering pattern often cutting off some Palestinian villages from markets, is directly related to food insecurity and unemployment for Palestinians living along its length. And this has forced some to leave their homes.

If you have not already, please open this Israeli divider wall map from the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories. Zoom in on the northwest part of the West Bank around Qalkiliya. You'll see the bluish areas are settled by Jewish families and the brownish areas are Palestinian. The bold green line is where the UN-brokered agreement stated that the dividing line should be. The bold red line is where Israel built the wall. Having traveled there or at least considered the economic, if not political, impact of this wall according to the map, the findings of the Save the Children report will make a lot of sense.

On the humanitarian level, the report shows evidence that the wall's construction has led to increased hunger and economic malaise among Palestinians, and in some cases increased outward migration. On the political level, it's hard not to come to the conclusion that these displacements were not intentional. Some would call it a kind of slow ethnic cleansing.

For those who disagree, consider why during the previous Intifada the Israeli government didn't instead decide to put up temporary blast wall barriers like it has around some settlements, which could be removed when tensions fell. Instead, they constructed a wall that has no other comparison except to that of the Berlin Wall, perhaps to portray a sense of permanence in the division. Also, the wall was built well inside the West Bank, rather than along the dividing line agreed upon by the UN-brokered agreement. How will it be undone?

[Photo, Bethlehem, Susan Mizrahi]