Tear down the wall 2.0

It was the night that communism, or at least Stalin’s state-strangled interpretation of it, was consigned to the dustbin of history. On November 9th, 1989, hordes of Berliners combined to puncture a fatal crack in the Berlin Wall, the concrete barrier that divided the former German capital between the Russian-controlled Eastern sector and the districts administered by Britain, France and the United States. The wall, built in 1961, became the physical embodiment of the Iron Curtain, the virtual barrier that stretched from Stettin on the Baltic Sea to Trieste on the Adriatic, while Berlin was a microcosm of the Cold War itself – a political and diplomatic stand-off quickly leading to mutual suspicion, then heavily-armed antipathy and, ultimately, permanent division. The joyous demolition of the wall after 28 years, therefore, was the symbolic conclusion of a system that curtailed freedom, denied hope and, as all walls do, separated people. 

 

As Ronald Reagan declared during his speech at the Brandenburg Gate in 1987, before famously imploring Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall”, the “advance of human liberty can only strengthen the cause of world peace”. On the eve of the 20th anniversary this November, German newspaper Bild expanded on the theme: “[The Berlin Wall] was dismantled,” they insisted, “because East Germans never lost their desire for freedom and were prepared to take to the streets for it.”

 

In the history of human progress, the night the wall was breached has been placed alongside the American civil rights movement and the collapse of apartheid in South Africa, and to mark the anniversary, a series of events, exhibits and celebrations are taking place around the world – remembering when a popular desire for peace defeated decades of deadlock. On November 9th, a concert is being planned in Potsdammer Platz, where Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters and a host of stars performed anti-totalitarian album The Wall to 350,000 people in 1990, while a wall is being temporarily rebuilt with colourful dominoes which will again topple to the sound of cheers. German embassies across the globe have also coordinated a campaign called “Freedom Without Walls” to promote human rights. “For me,” said former Chancellor Helmut Kohl, “the day of the wall falling is always a very special one and a day to look back on with happiness.”

 

Unfortunately, Western celebrations of a key moment in the “advance of human liberty” run parallel to a complicit silence on another wall of separation and exclusion that continues to expand in our region – and often with their governments’ acquiescence and, on occasion, financial and material support. Israel’s Apartheid Wall, or Separation Fence if you’re a CNN news editor, is little more than 700 kilometers of Western hypocrisy. While dignitaries, politicians and various self-congratulatory leaders gather to mark the fall of the Berlin Wall, their ally’s concrete and steel structure will continue to cut deep into the West Bank, dividing, disenfranchising and dehumanising the Palestinians living under the yolk of Israeli occupation.

 

The contrast isn’t lost on the Stop The Wall organisation, the Palestinian pressure group dedicated to tearing down the 8-metre-high human rights violation. Every year for the past four years they have organised events in as many as 26 countries to highlight the double standard. “It’s definitely why we chose the week of November 9th,” says one activist, giving only Daoud as his name. “The collapse of the Berlin Wall signified the end of the Cold War, and our goal is similar: to end the conflict and begin a new era of hope in the Middle East. The Apartheid Wall isn’t the issue in Palestine, just as the Berlin Wall wasn’t the sole issue between America and Russia – but it’s a powerful symbol.

 

“When the Berlin Wall fell, the event was celebrated as a victory of the ‘Free World’, ” Daoud continues. “Today, however, the same powers back the construction of the walls that are destroying Palestine.”

“If ever there was a need for an airlift to breach a wall and succour a desperate people it is now. And it is in Palestine,” says Robert Weitzel, contributing editor to Media With a Conscience, who compared President Obama’s “no more walls” speech in Berlin in 2008 with America’s ongoing silence about Israel’s policies. Current US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who plans to attend the 20th anniversary celebrations in Berlin in November in Obama’s place, underlines the administration’s hypocrisy. Back in 2005, no doubt with a presidential run in mind, she remarked, “I have been a strong supporter of Israel’s right to build a security barrier to keep terrorists out. I have taken the International Court of Justice to task for questioning Israel’s right to build the fence.” A year later, on seeing the wall in person, she declared that a wall cutting across farmland, dividing communities from their fields and stifling movement and trade was “not against the Palestinian people”.

 

The New York Times, that “liberal” bastion, reveals a similar duplicity in its coverage of the wall – and one that seems to afflict large swathes of the Western media. In 2004, the otherwise thoroughly reasonable Roger Cohen soft-soaped his readers with arguments about “the barrier” in the West Bank being “an effective, additional guarantee of some semblance of normal life in Israel”, before reporting that a “fence” around Qalqilya could be regarded as “fair treatment” for “a people who adopted a national strategy of blowing up busloads of children”. The same paper, five years later, could state with preening moral clarity that “for 28 years the wall in Berlin was one of the world’s most frightening and impermeable borders”. 

 

The difference even extends to language. While sensitive news networks, and indeed American presidents, tie themselves in knots over the best noun to employ when describing the concrete snake devouring great chunks of other people’s land, no such ambiguity existed in the Cold War. It was never the Berlin Fence, or the Berlin Barrier, or the Berlin Security Measure, even though it too was made of concrete, bordered by a no-man’s land and patrolled by snipers in watchtowers who were given instructions to shoot on sight. “Do not hesitate to use your firearm, not even when the border is breached in the company of women and children, which is a tactic the traitors have often used,” was the written instruction from GDR officers in 1973. In May, 2009, Basem Abu Rahme became the 18th Palestinian to be killed by an Israeli bullet while demonstrating Israel’s wall. 

 

Interestingly, the double standard doesn’t appear to be lost on the Israelis themselves. The one German embassy that isn’t hosting any “Freedom From Walls” festivities this year is the one located in Tel Aviv. Germany’s embassy in Israel hosted instead a reception on October 15th, four weeks before the actual date, and only after the original party was cancelled to mark National Kibbutz Day. “They don’t even usually do that,” said Daoud from Stop The Wall. 

 

Their near-silence is perhaps understandable. Back in April 2008, German photographer Kai Wiedenhöfer held an exhibition in Berlin called “Wall on Wall”, which compared the two structures. It was instantly denounced by Jewish groups, with Klaus Faber of the Coordinating Council of German Non-Governmental Organisations Against Anti-Semitism stating (remarkably considering what the wall embodied) that “no political propaganda should be made with the commemorations at the Berlin Wall, especially not agitation that is anti-Israel”. Faber couldn’t, naturally, fail to add a barb about German’s own historic, if inadvertent, role in the creation of Israel. 

 

The hypocrisy is usually explained by the underlying motive. The official website of Berlin’s tourist board may state that the wall was “the symbol of… the German Democratic Republic leadership’s disregard for human rights and basic freedoms”, but fast forward to George Bush’s polarised, “with us or against us” world, and Israel’s barrier/wall/fence is simply a last, desperate attempt to save humanity itself. “It’s the most effective measure against terrorism,” snapped Ariel Sharon when asked about its legality, while Levi Salomon from Germany’s Jewish Forum for Democracy and Against anti-Semitism even suggested our aforementioned photo exhibit was racist because “the lifesaving function of the wall is not taken into account”. 

 

But then, the Berlin Wall was justified in its day, too. Erich Honecker, head of East Germany’s Communist Party between 1971 and 1989, said the wall was an “anti-fascist protective barrier” and, with even more echoes of a Likud talking point, “our contribution to peace”. One can only hope that the politicians present at the Brandenburg Gate in November can deliver a resolution to Israel’s monstrosity as joyous as the Berliners managed 20 years ago. 

 

Uri Avnery, Israeli peace activist and writer, is optimistic at least. “When my friends fall prey to despair,” he says, “I show them a piece of painted concrete which I bought in Berlin. It is one of the remnants of the Berlin Wall, which are on sale in the city. I tell them that I intend, when the time comes, to apply for a franchise to sell pieces of the Separation Wall.” We’ll be first in the queue to buy one.  

 

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