The Apartheid Wall

Discussion Question: How does Zionism seek to control and contain the land? How might we understand these forms of control and restriction as also forms of elimination?

In her essay “Settler Colonialism” for the collection The Social Properties of Concrete, Lila Sharif writes about one of the oldest olive trees in the world, which resides in an ancient 5,000 year old olive grove just a few miles from Jerusalem. She explains the Zionist project of constructing an illegal wall within the boundaries of occupied Palestinian land as a means of stealing Palestinian land both by usurping/annexing it and by enclosing it, choking it off from life.

*You can access Lila Sharif’s essay at this link – click on eBook/free download. Sharif’s essay begins on p. 373.*

• Consult photos of the olive tree in Walajah from Sharif’s essay as well as this Librarians and Archivists for Palestine zine, which includes photos of the apartheid wall from various parts of the West Bank.
• Consult Visualizing Palestine’s infographic Living Under Policies of Colonisation in Jerusalem to understand more about the role that the apartheid wall plays in a larger system seeking to dispossess Palestinians of their land through a network of illegal policies.

Discussion Question: How does the wall enable the process of settler colonialism? How does enclosure work as a technology of settler colonialism – something that enables it to function?

Discussion Question: Zionist rationales for the illegal apartheid wall construct it as necessary for “security.” What does this tell us about the concept of security? How does the idea of security relate to settler colonialism?

Discussion Question: As the Librarians and Archivists zine “Walls: Palestine” explains, Palestinians have debated whether it is best to leave the wall blank, allowing its stark violence to speak for itself, or to cover it with art. What is the role of graffiti art in this context?

Discussion Question: The apartheid wall is aptly named because of the way it violently separates Palestinians from one another and from their land. Yet the wall also achieves much more than this. In the spirit of, as Loubna Qutami puts it, “protecting prospects for liberation from being limited by the politics of analogy” (e.g., with the case of apartheid in South Africa), what other adjectives could we ascribe to the wall?