http://www.counterpunch.com/Life Behind the Wall
"We are No Longer Able to See the Sun Set"
The Israeli Wall-the so-called security fence is a daunting and ominous matrix of social control and demographic separation that is currently planned to be 670 km long. It is thick and concrete, 8 meters high, and at some points 104 meters deep. It is three times as high and twice as wide as the Berlin Wall. It is surrounded at a distance by nests of barbed wires, rolled up like stacks of hay piled high around it. High voltage circuits run through the so-called "smart fences," three meters tall that line the perimeter of the barrier. Between the fence and the wall is trench, over two meters deep, studded with piercing metal spikes.
Outside the smaller fence, the Israeli military has paved a path of finely ground sand that is groomed to make footprints visible. At certain intervals, there are 10m vertical steel poles housing highly powered stadium lights and surveillance cameras. Adjacent to the Wall, on the Israeli side, stand huge and foreboding turrets and watchtowers where Israeli observers and snipers are stationed. The Israeli military has defined the area of the Wall to be a "military zone," and soldiers have orders to shoot to kill upon the discretion of the commanding officer.
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The aim of all this, which Ariel Sharon has admitted quite candidly, is to prevent Gaza from having any external contact with the outside world by land, by air, and by sea. Indeed, it is far more costly for Israel military to continue to occupy Gaza from within its borders, than to control Gaza from outside of it as a prison-like entity. Through a process of systematic demolition and armed encirclement, Israel has established a 200-300 meter buffer (the so-called Philadelphia corridor) between the entrance to Gaza at the mouth of Salah Edin Gate--the main entrance to Rafah's central throughwayJamal Abdel Nasser Street and demolished entire blocks of houses in front of the gate. In addition, it has razed the houses along the borders of Gaza and Egypt-the Al Brazil Block, As Salam Block, and other make-shift residences that are simply called "Block D"to the ground. In the Rafah camp alone, eighty children under the age of fourteen were killed by the Israelis in the process. To put the housing demolition into some relative perspective would be say it is equivalent of 1.2 million homes in the United States were destroyed. "What the army is doing in Rafah camp is nothing less than ethnic cleansing," says Dr. Moustafa Barghouti, the head of the Palestinian National Initiative
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When Guy de Maupassant ate lunch under the Eiffel tower, someone asked him "Why?". "Because," he said, "it is the only place in all of Paris where I don't have to look at the thing." Perhaps the Wall, as long as it exists, will serve as a constant reminder that a large population of humanity manages by a sheer will alone to survive as a culture in a place where the sunset is no longer visible to the naked eye except in its dreams. On the other side of the grey, storm clouds of a military occupation, there is a blue sky where the sun will always, in a matter of speaking, setimagined or no
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Israel surrounds itself with a wall; america is surrounded with yellow crime scene tape
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