Apartheid Wall

The apartheid wall is one of the most brutal parts of the Israeli military occupation under which Palestinians in the West Bank have been living since 1967. Israel began the construction of the wall in the early 2000s during a wave of resistance operations marking the Second Intifada.  Built under the guise of protection and security, the wall illegally annexes more Palestinian land, regulates the movement of Palestinians, separates communities, and is detrimental to the livelihoods of several Palestinians.  The wall is 26 feet high in highly populated areas, and it runs 280 miles long— which is the distance between Philadelphia and Boston.  Despite this, parts of it are still being built, only 64%  of the wall is currently constructed. 85% of the wall is built inside Palestinian territory, a strategy to further annex Palestinian land and build illegal settlements; when the wall is completed, an area of approximately 600 km² will be added to Israeli territory

Several Palestinian villages and towns are destroyed by the wall, which often cuts right through them.  For example, the Palestinian village of Dabaa lost half of its land to the wall.  During construction, Israel used dynamite to clear the path for the wall, damaging homes and local schools.  Hizma, a village near Qalqilya, is another example: the wall separates it from Jerusalem and isolates a few homes formerly belonging to Hizma from the rest of the village.  The wall also cuts off Betlehem from some of its agricultural lands, churches, and local businesses.  The city is strangled by illegal settlements and the wall which surround it.  Because of the wall, Palestinians are unable to move freely through their land.  It cuts people off from their family, community, and oftentimes source of livelihood. Every Palestinian village and town near the path of the wall has lost its lands and has been restricted from moving through the structure. 

The US also practices state violence in its regulation of space and determining who has access to certain spaces. The US immigration system is a violent structure that functions in an exploitative and harmful way, endangering human lives and separating families and communities. The Department of Homeland Security manages the largest immigration detention system in the world, where Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents are poorly trained to deal with humanitarian crises at the southern border, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) cooperate with state and local law enforcement to racially profile, harass, and detain individuals.  The US relies on the violent exclusionary nature of its border in order to devalue immigrant labor and render it exploitable.  One such example in Philadelphia is the case of Christian M’Bagoyi, a West African immigrant who was deported to South Africa after 20 years of lawful US citizenship.  Immigrants like Christian can spend years under surveillance, working and paying taxes, and then suddenly be deported.  Juntos is a Philly-based community-led, Latinx immigrant organization that fought to protect Christian’s right to remain with his family and seeks to protect community members from state violence.  They have launched several campaigns such as ICE Out of PA, and Sanctuary Schools demanding ICE-free schools.  

Another important site of resistance is the Campaign to Shut Down Berks which was aimed at shutting down the Berks Detention Center, where ICE had been detaining women and children who were undergoing mistreatment and abuse at the facility.  The campaign recently succeeded in achieving its goals, shutting down the facility and returning formerly incarcerated immigrants to their communities.  

In Palestine, two of the main organizations resisting the regulation of space, and particularly the apartheid wall, is Stop The Wall: A Palestinian Grassroots Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign and the Popular Struggle Committees. They have been the main national grassroots bodies mobilizing and organizing the collective efforts against the Apartheid Wall. The unarmed resistance is based on the efforts of popular committees in the villages affected by the wall where people can meet, organize, strategize and mobilize.  These groups understand the wall as a symptom of the larger structures of settler colonialism and apartheid, and see the dismantling of the wall as part of the larger struggle for freedom.