Feb 14,2018 – JORDAN TIMES – Michael Jansen

Israel loves walls. Last week, it began constructing a concrete slab wall along the ceasefire line with Lebanon, although Beirut charges that the structure encroaches on Lebanon’s territory and amounts to “aggression” on Lebanon’s sovereignty. The government argues the new wall will stand on Lebanese land placed on the Israeli side of the Blue Line demarcated by the UN after Israel withdrew its troops and surrogate militiamen from south Lebanon in 2000. 

This is not the first wall Israel is building on the Lebanese armistice line. In 2012, Israel raised a seven-metre high, 1,200-metre long wall near the town of Metullah. Until the wall intervened Lebanese tourists and activists visiting Kafr Kila used to gather along the fence separating the two countries to shout insults and throw stones at Israeli troops on patrol and workers cultivating crops. 

Israel has recognised borders with Egypt and Jordan due to the peace agreements reached with these countries in 1979 and 1996, but ceasefire lines separate Israel from Lebanon and Syria which remain at war with Israel. Beirut argues Israel is illegally occupying tracts of Lebanese territory allocated to Lebanon by Britain and France in 1922-23 when they fixed the borders of Palestine and Syria. Israel has occupied and colonised Syria’s Golan Heights since 1967.

In September 2016, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was asked by a journalist from the Israeli daily Haaretz, if he plans to build barriers around the whole country. “Will we surround all of the State of Israel with fences and barriers? The answer is yes. In the areas that we live in, we must defend ourselves against the wild beasts,” he said. At that time, Israel was constructing a barrier designed to stretch along the border with Jordan.

Netanyahu was simply echoing the words of Vladimir Jabotinsky, the Zionist ideologue, who wrote in 1923 that Palestinians would never accept a Jewish majority in Palestine and “Zionist colonisation must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population. Which means that it can proceed and develop only under the protection of a power that is independent of the native population — behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach.” 

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