Trapped behind the wall

As the slaughter in the Holy Land continues, Emma Williams reports on the miseries caused by Israel’s security barrier, and wonders whether there is any way out of the cycle of violence

Last week yet more children were slaughtered in the Holy Land. Four little Israeli girls and their pregnant mother were gunned down by Palestinian terrorists on a settlement road in Gaza. Eleven Palestinian children were killed by the IDF, also in Gaza.

‘Nothing changes,’ said my Israeli host in Jerusalem as we left his home on our way to a restaurant. ‘We need something — God, do we need something — to pull us out of this madness.’ Some Palestinian children ran off into the bushes, scared. ‘That’s “starvation crime”; kids trying to steal car radios for a few shekels. We have economic despair on both sides, as well as terror. We’re still living in dread of their retaliation to us assassinating Sheikh Yassin and Rantisi. And the government thinks the wall will help.’

The wall is, of course, Israel’s security barrier in the West Bank. The following day I was on a tour bus with two Israelis and a party of North American priests. We got out and looked up at the wall’s vastness, eight metres high, and then along the length of it, running limitless into the distance, dividing the Palestinian suburb of Jerusalem into two parts, one side of the street permanently divorced from the other. Life stilled around it.

‘I thought the barrier was supposed to divide Israelis from Palestinians,’ said the priest next to me, mystified. Our Israeli guide explained the political nature of the barrier, pointing across the valley to the sites of two brand-new settlements. ‘This section of the barrier puts paid to the claim that it is a defensive measure. It is not about security,’ he said.