israelnationalnews.com/ne...?id=120760

Quote:
Gush Etzion's Jewish Residents Poised For Major Wall Protest

Though Israel prefers to refer to it as a security fence, the concrete wall that politicians openly admit is a border is tightening around a formerly complacent Gush Etzion.

A large terminal is nearing completion and the once-scenic Highway 60, or Way of the Forefathers, is now overshadowed by towering concrete slabs, angled inward toward the Israeli side.

Though an initial struggle against plans to destroy a local forest to build the wall met with success, local activism has fizzled out, with municipality officials and Yesha Council mayors assuring residents that they were fighting for their rights in the Supreme Court and opposite government ministries. Grassroots efforts have focused on the opening of an alternate highway connection eastern Gush Etzion to Jerusalem in recent month.

Now, with bulldozers working at full steam and quiet towns like Efrat realizing that a Palestinian state is being established meters from there, the grassroots activist infrastructure that has been constructed since the Gaza Disengagement is preparing to flex its muscles.

A petition against the Partition Wall (a description adopted by activists who believe its purpose is not security, but rather to divide the land) was circulated on Gush Etzion email lists. The hundreds who signed, and those who declined, thinking petitions to be a waste of time, are now being called upon to join the veteran activists and Land of Israel youth in standing up to the wall.

The time has come, explains Women in Greens Nadia Matar, an Efrat resident struggling to galvanize her neighbors to action. now that the cement is really going up, people are beginning to understand that it is not a security fence. It is a Partition Wall and in the age of Kassam rockets such a border only keeps us out, while rockets fly freely overhead.

A protest is set to take place this Tuesday, February 4, at 4 PM near the northern entrance to Efrat.


Matar admits that many residents remain in despair since the Disengagement. The reaction of most people to all the bad news is to turn off the radio, stop listening to the news and withdraw into their family and hope things will pass, she explains. That is exactly what our enemies hope we will do.

But residents say, in community email lists, that perhaps opposing the wall is the equivalent of knocking our collective heads against the wall literally, as one skeptic wrote.

Matar insists that activism, including protests, even by a small number of people, works. Pressure managed to stop the fence in the Judean Desert, she says. There the bulldozers are now silent. One of the lessons we learned from Gush Katif is that the worst thing is to have a public that continues with their daily routine and lives in denial. Before the expulsion decrees there were many other decrees that the leadership there would tell the residents not to worry about starting with fencing off Gush Katif. The most important thing is to continue our daily life, they would tell them. A public that gets used to these small things and doesnt rise up will not be able to rise up when the big decree comes. That was our mistake.

Matar sees the current time as a critical one in injecting the controversy over the wall into the coming election. We are in the final days of this government and we must already start passing on the message to the next MKs, ministers and government that the first issue should be to stop this fence.

The Judean Desert fence was stopped through an alliance with environmental groups. Matar is satisfied with the alliance, as environmental concerns are very much part of her objection to the wall as well. They wounded the land of Israel, she says of the walls architects. When I see them working, uprooting trees, destroying forests and creating an unnatural route in the middle of Israel it hurts.

Matar is confident that the battle will be won and that the gashes carved out of the land by the wall will be healed. If the Berlin Wall fell, then this one will certainly fall, she says. If we work hard enough, we can bring it down. Then we will have a massive tree planting along the route.

We all know Israel will be forced to remain on both sides, says a neighbor. But Matar says the money being wasted on the project is a matter of life and death. The 250 million shekels can be used by Sderot, she says. They are bleeding already from their wall around Gaza why build another one using money that could help the victims of the first one?


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