Evergreene Digest A Journal of Progress for the Rest of Us

• The following is an excerpt from A Wall in Palestine by Rene Backmann (Picador, 2010), which lays bare an international human rights controversy.
• Mr. Netanyahu, tear down that wall.

AlterNet

Submitted by Evergreene Digest Contributing Editor Ken Mitchell

Who invented the wall? Who came up with the idea for it? "Maybe it was me," Dany Tirza says half-jokingly as he weaves his car through Gilo morning traffic. Adjacent to the southern neighborhoods of Jerusalem, this truly "new" city of thirty-seven thousand people, which dominates the nearby Palestinian enclaves of Bethlehem and Beit Jala, is considered by the Israelis to be a natural extension of the Holy City. In fact, Gilo was built on the outskirts of "Greater Jerusalem," as it was redefined by Israel in 1967 after the Six-Day War, on approximately seven thousand acres of annexed Palestinian land. But Gilo is on the Palestinian side of the "Green Line," which, since 1949, separates the State of Israel from the present- day West Bank. Thus, it is a settlement, one of twelve built by Israel since 1967 at the periphery of Greater Jerusalem.

Colonel Dany Tirza lives in Kfar Adumim, a settlement near the Jordan Valley. He is a strapping man with salt-and-pepper hair who wears the crocheted yarmulke of a settler. Forty-six years old, he has recently been relegated to the Reserves, but remains in charge of "strategic and spatial" planning at the Ministry of Defense. This grants him a plastic ID card authorizing passage at any crossing. He travels with an armed soldier in the backseat of his car for protection. Tirza never goes anywhere without a thick folder of daily updated aerial maps. He is considered by the military forces to be one of their top experts on the West Bank. He has trekked its villages and pathways in all directions in his Jeep. Perhaps only Ariel Sharon possesses as much ground-level intelligence about the region. At the beginning of the Oslo peace process, Tirza was put in charge of the Rainbow Project, planning military withdrawals and redeployments in the West Bank, during the region's initial period of self government. As such, he was also part of the Israeli delegation involved in negotiations with the Palestinians. It was during this time that Yasser Arafat, amused to see Tirza arrive at the meetings every day with a roll of maps under his arm, gave him the nom de guerre Abu Karita, or "the father of maps."

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A course on Middle East Conflicts will be held through St. Paul Community Education, Women Against Military Madness
A course on Middle East Conflicts will be held through St. Paul Community Education, every Tuesday from 7:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. for five weeks, beginning Tuesday, April 20 at Como Park Senior High School, 740 West Rose Avenue, St. Paul.