Dear Norman,
I want to thank you once again for another gripping book which I’ve just finished reading – Knowing Too Much.
I was happy to find, amongst else, your chapter which discusses Benny Morris, and also his ‘nuclear threat’, which I now realised we had corresponded on last year…
I was happy to read once again the chapter which appeared earlier in ‘Beyond Chutzpah’ concerning the ICJ and Israeli HCJ respective rulings concerning the Separation Wall – in extended version.
I found this time footnote 116 on page 448 extremely interesting in itself, with Jean-Francois Garueau’s contention that even the risk of the wall’s permanency making it illegal.
and it kind of shocked me once again, visually, after having related to an earlier map before –
because when one looks at the areas that are being added as masterplans (for example E1 and its expansion eastwards) an considering what you were speaking of, regarding Tzipi Livni’s claim in 2005 that the wall would serve as the ‘future border of the state of Israel’ (comically, just months after the HCJ ruling based on the idea that the wall was temporary…) –
I, at the point of reading Livni’s statement, basically thought ‘ok, this is bad, but at least the wall is static, it doesn’t move’. But the realisation that dawns upon me today is that the wall does move…
The area mentioned, as well as additional areas maked for approval (marked in lined purple, such as the huge tongues around Qalqilya) are basically additions to the wall that is already done – it means that once the wall has been incircled by another wall, the first wall will be dismantled and so on.
This really puts Livni’s claim in a whole other light, that I didn’t even have the fantasy to perceive – that the word ‘future‘ gets a sense of undetermined time and space…
It seems already, that Barak’s idea of severing the west bank in two from East Jerusalem to Jericho is very clos to be relaised (this time with more than the ‘razor thin line’ he mentions regarding his 2000-2001 intentions).
I think about my own past perception, and think ‘what an idiot!’ – I thought that once the wall was built, it would at least stay put until a settlement is reached. I now realised, that the wall is a kind of slow motion bulldozer – it clears and area, the area is built on, and then it clear more territory, etc. At some point, I reckon, the wall might just encircle all Palestinian towns like it does to Qalqilya today, and we’ll end up with small ghettos of Palestinians. Fantasy? Well, all this just surpasses my wildest fantasies already… and come to think of it, we have a huge example of this already – Gaza.
I see that you mention working on a book concerning a solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict – I look forward to that, also in the light of the above.
Warm regards,
Jonathan
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