“And the walls came tumbling down”

Sonja Karkar, Women for Palestine -ZNet

...Whether for protection and security or to contain and imprison, walls are a symbol of failure – a failure to revel in freedom and embrace our common humanity: that is reason enough to bring them down. In 1989, the world watched in rapture as the Berlin Wall tumbled. At 4 metres high and 166km long, it had stood for 28 years creating an Iron Curtain between East and Western Europe. However, for all its immensity, the wall – with its watch-towers, border patrols, barbed wire, guard dogs and searchlights – never worked. Centuries earlier, the Great Wall of China – 7.6 metres high, 9 metres wide and extending over 2,400 km – had failed to keep out the invading Mongols. No one could have imagined that a worse wall would be built in the 21st century of our "civilisation". But, Israel’s Wall is worse beyond all imaginings, as if something higher, wider and more forbidding will ultimately succeed. And even as its effects are finally beginning to nudge a catatonic world into feeling some sort of incredulity - if not outrage - at Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, we hear that the US is building a wall to divide Shiite and Sunni enclaves in Baghdad...

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