1. Introduction
1.1 Walls Have Meanings
In 2005, the publication of 12 cartoons in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten depicting the Islamic prophet Muhammad in unappropiated ways for the majority of Muslims resulted in an enormous controversy around the world leading to further boycotts, riots, violent acts against the Danish embassies in Islamic countries and several death threats to its cartoonists.
How simple caricatures can cause such reaction in people? As an integral part of many newspapers, editorial or political cartoons are tools for criticizing, evaluating and making people reflect about current issues and social phenomena. Within this social phenomena are the walls which have been built to provide ideological and physical boundaries between neighbors.
Originally, the walls were conceived to protect people against the rough weather, they were built at strategic locations made from locally available materials and later, entire nations started using them as a resource to protect themselves against enemies.
The most famous example is the Great Wall of China, which includes a sequence of barriers built and maintained between the 5th century B.C. and the 16th century A.D. to protect the northern borders of the Chinese Empire from barbarian attacks during various successive dynasties. In contemporary times, the most prominent example would certainly be the Berlin Wall built by the socialist state of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) or East Germany not only to demarcate its border with the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) or West Germany, but also to control the national movement and restrict people’s migration. In 1952, East German leaders met the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in Moscow, where he advised them to build up their border defense, telling them that “The demarcation line between East and West Germany should be considered a border – and not just any border, but a dangerous one ... The Germans will guard the line of defense with their lives” (Harrison, 2003: 240). As a result, the inner German border between the East and West German states was closed and a barbed-wire fence erected. Later, the construction included guard towers placed along 96 miles of large concrete walls of 11.8 feet highcircumscribing a wide area later known as the “death strip” because it contained anti-vehicle trenches, beds of nails and other defenses. For West Berlin it was the concrete wall that marked
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the border and only in that side was officially a mere and plain “wall”. Nevertheless in East Berlin it was called “antifascist protective rampart” and the use of the word “wall” was strictly forbidden (Ladd, 1998:18). The Berlin wall, after being erected for 28 years, fell down along with the Eastern European Communist regimes in 1989. But despite the hopes it evoked, its collapse did not result in an end of walls. Mark Ehrman observes:
In the heady aftermath, watching Berliners hugging in the streets, it was easy to believe that walls would become another absurd relic of a barbaric past.
Beirut’s barriers came down the same year as Berlin’s. Cyprus’s Green Line, Europe’s last barrier, would become more porous. Israel and Palestine seemed at the cusp of a solution. One could even imagine Korea’s DMZ, the last remaining Cold War barrier, crumbling in the aftershocks. Walls seemed headed for museumdom.
Instead, a new generation of border barriers began crisscrossing the planet.
Bill Clinton, who came to power promising ‘a bridge to the twenty-first century’, gave us a wall with Mexico instead (Ehrman 2007, p. 40).
Walls not only signify an artificial or physical structure but also connote ideological and political beliefs. In the case of the Berlin wall, it came to denote “all the consequences of the division of Berlin and of Europe” (Ladd, 1998:16) as known by Winston Churchill’s metaphor of an “iron curtain”. The Berlin wall became most famous as the preeminent cold war symbol. In this concern, Manghani (2008) writes “The wall became the signifier of the Cold War scenario.
Thus, the Berlin wall was never simply a concrete edifice, but actually a panoply of symbols, myths and images; indeed, a textual and intertextual phenomenon” (p.36).
In 2001, Israel started planning a barrier to be four times as long and in places twice as high as the Berlin Wall, in order to divide the State of Israel from Palestine. Since the beginning, this barrier was highly controversial because while the Israelis most commonly refer to it as the
“Separation fence” or “Anti-terrorist fence”, the Palestinians point at it as the “Racial segregation
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wall”. Following a Palestinian violence outbreak in 2002, Israel began the construction of a barrier that would separate most of the West Bank from areas inside Israel. The Israeli Supreme Court made reference to the conditions and history that led to the building of the barrier. In the September 2005 decision, it described the history of violence against Israeli citizens and cited the attempts Israel had made to defend its citizens, including military operations carried out against terrorist acts, and stated that these actions:
...did not provide a sufficient answer to the immediate need to stop the severe acts of terrorism. . . . Despite all these measures, the terror did not come to an end. The attacks did not cease. Innocent people paid with both life and limb.
This is the background behind the decision to construct the separation fence.
(Supreme Court of Israel, 2005:815)
Still under construction, Israel's barrier is expected to reach at least 403 miles long and is planned to be completed this year. In addition to the concrete wall and fencing materials used in the construction of the structure, sections of Israel's Separation Barrier additionally include electrified fencing, two-meter-deep trenches, roads for patrol vehicles, unmanned aerial vehicles, sniper towers and razor wire.
There is general agreement that the barrier improved Israeli security concerning suicide bombings (Nissenbaum, D., 2007). However, there is debate over how effective the wall has been in preventing other attacks. While this is happening, the blockade construction had other effects for Palestinians including reduced freedoms, road closures, loss of land, increased difficulty in accessing medical services in Israel, restricted access to water sources and economic effects.
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