The great walls of Palestine

Philosophy Assistant Professor Ryan Falcioni and ASCC representative Alaa Milbes, also of the Muslim Student Association, organized a presentation featuring Dr. Hatem Bazian of Berkley University as part of the event.

A wall display that featured the horrific consequences of this war was set up in the Quad to shed light upon why students must be aware of the problems inside the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, especially in how innocent citizens are having their lives torn apart because of politics.

The speaker discussed numerous elements of the war, such as that in 2002 Israel was being bombarded with suicide bombers from religious extremists coming from Palestine. To combat this, the Israeli government started construction on a wall around the Gaza Strip and another around the West Bank.

Many political leaders from the U.N. and Israel's then Prime Minister were said to have disagreed with the building of the wall. The U.N. even voted to stop the construction of the wall, but the United States government vetoed against it.

After years of construction and reconstruction, Palestine is calling the wall illegal. According to Bazian's presentation, Israel has built all of the wall over Palestinian land, land that has been confiscated from the poverty stricken olive farmers inside the land of the Muslim people.

The wall's footprint is approximately 160-feet across at most points, Bazin said.

This translates to the fact that not only is the Israeli government taking land that is not theirs, but in doing so in large chunks, they are isolating the Palestinian people. Many villages are cut off and blocked with only one gateway for travel.

One of the most compelling pictures Bazian showed was of a lady pulling a bushel of onions from a water drainage hole.

The onions were from a market on the other side of the wall, which in reality was only a short distance from the women. But without a direct path to the market and no openings in Israel's "security barricade," this was the only way that the Palestinian woman could get food from the market.

In addition to damaging the Palestinian economy, the pilfering of the farmers' land is basically a land grab, as Bazian put it, and it is completely shifting the population of Israel and Palestine.

By 2020, the Palestinians will only represent 55 percent of the census in a land that before 1947 was over 90 percent of the people.

Bazian said another way that the Israeli Government is taking land is through punishment.

If a Palestinian is charged and found guilty of a crime as seemingly harmless as throwing a rock at an Israeli, they are put in jail and their assets are taken away. In some cases this could result in a family losing their farmland.

Often these actions occur right before harvest time, which further damages the financial standing of the Palestinian farmers.

Bazian visualized this for the audience by showing women sitting on the ground picking fruit from trees that had been cut down.

Bazian pointed out that there is a lot of wrong doing going on in the Middle East right now, and to tell the truth, there is not much college students can do alone. The best thing he said is to learn the facts from all sides and join in with groups that feel the same.

Awareness is the key, and being attentive to what is going on behind the scenes is the only way to effect it.