Mr. Sharon, tear down this wall! Pictures of Christmas celebrations in Bethlehem broadcast in yesterday's evening newscasts showed Bethlehem's mayor and others dwarfed by the 'security fence' that Israel has built to 'protect itself from terrorists'. ABC News gives the height:

[A] reminder that peace is not around the corner lurked at the edge of town[:] a 25-foot barrier Israel built to keep Palestinian suicide bombers out of Israel. Palestinians complain it has cut them off from Jerusalem.

The Australian newspaper The Age described, December 10th, Israeli 'security' measures against tourists to Bethlehem:

Foreign visitors leaving the city through the terminal are now required to get off their buses and pass through a network of metal barriers and turnstiles to be searched and have their passport checked. * * *

"Before, the soldiers would get on the bus and check who they were, and that was it. Now the guests complain that it takes a lot of time, and it's humiliating and now some guests don't want to come to Bethlehem any more." The Israeli Government says that the new complex of concrete buildings and metal control cages is one of 16 being built around Jerusalem to "facilitate" Palestinian travel.

It would seem that in Israeli English, "facilitate" means "block".
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Last year, before the 'fence' was completed, it was described thus:

Israel’s "security fence" has arrived in Bethlehem. It snakes through the suburbs, close to the old stone houses. But the term "fence" is misleading. The section built in Bethlehem is made up of a triple layer concrete wall and two metal fences, one equipped with electronic sensors. The space between the two fences is [wide enuf to be] patrolled by Israeli army jeeps. Israel is building hundreds of miles of fence across the West Bank.

A website titled "Photos of the Separation Barrier from Israel and the Occupied Territories" contains a picture captioned "Israeli version of the british Pillbox", which is very telling. (Oddly, its caption appears only on the index page, about halfway down.)
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This is not a "fence". It is a wall.
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Alas, I can't find online any photo of the astonishing height of the barrier at Bethlehem that I saw last nite on either NBC or ABC (I switched between them), but if you did not yourself see it, you should try to picture it in your mind: steel beams laid on their end, side by side, rising more than 4 times the height of a full-grown man.
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Rather than condemn a structure that dwarfs the Berlin Wall, which conservative Americans supposedly hated, American conservatives say not one word about Israel's 'barrier', unless it be to justify it, and indeed want to create a similar structure on our own Mexican border.
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Communist wall, bad. Democratic wall, good. Wall to keep people in, bad. Wall to keep people out, good. "Good fences make good neighbors." Fortified walls with pillboxes and machine-gun turrets make people even better neighbors.
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We already have "gated communities" sprouting up like mushrooms all over this country. What next? Walls between "bad neighborhoods" (black) and "good neighborhoods" (white)?
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We're not talking white picket fences here, folks, but wrought-iron fences with spiked tops, razor wire, perhaps even electrified barriers, here at home, and a massive Maginot Line in Palestine.
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When I did a Google search on "maginot line israel", I found an interesting column from the August 12, 2004 edition of Israel Insider ("Israel's daily newsmagazine") by Moshe Feiglin, described as "head of the Jewish Leadership faction in the Likud".

To the question "Will the State of Israel continue to exist in another 30 years?" most of those asked answered in the negative. This is something unique to Israel. Most Israelis regard their country as a fleeting incident, and the great efforts made to acquire foreign citizenship are evidence of this. Such a popular feeling of emptiness considerably worries the leadership. * * * When it becomes impossible to prevent the public from sensing the approaching disaster, the leadership begins to resort to magical solutions, such as inventing an enemy that can be easily pursued. It's always a good idea to send the ignorant masses to hunt down witches, Jews, or the extreme Right.

Or, alternatively, you can hide the enemy from the people. You can build a Wall of China, so that the Mongols disappear, or a Maginot Line behind which the Germans will simply evaporate, or a Bar-Lev Line, behind which the Egyptians will vanish and every Israeli will feel secure under Golda's apron. And now, of course, we have the separation fence. * * *

A real solution actually exists, but it is associated with a totally different concept.

What solution might that be? A quick look at the home page of the Jewish Leadership website shows nothing but insistence that Israel must become more authentically Jewish (religious). I don't see how that will solve the security situation Feiglin complains about. Does he anticipate that God (oh, sorry, "G-d", as the ludicrous Orthodox Jewish convention writes it) will intercept Arab missiles mid-flite if Jews become devout?
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I don't recall God stopping the Gestapo, nor Polish and czarist Russian pograms, nor the expulsion of the Jews from Spain. (Palestinians might want to compare the elimination of Israel to the expulsion of Jews from Spain: no mass slaughter, just expulsion from which the Jews rebounded handily. Palestinians might even say that, unlike Spain, they don't even demand that Jews leave or convert, just that they consent to be merely Jewish citizens of a religiously neutral United Palestine who receive no special treatment and are content to live in peace with their neighbors of all faiths.)
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In fact, the last instance I can think of in which God (is said to have) divinely protected the Jews dates to the time of ancient Babylon, when an angel protected from a furnace Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, "upon whose bodies the fire had no power, nor was an hair of their head singed, neither were their coats changed, nor the smell of fire had passed on them." (Daniel 3:27). The Nazis had no trouble cremating the bodies of Jews who died in concentration camps, however, so perhaps God abandoned "His people" sometime between 603 B.C. and 1945 A.D.
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What else you got? Let's look at the "talkback" discussion board at the Israel Insider. One "sanguine" from the U.S.A., offers this take under the heading "Purge the Land of the Enemy":

I keep coming back to declaring war against the terrorist Palestinian "people" as the US did against the Taliban "people". Both surely are on the same crazed Islamic magic carpet to hell.

Since "Palestinians" house lots of terrorists (possibly the most varied on the planet--and certainly the most per capita rodent) Israel has a perfect right to decimate them.

Israel must elect a government who will take care of business. Until that day occurs lets prep the Pals and give them notice their days are surely numbered.

They're all 'living' on borrowed time like the zombie rodents.

Isn't that charming? And so realistic.
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I'm reminded of a scene from a German anti-Jewish propaganda film in the Hitler era, in which dozens and dozens of rats are shown streaming out of a sewer while the narrator compares the Jews to rats. Maybe "sanguine" can get a copy of that scene, colorize it for today's audiences, and substitute "Palestinians" for "Jews" in the soundtrack.
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It is 'people' like "sanguine" who gave rise to the need for the term "zionazi". And I see, late, that "sanguine" (which ordinarily means "cheerful" and "optimistic") might really intend his moniker to be perceived as "sanguinary" (bloody) or "sanguineous" (accompanied by or requiring bloodshed).
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Can anyone with a functioning brain really believe that Israel could systematically kill off the Palestinians and the world would do nothing?
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The premise seems to be that U.S. would stand idly by, like Sharon at Shatila, and permit genocide, then actively intervene to defend Israel against the missiles that would fly like massed arrows in medieval warfare against every city of Israel from all its neighbors, and every single one of those missiles would be intercepted and destroyed before killing any Israeli, because, of course, God will protect them.
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Zionists are the stupidest people on Earth, possibly the stupidest people who have ever 'lived'.
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In 1997, Canadian (and presumably Jewish) commentator Eric Margolis used the term "Jewish Maginot Line" to refer not to the 'security barrier', which had not yet been started, but to the hardened settlements created over the last several decades by Jews on land that all the world except Zionists regard as Palestinian:

Immediately after the 1967 war, Israel began building `housing projects' on a broad arc from NE to SE of the Old City. `Housing' is really a misnomer. As a specialist in modern fortifications, I instantly recognized the massive housing projects for what they truly were - a Jewish Maginot Line.

These massive, ugly apartment blocs form a nearly unbroken wall, cutting off Jerusalem from the West Bank. Constructed of large stone blocks protected by earth revetments, and thick, steel-reinforced concrete, many are capable of withstanding 155mm howitzer shells and even direct fire by 105-130mm flat trajectory shells. Narrow windows resembling pillbox embrasures face the enemy. These fortress blocs have underground shelters, magazines, and independent water supplies. Their residents are armed and organized to defend the complexes.

The residential forts are designed, like Israeli border settlements and forts along the Golan, to delay an Arab attack, shelter civilians, and serve as tactical strong-points, or `schwerpunkt,' upon which offensive armored formations can manoeuvre.

Margolis understood, however, that this policy of steeling (not a typo) Palestinian land thru fortified settlements "assures decades more hostility between Israel and the world's 1 billion Muslims" but added:

Alas, logic stops on the road to the Holy City, over which Jews, Christians and Muslims often seem more eager to fight than pray. This is a case for King Solomon.

King Solomon is not around. King George is. I can't see Dubya the First declaiming for the multitudes and for history, in his most stentorian Reaganite tones, "Mr. Sharon, tear down this wall!"
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,166.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:22 PM