Fence. Wall. Partition. Obstacle. Security. Separation. Purity. White Inside, Black Outside.

The wall in front of us separates the villa from the jungle; the master from the slave. The slave may enter the gates of the master’s villa in order to work and to tend to it, but when evening falls, he must return to the jungle. That is his place. He exits and enters through a passageway lined with iron. Sophisticated, supervised, photographed and surveilled from all angles. This passageway ensures the safety of the residents of the villa.

The story of the State of Israel can be told in many ways. Who is more entitled to tell it than the defeated? They lost their possessions, their land, their heritage and their freedom in two large strokes many decades ago.

Thereafter, they also lost their ability to move freely in their homeland. What little is left continues to slip through their fingers, in all places that lie between the river and the sea. Over the years, they have also lost hope, which has since been replaced by despair. The race to obtain a temporary residence permit, with more convenient conditions in the master’s house, began.

The separation was instituted in order to provide security – for Jewish Israelis, that is. The separation barrier does not provide security for the Palestinians; it prevents them from having personal, humanitarian, national, psychological, medical, and employment security. It deprives them of the opportunity to live and work alongside Jews, not as subordinates to them, and thereby to become acquainted with Jews as equals and not as their masters. In this way, the separation barrier actually thwarts sustainable security for Jewish Israelis.

The State of Israel was founded upon the tensions between immediate survival, amidst a campaign of field rescues of both individuals and the Jewish nation, and the hope for its enduring prosperity. The operation succeeded and the patient survived, but he has sacrificed himself each and every day on the altar of immediate survival and in the end, he loses from all directions . The Palestinian negation of Zionism endangers its survival in imagination only; or perhaps the fact that the Zionist vision has gradually been reduced to negating Palestinian identity is what truly endangers the immediate survival of Zionism as well as its prosperity.

Separation provides Jews with security at the time of reading these words. The security outlook of a Jew in Israel- Palestine is hence limited to these very minutes. There is no way of knowing what will happen in the near future when Jews and Palestinians intermingle with one another. Thus, the sense of existential security for Jewish Israelis stems directly from the separation between them and the Palestinians: the greater the separation, the greater the extent of security. However, in a diabolical twist, Jewish prosperity depends on Palestinian resources: on the Palestinian workforce, and, on a calculated and planned measure of welfare for the workers, lest the workers seek to rebel. In this way, the relations between Israel and Palestine, and between Israeli Jews and the Palestinians have soured.

Zionism exists in the tension between the anxiety of being created and the attraction to its creation. Should the separation be extended and expanded ad infinitum, to complete the job, to become dedicated to the creation, to become pure forever, and to acquire eternal security along the lines of “a people who live apart and do not take other nations into consideration”? Or perhaps its creator, or, at the very least, one of them – the oppressed Palestinian – will never leave it alone, will always dwell within its consciousness, legacy, religion, history, oriental experience that, since time immemorial, has been part of the Jewish experience? And if the oppressed comes back and suddenly appears, we will never be able to deny him, lest we dissolve the forced symbiosis by subjugating it to a regime of punctilious licenses, whose procedures are continually updated so as to ensure 99.9% security and 0.1% death?

The separation barrier that divides us from the Palestinians is the nagging murmur of that minute percentage of certain death, a constant reminder of the catastrophe that awaits us just beyond the gate. It undermines our very existence, wounds our souls, our bodies, our past, present and future. It requires us to imagine absolute Jewish purity and infinite Jewish security that has never existed, nor could it ever exist. It ensures our security at the present moment, but war in the coming moment. Outside the barrier, the sword is being sharpened and terror is being inculcated. The fear is of them, or of ourselves, or of whom we have become: forever pure.

The separation barrier blinds us. It disconnects our self-image from who we actually are. There will be no security for Jewish Israelis without equality for Palestinians. There will be no peace unless the embittered relationship is broken. There will be no security unless the separation barrier is torn down, brick by brick, and unless the existential Zionist-Palestinian fear in Israel- Palestine is grappled with: the bi-national lack of security can only be dismantled together.