Andrew Rubin on Israel’s construction of the so-called security fence, in Al Ahram:
A comparison between the 1993 maps of the Oslo Accords and the existing plans for all three phases of the wall incontrovertibly shows that the wall is nothing less than the physical and concrete institutionalisation of precisely those aspects of Oslo that Israel had agreed to: the establishment of tiny cloisters and pockets of Palestinian self-rule, with no meaningful sovereignty, that Edward Said compared to the bantustans which the British had devised as a means of exerting colonial authority in Africa. Yet the comparison with British form of colonial rule ends with the establishment of numerous, non-contiguous bantustans. Whereas from 1918-1948 in British Mandate Palestine, Britain had dredged and designed the Port of Haifa, constructed six power stations for Palestinians and Jews, built public roads and buildings for everyone, all Israel has done is to shore up its military presence with more check-points, more prisons, more expanding settlements, more rerouted irrigation systems (for the settlements), more de- development (of Palestinian infrastructure and agriculture), more barriers and more of its massive $3.4 billion wall. In others words, it is colonialism without development, or “de-development” as Sara Roy called it, the sole aim of which is the complete destruction of the foundations of all aspects of Palestinian civil society.
More here.
