From the ‘Iron Wall’ to the ‘Villa in the Jungle’: Palestinians Demolish Israel’s Security MythsBy Ramzy Baroud
25 years before Israel was established on the ruins of historic Palestine, a Russian Jewish Zionist leader, Ze'ev
Jabotinsky, argued that a Jewish state in Palestine could only survive if it exists “behind an iron wall” of defense.
Jabotinsky was speaking figuratively. However, future Zionist leaders, who embraced Jabotinsky’s teachings, eventually
turned the principle of the iron wall into a tangible reality. Consequently, Israel and Palestine are now disfigured
with endless barricades of walls, made of concrete and iron, which zigzag in and around a land that was meant to
represent inclusion, spiritual harmony and co-existence.
Gradually, new ideas regarding Israel’s ‘security’ emerged, such as ‘fortress Israel’ and ‘villa in the jungle’ - an obviously racist metaphor used repeatedly by former Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, which falsely depicts
Israel as an oasis of harmony and democracy amid Middle Eastern chaos and violence. For the Israeli ‘villa’ to remain
prosperous and peaceful, according to Barak, Israel needed to do more than merely maintain its military edge; it had to
ensure the ‘chaos’ does not breach the perimeters of Israel’s perfect existence.
‘Security’ for Israel is not simply defined through military, political and strategic definitions. If so, the shooting of an Israeli sniper, Barel Hadaria Shmuel, by a Palestinian at the fence separating besieged Israel from Gaza on
August 21, should have been understood as the predictable and rational cost of perpetual war and military occupation.
Moreover, one dead sniper for over 300 dead unarmed Palestinians should, from a crude military calculation, appear to be a minimal loss. But the language used by Israeli officials and media following the death of Shmuel - whose job included the killing of Gazan youngsters
- indicates that Israel’s sense of dejection is not linked to the supposed tragedy of a life lost, but by the
unrealistic expectations that military occupation and ‘security’ can co-exist.
Israelis want to be able to kill, without being killed in return; subdue and militarily occupy Palestinians without the
least degree of resistance, armed or otherwise; they want to imprison thousands of Palestinians without the slightest
protest or even the mere questioning of Israel’s military judicial system.
These fantasies, which satisfied and guided the thinking of successive Zionist and Israeli leaders since the times of
Jabotinsky, work only in theory.
Time after time, resisting Palestinians have made a mockery of Israel’s security myths. The resistance in Gaza has
exponentially grown in its capabilities, whether in preventing the Israeli army from entering and holding positions in the Gaza Strip or
its ability to strike back at Israeli towns and cities. Israel’s effectiveness in winning wars and keeping its gains has
been greatly hampered in Gaza, as Israel’s efforts have also been repeatedly thwarted in Lebanon in the last two decades.
Even the iron dome - an ‘iron wall’ of a different kind - proved to be a failure in terms of its ability to intercept
crudely-made Palestinian rockets, with Professor Theodore Postol of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) arguing that the success rate of the dome was “drastically lower” than what the Israeli government and army have reported.
Even the Israeli ‘villa’ was compromised from the inside, as the popular Palestinian uprising of May 2021 has demonstrated that Israel’s native Palestinian Arab population remains an organic part of the Palestinian whole. The violence, at the hands of the police and rightwing militants, that many
Arab communities inside Israel have endured for taking a moral stance in support of their brethren in occupied
Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza, indicated that the supposed ‘harmony’ within Barak’s ‘villa’ was a construct that
shattered within a few days.
Still, Israel refuses to accept what otherwise should have been obvious and inevitable - that a country’s existence
which is sustained through walls and military force, will never be able to find true peace and will continue to suffer
the consequences of the violence it inflicts on others.
A public letter issued by the Israeli army’s chief of staff, Aviv Kohavi, on September 4, in response to the widespread
criticism over the killing of the Israeli sniper, further highlighted one of Israel’s major national fault lines. “The
readiness to sustain loss of life is crucial to national resilience, and that resilience is vital to the continuation of
our very existence,” Kohavi wrote, an assertion that sounded alarm bells throughout the country, leading to a political controversy.
This controversy was compounded with the news of six Palestinian prisoners escaping Israel’s most secured Gilboa prison on September 6. While Palestinians celebrated the daring escape, Israel plunged
into yet another major ‘security’ crisis. This single act by Palestinian freedom fighters seeking an escape from the
Israeli gulag that lacks the minimal requirements of justice or the rule of law, was treated in Israeli media as if the very collapse of the security state. Even the recapture of some of the prisoners hardly
altered this reality.
Israel’s iron walls are falling apart at the seams and the fortress is crumbling, not only because Palestinians never
ceased resisting, but also because the militaristic mindset through which Israel was conceived, constructed and
sustained was a failure from the very start.
Israel’s problem is that its military fortress was built with major design flaws that were never corrected or even
addressed. No nation on earth can enjoy long-term security, peace and prosperity at the expense of another nation, as
long as the latter never ceases its fight for freedom. Possibly, early Zionists did not factor in that Palestinian
resistance could last for so long, and that the baton of freedom fighting can pass on from one generation to the next.
It behooves Israel to accept this unavoidable reality.
Until Israel abandons its foolish ‘security’ fantasies, there can never be true peace in Palestine, neither for the
occupied and oppressed Palestinians, nor for the Israeli occupiers.
- Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of five books. His latest is
“These Chains Will Be Broken: Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons” (Clarity Press). Dr. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior
Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA) and also at the Afro-Middle East Center (AMEC). His
website is www.ramzybaroud.net