Build Resistance not Walls A Reader for a World without Walls.
Ed. Palestinian Grassroots Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign (Stop the Wall). November 09, 2019.
A collection of essays concerning the boundaries being established by walls, Build Resistance not Walls centers its
arguments on the walls of Palestine: the so called security fence that runs some 700 km through Palestinian lands of the
West Bank, and the Gaza wall of various constructions that is about 60 km long. It goes far beyond these two physical
manifestations of walls, taking the reader into global geographies and into global ideologies, strategies, and mindsets
using walls to, essentially control global populations. It is in essence about the extension of the global frontiers of
empire, an empire based on corporate capitalism that dehumanizes the majority of people and destroys environments, while
extracting profits for the elites. The empire is based on Israeli-American desires of hegemonic control.
Various themes
The essays speak for themselves on different topics, but several themes are common to all sections of the work.
The most common element is how Israel plays a dominant role in the physical structures of different walls. Their
militarized expertise is advertised as being “field tested”, an acknowledgement of their use of various mechanisms and
structures to control and subjugate a population. Several major Israeli companies sell directly or have subsidiaries
selling hardware of different kinds - imaging devices, sound detection systems, radar, facial recognition, drones - as
well as selling techniques for crowd control in general, at walls or away as desired. It also sells techniques for
individual controls (passbooks, intimidation, delays, beatings, interrogation, torture, rape), techniques also used by
the former School of the Americas, now WHINSEC (Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation).
Another general common element is the recognition that walls are used to create separations between “us” and “others”
with the latter being basically subhuman, beyond the law and thus can be easily killed, ignored, or mistreated in any
manner. The context in which this duality exists comes from the corporate world and its capitalist requirements for
exploitable labour, constrained labour, while resources and profits flow out of one country or region into the banks and
homes of the privileged elites. It is a “the hegemonic structure of exclusion, exploitation, discrimination, and
destruction.”
Walls in this sense strip people of their culture, their land, their means of making a living. This is more and more a
global phenomenon with walls of some kind being represented from the favela slums of Rio de Janeiro, through the
European neocolonial walls in Morocco, the physical wall for northern Mexico and its subordinate walls attempting to
keep migrants away at Mexico’s contact with the Central American republics.
As another theme, walls are not exclusively physical barriers. Many walls are constructed by different legalities, the
various so called free trade agreements being prime barriers, with Mexico being a prime example. With the creation of
NAFTA, Mexican farmers were devastated with the import of cheap (subsidized )imported U.S. corn and meat products.
Having lost their lands the farmers then became subject to the regimes of exploited labour made possible by the
corporate interests embedded in NAFTA. Corporate elites are the main beneficiaries, both for general manufacturing but
in particular those industries aligned with weapons, security infrastructure, and extending into personnel requirements
(e.g. private for profit prisons).
The theme of “frontiers” is brought up frequently. The developed countries, the U.S. and the European Union in
particular, maintain their frontiers largely away from their homelands. Other countries are encouraged-bribed-forced to
create barriers of some kind or another to keep recalcitrant and belligerent local indigenous populations under control
in order that corporate profits are not interfered with. U.S. frontiers, based largely on Israeli technology, are
finding their way throughout the world, aggravating already bad conditions in these countries.
Migrants that make it through the various walls are used by “capital and complicit governments in order to create
conflict between exploited people and between the poor; between poor nationals and indigent foreigners. A "war" between
the poor that favors capitalism and reinforces racism and xenophobia.”
A lesser theme, although very important, are the walls built by media, public relations firms, and the educational
systems of the countries involved. These are soft walls, but create a lifetime barrier of lies built on exceptionalism
and moral superiority along with the ever present fake calls for democracy and freedom being protected, protected from
the ‘other’. The fundamentalist pentacostal churches play a large role with this in the U.S., both in support of their
moral Christian superiority over savages and in their support of the apocryphal events supposedly focused on Israel.
A summary is made difficult as the theme of walls covers most aspects of domestic and international discussions. The
American-Israeli empire is at the center of providing field tested structures, technologies, and methodologies to
subordinate not just indigenous but all populations to the global military-industrial-capitalist complex that seeks to
extract wealth and resources. It leaves behind broken societies, families, cultures, and individuals, wounded, maimed,
dead and dying.
At the heart of it all, a cancer that has metastasized around the world is Palestine, “a laboratory for so many
cruelties...the laboratory for our lives.”
The essays within Build Resistance not Walls provide an expanded and valuable series of perspectives on the walls of our
lives. It serves well to illuminate how current political ideologies are expressed throughout the world as barriers to
people and their homelands.