More on the Wall

Walls do not easily function to completely keep people out of a certain area. People will scramble, crawl, climb, even fucking pole-vault over walls if economic need, basic hunger, gives them reason to get over the wall.

You can build it really tall, and they will cut holes in it at the bottom and dig tunnels underneath it. You can patrol the entire length of the thing, and someone will cut a singular hole in the fucker, which everyone knows about, and everyone will go to, and they will watch for each other to make sure no patrol is coming and get people through.

That's how we roll. Humans are very resilient, tricky, clever, and the oppressed are usually far more clever when it comes to things like this than the well-educated classes. You can't stop us; all you can do is make this yet another trial that makes us smarter with every added difficulty. It makes it worse for you in the end, so go ahead.

From the Economist:

Fence them off
In the easternmost parts of the city (Jerusalem), where the barrier cuts between the Mount of Olives (inside) and Abu Dis (outside), running right through residential neighbourhoods, a strange sight presents itself. The great concrete wall leaks people. In the morning, they squeeze through gaps between the blocks and existing buildings, helping each other to negotiate piles of rubble and loops of barbed wire. In the evening they are sucked back in.

For thousands, this is the daily commute.

Most of them are blue ID holders who prefer some discomfort to a long detour to the nearest official crossing point. One way or the other, some 60,000 people are thought to cross each day in each direction. While the wall is still incomplete, the soldiers often tolerate their infractions.
But according to a survey by the JIIS, a wide swathe of West Bank Palestinians without blue IDs are also in East Jerusalem's catchment area. For it is (or it was until recently) their main place of work or study, of shopping and recreation.

An unknown number—some say 40,000—also live there illegally. Cutting them off from Jerusalem not only complicates their lives and splits up families. It takes away business from Jerusalem, impoverishing it further. And it creates joblessness in Ramallah, Bethlehem and the surroundings, adding to the severe depression of the West Bank's economy.

A series of industrial estates that have gone up around the edge of Jerusalem and in the West Bank could help. Ezri Levi, head of the Jerusalem Development Authority, says that places like the Atarot industrial estate, located just by the checkpoint between Jerusalem and Ramallah, are intended partly to create jobs for those West Bankers who can get permits to work there, which should, he argues, "reduce the tensions between the two populations".

But Jeff Halper of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, a pressure group, points out that the estates also allow Israel to maintain its economic dominion: Israeli firms can compete with West Bank firms for cheap labour, yet the Palestinian firms cannot compete with the Israeli ones for custom.

Before the barrier began to go up, the intifada had done its worst to the tourist industry on which both Jerusalem and Bethlehem thrive. Though more than a year of relative calm (thanks less to the barrier than to a ceasefire by the militants) has brought an upturn, tourists and pilgrims are still reluctant to stay the night in Bethlehem, on the West Bank side of the barrier, so the city's hotel business is collapsing.