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On May 27, 2022, as part of a panel about the Wall Israel built in the West Bank, I was asked to relate an Israeli perspective. The following is a lightly edited version of what I said.

I was asked to share with you how we experience the Wall on the Israeli side. While preparing, I asked some Israeli friends what they thought, too. The answer was simple, and matched my own impression: we don’t experience the Wall at all!

Most of us don’t live close to the wall, because it was built deep in the occupied West Bank, far from most Israelis. Actually, I grew up in Jerusalem, and the Wall passes through my home city. But it was never an issue for us. The government likes to say Jerusalem is “our united eternal capital”, because it is united under Israeli control. But Jerusalem is still divided: East and West, Arab and Jewish — and the wall does not cross through any Jewish-Israeli neighborhoods.

So in West Jerusalem, like in any Jewish town in Israel, we live a relatively normal life. The wall might as well be on another planet.

There is a pretty phrase in Hebrew: me’ever le-hararei hakhoshekh, literally “beyond the mountains of darkness”, meaning “in far-away lands.” It is often used ironically to talk about the parallel world half an hour’s drive away from central Tel Aviv: The world where the laws are made by military officers and it’s impossible to get a permit to build a new house or drill a new water well. The world where soldiers wake up a family in the middle of the night to take pictures of everyone, and remind them they are not free. The world where if you were born to the right nation, you enjoy full political and social rights; and if you were born to the wrong nation, not even your basic human rights are respected.

So it seems like the Wall is doing its job: the Wall is those “mountains of darkness”, turning our own military occupation into a far-away land, a place that has nothing to do with us, a place we can forget all about.

Thanks to the Wall, Israelis can violently dispossess and control another people without suffering the consequences: the inevitable resistance. But as we have seen again and again, recently too, that is not possible: One way or another, our violence comes back to bite us.

Separation and peace

When I was a child, before the Wall was built, I believed we needed a big wall. I remember saying things like “we can stay over here, they can stay over there, and with a wall they can’t come here and bomb us.” Or even that if we had a wall, whenever they attacked us, we could simply bomb their side of the wall mercilessly until they stopped.

In those years, it was hard to ignore the occupation, because attacks carried out by Palestinian resistance affected our everyday life within Israel. I remember the fear in those years. Taking a bus to school, worrying it would be the next one bombed… Being terrified of anyone on the bus who looked a little Arab…

I just wished that danger could be taken away, separated from my life.

I was not the only one. There was an Israeli “Peace Movement” which was very big for a while, in the nineties, and my parents were part of it too. And this was what that Peace Movement proposed: separation as a recipe for “peace”:

“We stay here, they stay there.”

“Two states for two nations.”

Many Israelis hoped that if we could just agree to split the country, we could stay separate, and Israelis would enjoy quiet and safety. Most of us were not so concerned what would happen with the Palestinians.

The meaning of separation

The word for separation in Hebrew is hafrada.

The word for separation in Afrikaans is apartheid.

Israeli politicians call the West Bank Wall things like “security barrier” or “separation fence”. I prefer the name “Apartheid Wall”. It makes clear what “separation” really means.

The State of Israel started building the Wall in 2002, but separation has always been part of how the State of Israel works.

Separation means there are “Jewish towns” and “Arab towns”, “Jewish schools” and “Arab schools”. In 1948, as soon as the State of Israel was founded, the Arab towns were placed under martial law and the Arab schools under control of the secret police, the Shin Bet. These systems of domination were loosened right before the Israeli military conquered the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, and it went on to apply the same martial law, the same secret policing, in the Occupied Territories.

Separation means there are people who have a right to a good, peaceful, happy life and people that should be happy if they get to live at all.

Separations means the moment you are born, your life is set on a separate path: will you have all the rights and privileges of the “chosen people” – or will you be treated as inferior, foreign, and dangerous?

When you turn eighteen, will you be given military training, advanced weapons, and a license to kill? Or will those young soldiers be licensed to kill you?

The air we breathe

West of the barrier, in the territories Israel took in 1948, we don’t experience the Apartheid Wall — but we experience apartheid everywhere. It is invisible, like the air we breathe.

It is the most normal thing in the world for Israelis: this is “our” country, our state, our army and our wall. The only problem is those people, who insist the land is theirs.

But we have a right to security, a right to take land, a right to take lives. And we have to, because we have to keep them away. Keep them down. And if that doesn’t work, we will have to deal with them somehow.

The idea of separation as the solution to the violence is not considered extreme. The extremists call for much worse “solutions”. Under the slogan of “Jewish sovereignty” they call to displace more Palestinians, and to kill all those who resist.

They are getting louder and more powerful than ever.

Their spokesmen have become regular guests in political talk shows. They have representatives in the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, and a recent poll gave their party almost 12% of seats. They are allied with Likud, the major right-wing party, and there is a good chance they will form a government together some time soon.

Meanwhile the moderates, the so-called Zionist “left”, call for more separation. In a system built on ethnic cleansing and separation, the moderates call for more separation, while the extremists call for more ethnic cleansing. And together, they demand that the world support our “security”.

Beyond the slogans

Separation, sovereignty, security… All of these slogans come down to one thing: we live on land taken from another people using deadly violence, people we try to keep under control by using deadly violence every day – and we wish to do this without experiencing any violence at all in return.

When I was a child, I believed the solution was as simple as a big wall. Tragically, it is not so simple.

It certainly does not help that the wall was built deep in the West Bank, splitting neighborhoods in East Jerusalem and separating villages like Bil’in from their agricultural land. It does not help that the wall twists and turns through Palestinian land not to maximize maximize Israeli safety, but to maximize land-grabbing.

But a better Wall would not solve the problem, either. Ultimately, our two peoples live together in one country, and there is no way any wall could cleanly separate us like I imagined as a child. And no amount of wishful thinking, no amount of guns, and no amount of walls will convince an occupied people to give up and accept a second-class status in their own country.

Human beings suffering dispossession, occupation and apartheid will fight back, one way or another.

We have had the Apartheid Wall, the Security Barrier, for twenty years – but still Israelis do not have security. And we never will have security, we never will have peace, if we continue to practice apartheid, separation, and dispossession by force

Please help end Israeli apartheid and occupation. Thank you.

(Based on an earlier version which appeared in Hebrew at Haokets; a further updated and developed German version appeared at Die Freiheitsliebe)

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The science on emissions and climate change has been fairly accurate since at least the 1970s, and internationally known and acknowledged since the early 1990s. The UN’s climate framework, which makes clear what needs to be done, has been in effect since 1994. States have spent the three decades since essentially wasting time, trying and failing to make sustainability more immediately profitable than destruction.

It may have been possible at the time to save both capitalism and the planet, in theory. But this would require directly assaulting fossil fuel fortunes, making them unprofitable or even worthless by means of state intervention. Capitalism as a whole could have continued, perhaps, simply using different sources of energy and different avenues for investment. But theory aside, this was never practically attainable within the liberal order.

Despite the liberal pretension to enabling reasoned debate to set public policy, this kind of action was – and still is – deemed unconscionable, because the liberal system is in fact set up to allow those controlling massive wealth to protect their property. Wherever public power threatens private profits, the wealthy can mobilize their wealth in the legal, political, and public realm, and nip the threat in the bud.

These battles have gone on for decades while all of the “reasonable,” “serious” people insisted that only gradual, market-based efforts could ever work, pinning much hope on future technological innovations. But the market has other priorities, above all to make whatever profits can be made; rather than pave the way to a sustainable future, energy-related innovation has largely focused on better ways to locate, extract, refine, market, burn, and use fossil fuels – the market in its infinite wisdom has willed it to be so. And why should it not? As far as securing profits is concerned, juicing a tried-and-true source of revenue like fossil fuels is obviously a better investment than exploring avenues where profitability is just one of many open questions.

A world in flames

For decades, in other words, capitalism has been proving its inability to respond to anything but near-term profitability, while the political system supporting it has been proving its complete inability to temper this near-sightedness with reason or concern for the public interest.

And now we find ourselves in a world literally up in flames, with short- and long-term threats to civilization converging across all continents – and the liberal-capitalist system continues to display an utter inability to do what needs to be done.

The science, having been generally clear for half a century, is now more detailed and unassailable than perhaps any other area of science has ever been before.

Politicians, trapped in the mind-prison of Liberalism and the golden cage of capitalism, continue to mutter “but what do you propose?” And no wonder: any effective action would ultimately require pursuing the economically insane aim of preventing private firms and state enterprises from making profits from highly valuable natural resources, materials which are just lying there, waiting to be turned into money.

Whether fossil fuel reserves are owned by private individuals, corporations, or the state itself, denying their ability to do this would entail a massive showdown with vested interests, the kind of thing that prudent politicians generally avoid.

In this way, the intrinsic irrationality of an economic system predicated on infinite growth, along with the massive concentration of wealth and power it has promoted, now stand in the way of common-sense rational action based on an irrefutable scientific consensus.

Listen to the science!

If you did not already reject capitalism to begin with, you might at this point be irritated. I am obviously biased and presenting the story in a way that serves my pre-existing communist agenda. Be this as it may, the science is clear: just read the IPCC reports.

These reports, compiled by volunteer scientists based on thousands of studies, and approved line for line by hundreds of representatives from nearly every government in the world, spell this out as clearly as can be. In the crucial 2018 report, they call for “rapid and far-reaching transitions,” about which they say: “These systems transitions are unprecedented in terms of scale, but not necessarily in terms of speed, and imply deep emissions reductions in all sectors, a wide portfolio of mitigation options and a significant upscaling of investments in those options.”

On the pivotal topic of fossil fuels, they write: “Some fossil investments made over the next few years – or those made in the last few – will likely need to be retired prior to fully recovering their capital investment or before the end of their operational lifetime.”

The International Energy Agency – originally an oil industry lobby group – has since piled on, calling for an immediate global stop to investment in new fossil fuel supply.

How to strand an asset

If you believe this is possible within capitalism, without violating private property, let us think this through. Consider the fact that about a sixth of the world’s wealth is invested in fossil fuels. How do you suppose we are to retire these investments, across the globe, before they even recover the initial costs, let alone turn a profit?

Do you expect the owners of these investments – including fabulously wealthy individuals, royal families, democratic states, dictatorial states, and of course corporations bound to shareholder profits – to simply come to their senses now, after four decades, and voluntarily forfeit this wealth? The corporations in question are legally barred from doing so, while the individuals and leaders in question would be objectively irrational to do it – they would be, simply put, destroying billions and trillions of dollars in value.

Yes, I am a communist, and have been since before I started down the climate rabbit hole. Nonetheless, I truly wish this weren’t so. I truly wish capitalism could continue to exist without destroying the climate, if only to give the left more time to organize to overthrow it.

But unfortunately for all of us, whether left, right, or oh-so enlightened center, time is running out. The current state of things is utterly unsustainable, and if there is any way out still conceivable, even any way to significantly mitigate the damage – it is being blocked by liberal ideology and capitalist economics.

Seriously reviewing the science and the history of this crisis makes any other conclusion untenable.