There have always been two groups of human beings, one who build fences, the other who spend their lives bringing them down. This generalisation however is one that can be transcended, and we can find ourselves on the either side depending on the circumstances of time.

It all began with the idea of fencing one’s self in to provide security. In Neolithic days somebody came up with the bright idea that fences might actually provide security from the hungry animals that freely prowled the lands and men seemed to be forever fending from their feeding frenzy. One idea sprouted from this ingenious “invention”, Landownership. Fences soon transformed into walls enclosing kings and landowners and thus began man’s love affair with the greed of land. So one can safely call Asif Zardari to be the specimen of a modern Neolithic man.

Man they say is the only creature in this world that this world can survive without. It seems that if men were to be taken out of the ecosystem, it would flourish and continue for far longer than if man continue to exist within it. Not to worry, we have developed the Nuclear Bomb and working steadfastly towards our own extinction. Coming back to the subject of fences, men have always come up with ingenious, albeit, racist, cruel ideas of the needs and uses of fences. There was that infamous rabbit proof fence in Australia, it was meant to keep the rabbits on one side and farmland on the other. Obviously rabbits and Aborigines were classed together for exclusion. As the Multi-Cultural Australia states today, that the aborigines are good for tourism but they wouldn’t want to live next door to one. Then there are the Indian Reservations in United States, which allow the natives to continue to live in the small territories in exchange for the entire United States as long as they exist in absolute poverty and social abyss. And occasionally if some of them will come up with an idea that would improve their living condition and employment opportunities by setting up gambling cities that would provide trade and employment for the Indians, Terminator type Governors are elected to counter and challenge these progressions. We also had the Bantustans in South Africa, which were built to separate Black People from White People. The old western adage of racial superiority of the skin. Its strange how men need to facilitate the concept of superiority. It is also strange that in Australia, Americas and all over the African continent, Europeans still dominate the natives in this so-called Multi-Cultural World.

Then there was the Berlin Wall that proposed that a country could be divided into two and its people will live in bliss. Unfortunately this experiment has only been enacted successfully once in the history of man, the subcontinent and the division of Hindustan into two nation states. Although successful is an ironic word in the context of the subcontinent and the ensuing pandemonium, that has a fence which is strangely formed of Nurtured Patriotic hate engendered through polemics, academics, media and governmental/military Interests. The fence, which is ironically termed the LOC or the Line of Control, is probably the most heavily contested border in this world. The British it seems pulled the last joke called Kashmir before freedom. That joke has haunted the people of both countries for over half a century now and the most amazing thing is the fact that we are further from resolution of this problem than we were in 1947. It seems through filtering our past and present that man has certainly evolved these fences of hate into newer more lethal modes. The fences of ideology and religion have blurred and men in grips of greed and patriotism are running wild to create even more lethal fences. Fury, Hate, Religious Intolerance is all being fenced regionally to nurture the most lethal form of hate. The West thus is populated with those everlasting diseases of Racism and Orientalism, and majorities in East it seems prefer history to the future.

A recent inclusion in man’s love affair with fences has been Israel’s Security Wall. This security wall is being built on the belief that it will reduce Israel’s problem of Suicide Bombers and terror attacks. Strange, how men can concoct such preposterous schemes based on such insane beliefs. Hate and violence is the product of repression, a product of intense human agitation, which no borders can prevent and no walls can stop. If hate is to be rooted out all the peripheral arguments and resolutions have to be thrown out and human beings will have to start asking the real questions with real significance. Israel is a country, which is built on the ruins of the Arabs that allegedly did not exist, their villages that allegedly were not present in that land for centuries, and built on denying the existence of a nation that does not deserve nationhood.

Suicide bombers are not born suicide bombers, they are turned into ones and no amount of brainwashing can make a human being give up his/her life. It takes a very deep scar, a very bad memory, a very close loss for a person to give up his/her life for revenge. As Sartre introduced Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the earth, he wrote “Our victims know us by their scars and by their chains, and it is this that makes their evidence irrefutable. It is enough that they show us what we have made of them for us to realise what we have made of ourselves.” This statement is such a close reflection of the Palestinian Condition. The Palestinian only recognises Israel through their losses, through their scars of violence and persecution, through the lenses of poverty ensued by Land seizures and denial of the basic human rights to earn a decent living. Palestine today is the illegitimate child of Israel, which denies to be killed off or displaced. They continue to exist in their makeshift camps, holding onto the keys to their houses in Jerusalem as their most prized possession. The Israeli army murders, pillages and destroys their homes, uproot their livelihood of the olive and orange trees yet the Palestinian continues to exist. He continues to scream and fight with whatever he finds at his disposal and lives on.

Palestine is also a question for humanity and taking an excerpt from fanon he writes “Let us waste no time in sterile litanies and nauseating mimicry. Leave this Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them, at the corner of every one of their own streets, in all the corners of the globe. For centuries they have stifled almost the whole of humanity in the name of a so-called spiritual experience.” Israel and America’s Complicity with Israel is now a fact of life too stern to be denied. America the professor of democracy, the invader, the spreader of freedom talks to the world and shouts out loud the meaning of real democracies and human values. Is it any wonder than, that men have stopped listening in there millions to these exaltations. America Murders and cries for justice, America supports fascism and Despots and cries Democracy, America that bullies nations to give up their natural resources and cries freedom. You see the Palestinian cannot hear America or its lackeys. The Palestinian can only see the war, the wall and the void in his/her existence. It is when this Palestinian stops asking for our help and starts expounding his measures, that we should start fearing.

Something bad is about to happen!

Bad for whom…The Palestinian, who has already lost everything?

Soon you will hear murmurs, the Wall will fall, the fences will come down. No containment chamber can contain human fury. No walls can change the course of an Intifada. It will just be one other obstruction in the path to freedom. That is the undeniable fate of all Walls and Fences.