A Book Review: BUILD RESISTANCE NOT WALLS: A READER FOR A WORLD WITHOUT WALLS

A Book Review: BUILD RESISTANCE NOT WALLS: A READER FOR A WORLD WITHOUT WALLS

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 acknowledgment 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 labor, constrained labor, 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 neocolonialist 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.

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