In 2012 I wrote for NACLA’s “Border Wars” about “A Palestine-Mexico Border”, a political geography of the military-industrial complexes of the United States and Israel with assistance from the security apparatuses of Egypt and the Palestinian Authority. The crux of the argument was and remains that the deterritorialization of formerly state-boundaried military-industrial complexes has led to intertextuality between the US and Israeli regimes of violence and that this is reflected in how each provides training and technologies for the other for border creation, extension, surveillance and enforcement.

Eleven years is a long time for a short article to hold up well and there are things I wish I’d either included or discussed differently. Reifying the Mexican and Palestinian regimes potentially not subject to Israeli and USian violences ignores their own systemic violences. For example some populations indigenous to Palestine historically are transnational. Many bedouin clans, especially those historically centered in the Jordan Valley and Naqab desert, in the past also spent significant time in parts of what are now called Egypt and Jordan. So while ending settler rule in Palestine is prerequisite to bedouin freedom like all Palestinian freedom, ending Israeli rule alone is not inherently synonymous with decolonizing the map. Similarly, the Tohono O’Odham nation, amongst others, straddles the colonial borders established by the USA and Mexico, two states that enact violence against them and ending US border imperialism does not alone inhere freedom. I have other quibbles with my 2012 self but here will focus on something I edited out for space: the violent farce of border walls.

During the first several years of Israel’s construction of its Apartheid Wall around the West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem, for the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) I guided groups, mostly foreigners, journalists and diplomats, around Israel’s colonial infrastructure. One of the stops was usually on the line between the Palestinian towns of Jabel Mukaber and Abu Dis where Israel erected an 8m concrete wall. The point was to show how the Apartheid Wall interacted with Israel’s checkpoint regime, zoning and planning and house demolitions, ID card regime and more to form what ICAHD head Jeff Halper formulated as Israel’s ‘Matrix of Control’. But a couple of times something happened while we stopped at the Apartheid Wall and I could better illustrate its function.

On the Friday of Eid al-Adha in 2005 (if memory serves) I was with a group at the Apartheid Wall. A fire truck had pulled up to the Abu Dis side of the wall and extended its aerial ladder over tit and Palestinians were rappelling down the Jabel Mukaber side to go to prayers at the al-Aqsa mosque, a few dozen in the time we were there. Residents of Abu Dis, Al Eizariya and other nearby areas do not have the blue ID card that would allow them into Jerusalem to pray at al-Aqsa, so they had to take rather extraordinary measures to get there. It happened a second time a couple of years later. These allowed me to illustrate persuasively part of my spiel that walls as military technologies had been mostly solved since at least the invention of the trebuchet in the Middle Ages, if not with the invention of the battering ram four hundred years before the destruction of the First Temple and the catapult shortly after. Further, the antecedents of Palestinians and ancient Israelites had earlier gained possession of “the ladder” and “the shovel”, two pieces of common Neolithic technology useful for going over and under obstacles such as walls and fences.

The idea that such an imposing construction as Israel’s Apartheid Wall with its extensive sensor array and gun towers could have minimal security effect seems unlikely at first. And, indeed, it is an insurmountable barrier to people going about their daily routines without substantial help. If you are going shopping, to prayers, to a social club or restaurant, having to climb over or dig under a wall while trying to avoid Israeli security is neither a plausible nor sustainable action. This is true as well if you wished to sell a small quantity of drugs or were an individual with a casual notion to harm. In these instances the barrier is an actual barrier. This is to say that the Israeli walls, like the US border barriers, function extremely well to interrupt ordinary travel. People trying to go about their everyday business cannot do so. Where separation walls go up, the people on both sides either adjust their activities to take place on ‘their’ side of the wall, or cease doing some of those activities. Walls work very well to separate populations. Walls are very effective barriers to ordinary travel.

Walls are completely ineffective barriers to extraordinary travel. If the goal is to achieve the wild profits of the criminalized drug and weapons trades, to carry out an attack, to smuggle criminalized migrants or laborers, to flee an oppressive regime or to pursue life-changing economic needs and opportunities via migration, a wall is simply an unremarkable part of the terrain to be navigated. When Palestinian militants captured Gilad Shalit in June, 2006 while killing two other Israeli soldiers, they did so through a tunnel they dug near the Keren Shalom checkpoint. Israel’s wall was not a barrier to it. Nor was the same barrier, technologically upgraded, in October, 2023 when militants in the Gaza Strip breached Israel’s military perimeter via land, air and sea. Because these kinds of walls are a long-solved military technology.

Neither the US or Israeli separation barriers are simple walls or fences. They also include various types of radar, camera, motion detection, drones and other networked surveillance technologies. These are also complimented with aerial and ground patrols and often other physical terrain adjustments such as cleared land and ditches. In the Israeli example, the military even controls both sides of the wall. But there have been tunnels between Mexico and the United States, and between Gaza and Egypt (and, later, Israel) since at least the 1980s. Meaning these technologically sophisticated and highly modern walls with extravagant budgets and even more extravagant punditry were built over pre-existing tunnels that rendered their claimed primary purpose moot.

The US and Israeli walls were never meant to be barriers to movement through tunnels that preceded them. It is farcical to think they could. But the walls being farces does not stop their violences. They disrupt the basic movement of life, including wildlife, for all near them. They fix in place land thefts and enforce racisms at the architectural and geographic levels. They’re silly. But they are not funny.

Despite being conquerable with ladders and shovels, the biggest failure of the US and Israeli apartheid walls is not technological but political. There is mass migration to the United States across its southern border because US empire has destroyed the economies and mangled the political systems of every state south of it. There is an illicit trade in weapons and drugs across the US’s southern border because the prohibition and criminalization of many drugs means there are astounding profits to be made through their smuggling and sale to the US. There is smuggling across the Egypt-Palestine border because Israel prohibits many imports to the Gaza Strip, both necessities and luxuries (including drugs and weapons as with the US-Mexico border!). There are occasional attacks carried out by Palestinians against Israeli targets because Israel continues to remove Palestinians from Palestine and to prevent their return.

Border walls do nothing to address the causes of the things they are purported to prevent because those things are not caused by the lack of a wall, nor is a wall a plausible solution to those things. But apartheid walls do fairly well the things they are designed to do, to create separation and surveillance technologies that geographically fix the systems of oppression they represent.