Walls and Their Futility

One of Robert Frost's most outstanding poems, "Mending Wall," begins:

Something there is that doesn't love a
wall.

If you had, like me, an imperfect recollection of this poem and could only recite that line and the equally memorable last line:

Good fences make good neighbors

you would think that the poet had learned the error of his thought. But actually the poem is about how the poet joins his neighbor in the spring to repair the rock wall between their properties that has undergone its annual damage in the preceding fall and winter, and in the process they gently pit against each other their opposite philosophies about the merits of walls (Frost says that his apples are not likely to cross over and eat his neighbor's pine cones), with of course neither changing the mind of the other.

Notwithstanding the need to keep cows in their fields, and the fact that in only two countries in the world, the U.S. and Israel, do people feel themselves so much under siege that they're busy walling themselves in from their neighbors, the writer of the first line of Frost's poem has the truth of the matter on his side, while the speaker of the last line is operating in an ancient darkness.

The happiest thing that has happened in recent days is that the Palestinians have breached the wall between Gaza and Egypt and have poured through the gap by the tens of thousands to buy badly needed goods, and meanwhile also to enjoy this freedom, if only temporarily, from one of the several prisons in which they have been incarcerated for so many years by Israelis, Americans, and Egyptians.

The Israelis seem to have studied the means used by oppressors to pen in and otherwise mistreat Jews in the past, and they have a habit of employing those same means against the Palestinians -- which suggests, ironically, that those badly mistreated Jews in oldtime Europe are in no way connected with modern Israelis, no matter how much the opposite may seem to be true.

I'm thinking of how walls were erected around an abandoned foundry in Venice to coop up the Jews at night, back in the middle ages, and how that led to the erection of similar walled-in ghettoes in other European countries. Then, more recently, in the Second World War, you had the Nazis walling in the Jews in Warsaw, before the Jewish fighters started fighting their way out, hoping for help from the approaching Soviet Army, which, however, took a break from their labors of war and thereby gave the Nazis time to finish brutally rendering the breakout null and void.

In that same ancient Europe, and on other continents, too, cities routinely were surrounded by high, King-Kong-like walls, similar to the ones that the Israelis are nowadays building and using to ghettoize themselves against the Palestinians in the West Bank. But it should be remembered that after improved munitions finally finished the job of showing the unacceptability of walls, people in those cities found ways to make themselves good neighbors after all, without those time-, effort-, and material-wasting barriers.

Therefore the Israelis, in the interest of their long-term well-being, should welcome the Hamas breaching of the Egyptian wall. In the ensuing relief, no one should object if they meanwhile made it appear as if the break was all their idea after all.

But in the hamster wheel in which both the Israelis and the Palestinians are locked, such a release from the Furies and the Fates can never happen, can it?