NY Times: Overnight, a Towering Divide Rises in Jerusalem

[La_Serpiente]

Overnight, a Towering Divide Rises in Jerusalem

JERUSALEM, Jan. 11 — With a towering concrete slab lowered almost tenderly into a ragged street, Israel began drawing a hard line around Jerusalem on Sunday, walling it off from Abu Dis, an Arab village joined to the city for generations.

The conflict between Israelis and Palestinians can look like the stalest of stalemates, a furious standoff that defies measurement and maybe even change. But in this crowded neighborhood of east Jerusalem, the city's Arab section, there was something monumental, even defining, about the 30-foot slab descending from the twilight, just after a muezzin called the sunset prayer over the crane's roar.

Israel has begun work on other sections of the Jerusalem barrier, which it says is a necessary bulwark against suicide bombers. But it has not built in such a busy area or so close to Jerusalem's center and holy sites.

Bent with age, bundled in a shawl and white head scarf, Nadieh Shihabi, 90, picked her way past the growing barrier, crossing to her house on the Abu Dis side.

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Overnight, a Towering Divide Rises in Jerusalem

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A mostly Arab crew sets up the wall

[bluesoul]

1. Some say here that Israel doesn't need Palestinian labor

yet even Palestinians themselves are building the so called "peace fence"

What irony...

[La_Serpiente]

2. It breaks my heart

to see another Arab do this to the Palestinians. The death of a culture happens when the conflict becomes internalized.