An-Najah Staff

This paper analyzes and assesses the impacts of the Segregation Wall (hereinafter “Wall”) and its associated infrastructure (such as by-pass roads, physical obstructions, among others), which the Israeli occupation authorities have been constructing, on the Palestinians life in the West Bank. The Wall, as one of the Israeli’s colonial engineering tools that has been used merely to coerce de facto situation on the ground will, arguably have implications on the viability and sustainability of the social development of the Palestinian community in the West Bank territory and consequently on the possibility to establish a credible Palestinian State on their lands which were occupied by Israel in 1967.
The adopted research methodology in this paper is built through deliberations on the available data sources in the form of literature reviews, published reports, field work investigations, and mapping interpretations using the state-of-the-art technology of Geographic Information Systems (GIS).
The paper would argue that the spoken motive for building the Wall on behalf of the Israelis (i.e., purported for security reasons) is fallacious and entails other tacit dimensions of Jewish geo-demography dominance, which is considerably, affects the rightful social development of the Palestinian communities and the aspiration for a fully sovereign and independent state.
The paper will be inaugurated by a generic background on the Wall construction, and its fallacious motives, merely to provide a context to the reader. Concurrently, the paper will methodologically define the Wall and its array of employed infrastructure, along with its trajectory path and spatial layout that zigzag across the West Bank. Furthermore, the paper will substantially touch upon the impacts of the Wall on the West Bankers, in terms of socio-economic, environmental, transportation, and geo-political repercussions that undermines the quest for a sustainable development within the Palestinian context.