Walls

A blog post by Adam. Israel is famous for its walls.

There is the Western Wall in Jerusalem, where thousands of Jews come to pray every day. We haven't seen this yet, but will soon.

There is the wall between Israel and the West Bank, which has been highly controversial (and deemed illegal by the Israeli Supreme Court) because it was used to unofficially take land from the Palestinian territories. We saw parts of this wall when drove through the middle of the West Bank to the Dead Sea. The highway we were on had protective walls on both sides, essentially splitting the future Palestinian state in half. I'm not sure how Palestinians get from one side to the other.

There is, of course, the wall around Gaza. We may see this later in our trip.

Then there was a wall we were not expecting....a giant wall between Israel and Egypt - two countries that have been at peace for over 30 years.

An up close view of the wall between Israel and Egypt.

The wall stretching on for miles...

This wall is not historic or religious...it's still in the process of being completed. And it doesn't appear to be primarily for security reasons. Rather this is a wall to keep out undocumented immigrants and drugs. In a country built on immigrants, not all immigrants are welcome...certainly not gentile African immigrants coming into Israel for work and asylum. We've seen some of these immigrants throughout Israel. The people who cleaned the bathrooms at our Dead Sea campground were from South Sudan. The cleaning man I spoke to said he had been in Israel for two years and that he had seen most of his South Sudanese compatriots deported.

Israel is the closest rich nation to North Africa (or at least the only one that can be reached without getting on a boat or plane). The fact that people want to come to Israel and the fact that Israel needs immigrant workers is a sign of its success as a nation. But how does gentile immigration work in a Jewish state?