Monday, July 11, was a historic day for the movement to abolish the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. The right-wing dominated Israeli Knesset gave the campaign to boycott the Israeli occupation a Good Housekeeping seal of approval - a hechsher, if you will - by passing legislation to punish it.

Of course, the effect of this legislation will be to rejuvenate the Israeli peace movement ["Israeli Left launches public campaign against new law banning boycotts," Haaretz reports] and promote the boycott. It is a sign of the political bankruptcy of the Israeli Right that it is now condemned to take actions which promote the agenda of its opponents.

This month, the right-wing Israeli government shone a spotlight on its illegal blockade of Gaza when it made giving free publicity to the Gaza Freedom Flotilla the top Israeli government priority. Every day, it seemed, there was a new Israeli government statement calling attention to the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, more outrageous than the last: 67-year-old Alice Walker was going to pour sacks of sulfur on Israeli soldiers and light them on fire; journalists who reported on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla were going to be banned from Israel for ten years.

I just got back from meeting with my friends at the Rebuilding Alliance who are walking the halls of Congress this week on behalf of a kindergarten in the West Bank village of Al Aqaba. They are asking members of Congress to press Israel to open and repave the now demolished Peace Road so that 200 children can reach their school in Al Aqaba without delay.

You can help open congressional doors by signing this petition, urging your elected officials to contact the Israeli embassy and ask them to open the road and fix what the Israeli army destroyed.

On April 7th, kindergartners looked out from their school bus to see Israeli soldiers destroying Peace Road, the main road in and out of the West Bank village of Al Aqaba. Al Aqaba’s kindergarten and school hosts children from throughout the area, and the demolition of this road threatens their access to education and the village’s connection to the Jordan Valley.

Last year, I stayed in Al Aqaba and fondly remember strolling down Peace Road with Al Aqaba’s mayor Haj Sami Sadiq and his family. As we would make our way down the road that afternoon, dozens of villagers would run towards us to greet Haj Sami. Haj Sami has been confined to a wheelchair since he was shot during an Israeli military live training exercise at age sixteen. But because the road was well-paved, he could still travel to meet with these villagers living far from his house.

On the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Western leaders are full of self-congratulation. But their paeans to universal freedom ring hollow, when they bear large responsibility for another wall constricting human freedom: the apartheid wall dividing the Palestinian West Bank.

Israeli authorities refer to it as a "separation barrier," but that's misleading. The wall doesn't separate pre-1967 Israel from the West Bank. If that's all it did, it would be an entirely different political object. Instead, the wall cuts deep into the Palestinian West Bank, separating Palestinians from each other and from their land, and signaling to the Palestinians that Israel intends to annex territory that Palestinians want for an independent Palestinian state. The fact that Western countries that support the Israeli government - above all the United States - say nothing about the West Bank wall signals to Palestinians that Western support for Palestinian statehood is merely rhetorical.

Today, AFP reports, Palestinians tore down a chunk of the wall near Ramallah.

AFP notes that 85 percent of the planned wall is inside the West Bank, and it would leave 9.5 percent of the West Bank and 35,000 West Bank Palestinians between the barrier and the Green Line that marks the 1967 border with Israel.

The World Court issued a resolution in 2004 calling for those parts of the barrier that are inside the West Bank to be torn down and for further construction in the territory to cease. Israel and Western countries have ignored the World Court resolution.

Two years ago Israel's own High Court ruled against the route of the wall near the Palestinian village of Bilin, but the Israeli government ignored the ruling of its own highest court.