Israel and the Dominican Republic: A tale of two fences made vulnerable by arrogance

By Narciso Isa Conde

Narciso Isa Conde is a Marxist political analyst, writer and political leader in the Dominican Republic, a veteran of the struggles against the Trujillo dictatorship and the U.S. invasion of the DR in 1965, who writes regularly on the class and liberation struggles. He published this article on Oct. 18, 2023. Translation: John Catalinotto.

No wall or fence can stop the flow of migration. The Super-Smart Fence built by Israel to make Gaza a concentration camp has now been torn down by an old Palestinian bulldozer.

The Smart Fence being built on the Dominican-Haitian border is of Israeli design and technology.

Its construction was decided at the beginning of the current Dominican administration, presided over by Luis Abinader, after receiving significant support from Donald Trump and his foreign minister, Mike Pompeo. Abinader is continuing this relationship of dependence with the Joe Biden administration.

It is impossible to overlook the fact that Biden’s foreign policy is of equal or worse quality than the one implemented by Trump, despite all the praises heaped on him by supposedly progressive Dominican commentators when this fascistic “democrat” arrived at the White House.

The construction of the wall or “smart fence” here was fueled by racist, anti-Haitian ideology and fed by the xenophobia and arrogance of U.S. imperialist power and its Israeli partner.

Border walls have perverse qualities

We have always said that there is no wall or fence that can prevent migratory flows, and even less so on a border where a big business operates – one involving generals, colonels, politicians and businessmen.

In the Dominican Republic, the wall’s installation was contracted to an Israeli company with two fundamental covert motives:

1) To facilitate greater control and greater presence of Israeli military intelligence and the Pentagon’s Southern Command in the border strip – while incidentally making very good profits.

2) To stir up hatred between both countries to divert patriotism in each of them towards chauvinist or pseudo-nationalist confrontations, which diminishes the struggle for self-determination of the island in the face of the intense colonialism deployed by U.S. imperialism and its European allies.

This imperialist drive for military control of the border strip has lame pretexts and evil goals:

1. The existence of gold, titanium and rare earth deposits, which is of great interest to the Southern Command and the Zionist army. The Dominican state has already granted the Pentagon the right to explore for rare earths in the southern part of the border, approved gold exploration concessions to Uni Gold and Barrick Gold, and authorized a suspicious exploration for titanium in the northern part of the border, in the name of one Eliezer Lisboa Medina.
2. The project of a new military intervention in Haiti and the use of that strip as a logistical base.

In addition, the construction of the fence on the Dominican side made it easier for President Luis Abinader to display his conservative thinking, based on a false patriotism, in an attempt to snatch the racist anti-Haitian banner from his main ultra-conservative political adversaries: Leonel Fernandez and Abel Martinez.

This is in view of the 2024 elections and a sensitive electoral segment, which political marketing considers large and numerous.

The vulnerability of the two barriers

The Smart Fence here is a small carbon copy of the fence that has surrounded the Gaza Strip.

The one here is said to cost, in addition to the considerable ecological damage, a little more than 1,750 million pesos – equivalent to some $200 million.

The Israeli one, which surrounded the Hamas-governed Gaza Strip and its 2 million people (the vast majority of them Palestinians), has foundations that alone cost a little over $700 million.

Both were nourished by a great high-handedness and equal arrogance exhibited by the rulers of the two countries.

The fiasco!

The great fence enclosing the Gaza strip was propagandized as the best in the world and the ultimate in technology; as it turned out, it was demolished in a jiffy by an old bulldozer acquired by Hamas. A just humiliation!

The stellar reporter of Jewish journalism, Gideon Levy, told the world of this event in this way: “As yesterday the old and smoking Palestinian bulldozer demolished the wall, the most advanced of all walls and fences, it also tore off the cloak of Israeli arrogance and indifference.”

No shame ensued, but a decision to impose much more cruelty and try to move towards the extermination of the Palestinian people, by means of a kind of holocaust.

Look at what a fence, said to be intelligent, accomplished: It served only to aggravate hatred, to sow and practice neo-fascism.

The fence here [which divides Haiti and the DR] must be weaker and less intelligent and more vulnerable. Already its months of construction have brought harmful results.

For now it has served to enhance an arrogant anti-Haitianism, place the Southern Command and Israeli Security on the border, and divert patriotic sentiment to be against Haiti, exonerating the U.S.’s cruel colonialism.

The fence is a tremendous service to the empire of the North in its brutally aggressive and overly prolonged death throes!

But not only. Add to this the damages caused to the border mangroves and wetlands, and to the natural treasure of the Saladilla Lagoon.

Eurocentrism and north-centrism: sources of oppression and arrogance

Behind all this is the determining impact of Eurocentric and north-centric ideologies, with their strong white supremacy and high dose of seductive and neutralizing capacity, with selective distribution of flattery and privileges by their social elites.

A power that makes it easy to turn outstanding artists and intellectuals into self-critics of their rebellious origins and their initial ideals; a power capable of filling people with fear and rewarding in many countries the complicit silences of a large part of the intelligentsia and professional sectors, as is the case in our beloved land.

They will have to justify themselves with the recent bad example of [Spanish singer] Jean Manuel Serrat and his infamous letter to the Palestinian people, justifying 75 years of genocide and Israeli terror and giving encouragement to their current crusade of extermination in Gaza.

Serrat and his undisputed poetic and musical talent are perfumed and privileged prisoners of these capitalist elites and their contemptuous attitude towards other civilizations and cultural and religious identities.

The same happens with other similar characters that swarm around here with their silences and pettiness on their backs, shamefully bent.

Their emphatic support for Israel filled me with indignation and pity, as much as I pity the pusillanimous behavior of a large part of the intelligentsia, university professors and the so-called progressivism of our country.

But there are sparks capable of igniting prairies, activating dreams that move mountains, and recreating the sublime concept of PATRIA ES HUMANIDAD!

There are minorities capable of becoming, in other possible circumstances to create, majorities determined to fight and build another country, another Latin-Caribbean subcontinent and another world.

In justice and solidarity!