Why no mention of the other Berlin wall, 20 years after the fall of the first one?

Because it's Israel, stupid, and it's the Palestinians.

By Robin Beste, Stop the War Coalition

Twenty years ago the Berlin Wall came down. The anniversary is being celebrated in Germany and around the world. The Berlin wall was 96 miles long (155 kilometres) long and 11.8 feet (3.6 metres) high.

But there is another wall – longer and higher than the wall that divided east and west Berlin. That wall exists today and is over 400 miles (650 kilometres) long and 25 feet (8 metres) high. It is called the "Apartheid Wall" or "Berlin Wall" by the people that it imprisons.

The highest court of the United Nations, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), said in 2004 that this wall violates international law. The ICJ recommended that all other states in the world "neither recognize the wall nor provide aid or assistance to maintain the circumstances created by its construction; prevent any impediment, created by the wall’s construction, to the exercise of the right of the people to self-determination; and, ensure compliance with international humanitarian law."

The ISJ called on the UN to consider what further action was needed to end the illegal situation caused by the wall's construction.

Amnesty International also reported in 2004 the wall’s construction violated. international law and is contributing to grave human rights violations.

And what has been the response of the so-called "international community"?

This being Israel that built the wall and the Palestinians that are its prisoners, the answer is all too obvious.

Israel has violated more United Nations resolutions than any other nation, it has committed innumerable war crimes against the Palestinians -- the barbaric attack on Gaza at the turn of 2009 being just the latest, it occupies Palestinian land illegally and expands its settlements incessantly to steal yet more.

Not only does Israel do all this with complete impunity, with no action taken against it by any other country, it is rewarded for its criminality.

Israel receives 50% of all US foreign aid. In 2009 it will receive $2.5 billion in military aid, that’s $7 million dollars every day. Meanwhile the people of Gaza are starved of essential resources by Israel’s inhuman blockade.

Barack Obama never loses an opportunity to say that he will always be a "true friend" of Israel and we are unlikely to hear from him a word of criticism about the Apartheid Wall.

But then Obama has a history on Apartheid walls. In 2006, when he was a supposedly progressive Illinois senator, he horrified immigrant rights advocates when he voted in favour of a Republican bill to authorize the construction of a 700-mile (1,100 kilometre) fence along the US-Mexico border.

This video shows the reality of the "Apartheid Wall". See also John Rees’s short film Timeline: Palestine, which describes the story of how the state of Israel was born out of terror, war, conquest and the dispossession of the Palestinian people.