Trump invokes Israeli apartheid wall to justify Mexico border barrier
US President Donald Trump has invoked an Israeli-made separation wall in the occupied Palestinian territories to defend his proposed security barrier on the US-Mexico border.
“Israel built a wall, 99.9 percent successful. Won’t be any different for us,” Trump said Friday, referring to the so-called Israeli “apartheid wall” that separates Jerusalem al-Quds from the West Bank.
The president made the remarks during a speech in the White House Rose Garden, after signing into law a bipartisan legislation that ended a month-long government shutdown over the funding of his controversial border wall.
Trump has time and again touted his wall strategy as the only “real” border security option to stem the flow of illegal immigration and drug trafficking from the south of the border.
Israel began building the 712-kilometer barrier of towering concrete walls, barbed-wire fences, trenches and closed military roads inside the occupied West Bank back in 2002.
Just like Trump, Israeli officials have claimed that the wall addresses the regime’s security concerns and provides safety for thousands of Israeli settlers who live behind it.
This is while the International Court of Justice said in 2004 that the apartheid wall violated international law and urged Israel to remove it.
Regardless, however, Israel has also set up a barbed tape fence 5-8 meters high along the 230-km frontier with Egypt's Sinai Peninsula for similar purposes.
The regime recently unveiled the so-called “apartheid road,” a relatively long stretch of highway just outside al-Quds which featured an eight-meter-high wall that put Palestinian drivers on the western side and Israeli settlers on the eastern side.
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Trump made the wall one of the key promises of his 2016 presidential campaign. His attempts to deliver on that promise, however, have fallen short amid a dispute with congressional Democrats over the $5.7 billion he has requested to construct the wall.
The row led to a partial government shutdown on December 22, a 36-day closure that damaged the country's economy and caused financial problems for hundreds of thousands of federal workers who missed their first paycheck of 2019 as a result.
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