A just wall

Anton La Guardia says that the Palestinians are co-authors of their own tragedy

The road from the Jordan river to Jerusalem is one of the loveliest in the Holy Land, a half-hour excursion through biblical history and religious mysticism. Starting below sea level in Jericho, it rises through the desert, the air thinning, cooling and becoming more damp as it reaches Jerusalem.

The first glimpse of the holy city is a line of three towers on the ridge: the spire of the Russian Ascension Church, the bell tower of the Augusta Victoria hospital, and the jutting concrete finger of the Hebrew university. These silhouettes have always evoked, for me, the 'three trees on the low sky', T.S. Eliot's allusion to the crucifixion in 'Journey of the Magi'.

1 travelled this road with undiminished pleasure over the eight years that I was based in Jerusalem as a journalist. But these days such a journey is impossible. Visiting Jerusalem earlier this month, I found the road brutally cut off by a tall, grey wall. The curtain of dull cement was livened up only by protest graffiti that proclaimed: 'Stop This Wall. It's Worse than Apartheid.'

Though I had often read about Israel's 'security barrier', my first encounter with it came as a rude surprise. It was like discovering that a close friend has had her leg amputated and feeling a sense of revulsion at the disfigured beauty.

The government of Arid l Sharon says the harrier — a network of fences with hightech sensors and stretches of concrete wall — is designed to keep suicide bombers out of Israel.

The bloodletting of the past four years may have convinced Sharon to force through his plan to withdraw unilaterally from the Gaza Strip despite the threats to the survival of his government, and even his own life. But in the West Bank, he is unilaterally building a fortified new border designed to consolidate Israel's grip on key parts of the territory.

The suicide bombers may think that after their 'victory' in Gaza, they need to make just one more push to get the Israelis out of the West Bank. Instead they have given Sharon the rationale to fence Palestinians into reservations.

Israel says the barrier is designed to 'separate' Arab from Jew for the sake of both, but in practice it separates Arab from Arab. Israelis and foreigners can get through the checkpoints, but most Palestinians cannot. West Bank Arabs, for instance, are banned from Arab East Jerusalem, so students are kept away from schools and universities, patients away from hospitals and traders away from their markets. A Palestinian friend has had to move house just to stay on the right side of the wall and protect his family's right to live in Jerusalem. In the name of preserving the 'unity' of Jerusalem, Israel is strangling the Arab half of the city.

Israeli officials like to produce charts showing the sharp reduction in attacks since construction of the wall began in 2002. Indeed, an air of normality has returned to much of Israel. In Tel Aviv, I dined carefree at a packed beachside restaurant, albeit with a guard checking bags at the entrance. Most Israelis here could not wait for the barrier to be completed, and to hell with the inconvenience caused to Palestinians and the niceties of international law.

'The fence is a passive measure,' explains E., one of the military architects of the barrier, who did not want to be identified. 'It saves lives every day, and nobody has been killed by a fence. Anybody can get through it, hut you cannot get through without being detected. Then it becomes a race, with the bomber trying to reach the target before we reach the bomber.'

At a military command post near Qalqiliya, Israeli officers show off their electronic wizardry. Any contact with the fence sets off an alarm — in this case the incongruous thudding bars from a song by Queen: 'Dum! Dum! Dum! Another one bites the dust!' The model for the barrier is the fence around the Gaza Strip that has stopped all but a handful of suicide attackers. In contrast, scores of bombers have set out from the West Bank. E. maintains that 'security' was the principal consideration in choosing the route. But security in Israel is an elastic concept, and a highly political issue. As well as the lie of the terrain and the best angles for security cameras, E. accepts that 'demography' was a central factor — Israeli demography, that is.

Israel's barrier would be shorter, and arguably simpler to control, if it simply followed the 'Green Line', the pre-1967 ceasefire line. Instead the barrier seeks to include as many Israelis as possible, and therefore as many settlements as possible. While the Gaza fence goes around the edge, the West Bank barrier creates a territorial Swiss cheese, with large holes gouged out of the occupied territories, for example around Jerusalem.

On its convoluted course, the barrier creates a noose around Qalqiliya, cutting off farmers from their lands and water, while contorting itself to incorporate Jewish settlements.

For Michael Tarazi, the legal adviser to Palestinian negotiators, the barrier has nothing to do with security and everything to do with grabbing land. 'Israel wants as much land as possible with as few Palestinians as possible. That consideration is what drives everything from settlement policy to home demolition. The wall is part of a single strateg.' In East Jerusalem, he showed me at least two gaps in the wall through which Palestinians trudged wearily clutching their belongings in plastic bags. They could just as easily have been suicide bombers. 'Great security,' he said scathingly.

But Palestinians are not simply victims of Israel. They are also co-authors of their own tragedy. When I first arrived in Jerusalem in 1990, there was no sign of the Green Line, or any security border. You could find yourself straying into the middle of a riot.

Then suicide bombers started to attack Israeli cities in 1994, prompting Israel to set up checkpoints along the 'seams'; then came a more rigid system of 'closures' of Palestinian cities and restrictions on Arabs using main roads.

The idea of building a physical barrier of walls and fences in the West Bank is a leftwing notion that was only grudgingly taken up by Sharon. His Likud party and other right-wing factions, believing until recently in the notion of 'Greater Israel', long feared it might become a future partition border. Had it not been for the intensity of suicide bombings, Sharon would not have mustered the political will to build the barrier.

In the name of 'liberation'. Palestinian suicide bombers have helped to erase the Green Line. They have become Sharon's accomplices, and should not be surprised if he now puts up his wall where it suits him best.

Anton La Guardia is the diplomatic editor of the Daily Telegraph and author of Holy Land, Unholy War: Israelis and Palestinians