The effects of the fence are clearest in nearby Qalqilya, a major West Bank town that juts into Israel. It's just 10 miles to the Mediterranean from Qalqilya, at the point where the Jewish state is at its narrowest. Over the last couple of years, many attackers have set out from the city to wreak havoc in Israel. As a result, Qalqilya has been virtually cut off from the rest of the West Bank for more than two years. Now that cordon sanitaire has been made visible by high gray concrete walls and barbed wire fences on three sides. On the fourth side the army maintains a checkpoint. Everybody going in and out has to present papers, though trucks can haul their cargo back and forth without controls.

The results have been disastrous for Qalqilya, says Mayor Mahrouf Zahran. Unemployment in the town stands at 64 percent. Of the population of 41,000, 3,000 have left town over the last three years, mainly shop owners who have decided to make a new start elsewhere in the West Bank. In total, some 600 businesses have closed. Part of the reason why Qalqilya is walled off, rather than fenced, is that the Israelis want to prevent shooting at nearby Israeli fields, houses and a new toll road, the country's first. Earlier this month, a young girl was killed when she traveled with her family over the road. Mayor Zahran says that he favors good relations with the Israelis. He tells about past cooperation and how many people from Israel used to come shopping in Qalqilya.

"The wall will only cause more resentment and violence," the mayor says.

The fence also cuts many villages off from each other and from towns where essential services, such as schools, hospitals and markets, are located. Abdelkarim Ahmed, the mayor of the nearby village of Azoun Athme, has tears in his eyes when he looks at his house across the road. "I will be cut off from the village by the wall that will run along this road," he says. To get to his job, he will have to drive around it to a gate several miles down the road, a delay of at least 15 minutes. "But for many pupils of our school who live nearby it will be much tougher," Ahmed says. "I don't know how they can keep coming; they used to just walk into the village but that will no longer be possible. The Israelis have offered to build a tunnel underneath the road," he says, "but that will cost millions and the village will have to pay for it. Besides, the army will then keep security control over the tunnel."

In Israel, all these complaints cut very little ice. Sitting in an easy chair in his air-conditioned office in the Knesset, Israel's parliament, the powerful chairman of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, Yuval Steinitz, does not want to let the concerns of a "few Palestinian farmers" interfere with the security needs of his country. Steinitz, a member of Sharon's ruling Likud Party, vehemently rejects a question about the trajectory of the wall. "Why is it that people always ask me about the viability of a Palestinian state?" he fumes. "What about the viability of Israel, what about our right to survival?" He maintains that there can be no return to the borders that Israel had between the end of the war of independence in 1949 and 1967 when it conquered the West Bank. "There have to be security zones," says Steinitz, but then he backtracks on whether these zones are already included in the planning for the wall.

Steinitz is a former member of Peace Now; he went over to the Likud in 1994 when he concluded that the Oslo peace process would lead to disaster. With the air of a man who cannot keep himself from saying "I told you so," he insists that he wished things were different. He still wants his country to withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza, but only to "defensible" positions. Anyway, Steinitz says, it's the Palestinians' own fault that Israel is building the wall -- if they had not started with suicide bombings, it would never have come to this. "In Oslo, we agreed that the Palestinian Authority would be a demilitarized entity," he explains. "We have seen what such agreements count for." Steinitz says he still hopes that something will change on the Palestinian side, so that "then we may not have to build the wall and spend so much money on it." Even though he is one of the few people who should know, he cannot -- or will not -- say anything about the course of the rest of the wall.

Gerald Steinberg, a professor of political science and a strategic analyst at the Bar Ilan University near Tel Aviv, largely agrees with Steinitz. "It's a bit much that first the Palestinians don't want to negotiate with us anymore about borders, among other things, and they turn to violent means to get what they want, and then they complain when we unilaterally draw a line to defend ourselves," says Steinberg. He does agree, though, that the barrier has a political aspect despite the heated denials of the government. "All the twists and turns in the fence may look idiotic from the outside but actually it is very logical in the Israeli political reality," says Steinberg. "Every settlement wants to be included and they lobby the government. That is how the route is determined."

Ironically, the fence was largely a left-wing idea initially, pushed by prominent Labor Party politicians and meant to be built on or close to the green line. It was seen as a means of reasserting the old border, thereby making a withdrawal from the West Bank more likely and providing a defensive line at the same time. That's why it is still viewed with animosity by many on the right, despite the efforts of many settlements to be included on the "right side" of the separation. Many nationalists don't want to see any acknowledgement that even limited areas of the West Bank may have to be given up. The most extreme among them would rather see the whole Palestinian population expelled.

Still, the Palestinian use of the term "apartheid" in connection with the wall is misleading. The West Bank is occupied territory and its residents don't have the same rights as the citizens of Israel, Jewish or Arab. There is no systemized structure of racial discrimination in place that is comparable to the apartheid that used to define South African society. Where the apartheid claim does make some sense, though, is where it is used to describe the possibility of the Palestinians being forced into several, possibly three, separate enclaves, just like the South Africans tried to do with the black population in the so-called Bantustans. Sharon has in the past said he may support a Palestinian state on some 45 per cent of the West Bank that will include well over 90 per cent of the population. The Palestinians see the fence as another step toward the realization of such a plan.

Abdelatif Khader in Jayyous is among those who does call it apartheid. "They are extending the fence to include the settlement of Alfei Menashe," he says. "There are 5,000 settlers there. In Qalqilya, which is being very badly affected by the detour, you have more than 40,000 and in the villages nearby another 25,000 will suffer. Now you tell me, if 5,000 Israelis are more important than 65,000 Palestinians, is that not apartheid?"

Remarkably, though, even as Khader fulminates against the fence, he is preparing to live with it. In a nearby village, he has taken measures to have water delivered to fields on the other side that will be cut off. "I know it seems paradoxical and many people first said we should only resist," Khader acknowledges. "But if we don't take any steps to live with it for now, then we will certainly lose the land on the other side."

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