Jerusalem's growing web of walls

That July night, Israeli border police arrested Mr. Dirawi and 15 others in his village for entering Israel illegally. Dirawi was born here, just south of East Jerusalem. He was living here in 1967 when Israel declared the area part of greater Jerusalem. The villagers weren't told until 1992. When they applied for proper identification as Jerusalem residents, they were denied, making them illegally present on land they had never left. Now they are trapped.

Part 1 An overview of the barrier's dimensions Part 2 The barrier's impact on Palestinians Part 3 Israeli victims talk about the barrier Part 4 Jerusalem's growing web of walls Part 5 Sharon's plans, made concrete Map The wall in Israel Graphic Fence to contain violence

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Dirawi and his neighbors don't have the ID to enter Jerusalem, to the north. An Israeli settlement hems them in on the west. To the south and east, Israel's new security barrier cuts them off from Bethlehem, their urban hub, and the West Bank beyond. And as bulldozers blazed the barrier's path, the border police raids began.

"A government man came [in March] and said they want this area as a no man's land, that they'll cut our electricity and water," Dirawi says. "After this man, we've seen no good. Israel wants our land, but it doesn't want the people."

After three years of conflict that has claimed over 800 Israeli lives and shattered many more, Israelis desperately crave the safety that the barrier seems to offer.

They believe a physical divider will stop suicide bombers from entering Israel proper, despite events like the Oct. 4 suicide bombing in Haifa, where the barrier is already complete. On the other side of that divide, in the West Bank, the barrier's rapid construction is altering lives, the landscape and, critics say, foreclosing on the possibility of a viable Palestinian state - all factors that will deepen Palestinian anger and motivation to strike at Israel. As this is happening, the barrier is shaping the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in other ways. Indeed, the barrier's dusty path through Jerusalem highlights like nowhere else how Israel uses law, policy, and construction to control lands the Palestinians claim as their own.

"Jerusalem is being radically changed in a way it hasn't been for centuries," says Daniel Seideman, an Israeli lawyer who heads a group that provides planning services to residents of Palestinian East Jerusalem. "It's the first time there has been a serious intent to build a wall around the city since the 16th century," Mr. Seideman says. "It's certainly the biggest change to Jerusalem since 1967."

Though the US has said that the Palestinians must act first to stop militant violence, it has expressed concern about the barrier and raised the possibility of financial penalties against Israel.

"The wall is not really consistent with our view of what the Middle East will one day have to look like, two states living side by side in peace," US National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice told reporters on Sept. 22. "We understand that the Israelis have some security concerns [but] it is extremely important, if it is going to be built, that it not intrude on the lives of the Palestinians, and most importantly, that it not look as if it's trying to prejudge the outcome of a peace agreement."

Jerusalem has always been a crucible for ethnic, religious, and political tensions - "a golden basin filled with scorpions," one Arab resident wrote 10 centuries ago. A metaphor for peace, holiness, and the divine for adherents to the three major monotheistic faiths, the city has endured massacres, sieges, war, desolation, and repeated rebuilding over its 4,000-year history.

For Jews, as Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon recently said, it is "the capital of the Jewish people for the last 3,000 years and the united and undivided capital of Israel forever."

Arab Christians see Jerusalem as the birthplace of their faith, while Arab Muslims declare it the third-holiest city in Islam, the place where Mohammad rose to heaven to receive the word of God and upon returning reportedly said that, "to die in Jerusalem is almost like dying in heaven."

Religion infuses and complicates the political struggle over Jerusalem. It underlies the decision by foreign mediators to make the city a "final status" negotiating issue, leaving the thorniest topics to the last. And it's one more reason why barrier construction here is so problematic.

Israel has already built 84 miles of barrier that include two sections the Ministry of Defense calls "Circling Jerusalem." Totaling almost 11 miles, these two barriers, when seen on maps, resemble giant brackets separating Jerusalem from Palestinian neighborhoods to the north and south. A third Jerusalem section was approved on Aug. 20, the day after a Hamas suicide bombing claimed 20 lives and galvanized support for the barrier (see part 3 of this series online at www.csmonitor.com/barrier).

This section will run some 38 miles through the eastern part of the city. Safety does not come cheap. At $4 million per mile, the barrier's price tag will reach at least $1 billion, but Israelis want a divider as quickly as possible, no matter the cost.

Controversy is slowing things down. US Secretary of State Colin Powell has repeatedly and publicly called the barrier "a problem" most recently on Oct. 3.

This is because the barrier veers from the Green Line border between Israel and Palestinian territory and dives into the West Bank, where Palestinians hope to establish their state.

The most contentious barrier section runs down a central section of the West Bank near the settlement of Ariel and would involve a 12-mile indent if Ariel were to be included. Israel approved that 270-mile barrier section Oct. 1, leaving a gap in the barrier opposite the settlement.

Israeli media and analysts widely expect Ariel to be included inside the barrier in a few months. In the meantime, four separate barriers and obstacles will be built east of Ariel and other neighboring settlements.

In Washington meetings on Sept. 21, Israeli envoys told the Bush Administration that the barrier's route has been determined only by security considerations and is not intended to create future political borders.

The US concern is that the Ariel diversion, along with other detours, would make it hard to create a Palestinian state out of one, uninterrupted piece of land. If Israel extends the barrier around Ariel, the US has threatened to deduct monies from the $9 billion in loan guarantees it gave Israel this year.

Israel media noted, however, the US silence about the Cabinet approval of the Ariel section. In the Ma'ariv newspaper, analyst Ben Caspit noted that Israeli politicians expect the US to disengage from the conflict over the coming year due to coming elections and other foreign concerns, thereby allowing Israel more freedom to act.

That has yet to happen though. On Oct. 3, Secretary Powell said the administration was having "intense discussions" about Israel's plan to leave gaps in the barrier. "The gaps in and of themselves do not satisfy me," he told the Washington Post. "The question is what becomes of the gaps in due course.... We have not yet come to a conclusion about what to do and what our action should be."

The US has doubts about the Jerusalem barrier. This is a sensitive area where the barrier will have a substantial impact on residents, and from a security perspective, its route is counterintuitive. As it winds around the hills of East Jerusalem, the barrier dips beyond Israel's boundaries for the Jerusalem municipality and into the West Bank, so that some 60,000 to 70,000 West Bank Palestinians will be on the "Israeli" side of the fence. At the same time, Palestinians with Jerusalem ID and lives that revolve around the city will be left outside.

Inside the city, surveillance cameras will oversee a 26-foot-high wall, high tech intrusion-detection fences and a patrol road. This barrier won't divide Palestinians from Israelis.

Instead, it will separate Palestinians from Palestinians, cutting people off from their families, jobs, schools, hospitals, community graveyards and land. Already, students, housewives, and others are climbing over or squeezing through gaps in the 8-foot concrete blocks plunked down in the middle of East Jerusalem's Abu Dis neighborhood.

"There is so much human pressure on both sides of this wall," says Mr. Seideman, looking down on the concrete divider from the hilltop courtyard of a local hotel. A wiry, rumpled man with intense green eyes, he anchors his conversational flood with facts, figures and historical detail.

Below him, the makeshift concrete wall squats along the edge of a dusty, litter-strewn street, a precursor to the barrier to come. The registrar's office of Al Quds University lies on one side. On the other, a gaggle of female students heave themselves up and through a chink in the barrier.

"While they can do it, people are going over the wall, under the wall, around the wall; residents have marked gaps in the slabs for people of various girths," Seideman says.

This barrier-induced pressure on communities in and around East Jerusalem is building. Seideman worries that it will radicalize one of the most peaceful Palestinian areas during this conflict. And many residents now wonder aloud whether they'll have to move to reach jobs and schools.

This pressure is amplified by other Israeli actions around the contested city - road creation, settlement expansion, and building restrictions on Palestinians. The overarching purpose, Israeli analysts say, is to shape Jerusalem's demographic profile and, by doing so, its future.

Next: A holy city grows increasingly divided