The wall that could divide Israel for ever

THE barrier is long. That is about the only thing you can say about it without one side or another complaining of bias. Almost everything about this enormous project is disputed, even the vocabulary used to describe it.

Some call it a wall, others say it is a fence. Most Israelis see it as a shield; Palestinians perceive it as a sword, hacking away at them and the land they claim. It is made of concrete and steel and razor wire but, despite its solid appearance, it changes shape and meaning depending on where you stand to view it and who you talk to.

From Bilal Rifai's house in the hilltop town of Salem in the north of Israel you can look down into the West Bank. The valley below is filled with olive trees and the air is perfumed by rosemary, sage and thyme. Bilal Rifai has many relatives on the other side of the valley.

He does not see much of them any more. There is a fence between them now.

Of course the wall is divisive.

That is what walls are for. It is being built to separate the majority of Israelis from the majority of Palestinians. It already divides Palestinians from friends and family-And, despite the overwhelming support of the Israeli public, it is beginning to cause divisions within Israeli society.

Last week, the Israeli Army's chief of staff, Moshe Yaalon, was named as the source of a critical attack on the government's policy of restricting the movement of Palestinians. And he said the army was unhappy with the proposed route of the fence.

General Danny Yatom, a former head of Israel's secret intelligence service, Mossad, is worried about a fence which carves out too much of the West Bank.

The government of Ehud Barak, in which Yatom served as his chief of staff, drew up plans for a fence when its negotiations with Yasser Arafat faltered.

But he envisaged a very different barrier. "We took into consideration the possibility that, on the other side of the fence, a Palestinian state would emerge," he told me. "There are many differences between [Sharon's] fence and our fence. This is something we never had in mind."

The barrier swerves deep into the West Bank, looping around Jewish settlements to bring them onto the "Israeli side" where the debate is dominated by the route of the wall, not its existence. Such a change has come about, in part, because of grief and fear.

These emotions are obvious at a kibbutz called Metzer, home to about 500 Israelis who prided themselves on good relations with their Arab neighbours.

For a while they even had a joint football team.

From the centre of the kibbutz you can hear the muezzin in the neighbouring village chanting from the minaret of the Mosque. While you listen, you can contemplate the memorial to five people murdered on this spot last November by a Palestinian gunman. Among his victims was a single mother who died trying to protect her sons.

Matan was five. Noam was four.

The gunman shot them too.

Dov Avital, the secretary of the kibbutz, says: "The kibbutz was in a state of shock and most of the people who were against the fence dropped their opposition because of fear." He points across the landscape, now dominated by the fence: "All of these are Arab villages and the first target is my kibbutz. We had the naive idea that 50 years of good relations with the Arabs would spare us from terror. Now people are more afraid and they want more protection."

From the kibbutz you can pick up Route 6 - a new highway running down through the country. The barrier swerves into the West Bank and back to the road again, before sweeping off in a large loop to encompass some Jewish town. It's a a regular reminder of fear, hatred and mistrust. It's like the fence farther north but there's an extra layer of defence here - a ditch on the Palestinian side to prevent anyone ramming through in a car.

As you approach the Palestinian towns of Tulkarem and Qalqilya, the fence solidifies into a massive concrete wall. It has been built in sections, each about six metres high, slotted together, side-by- side, to make an impenetrable barrier.

The wall shields the road from Palestinian view, protecting the drivers from snipers, but Israeli soldiers can still look down on the Palestinians from their positions at the top of concrete watchtowers.

From the Palestinian side the soldiers look like prison warders.

Israelis see them as a guard-force, patrolling the walls of a fortress.

"The purpose of the separation barrier is to keep armies of terrorists away from Jerusalem, away from the core of Jewish consciousness and history," says Professor Gerald Steinberg, director of the Program on Conflict Management and Negotiation at Barilan University. There is, he adds, another, longer-term concern. "There are about five-and-a-half million Jews in this area and about three- andahalf million Palestinians.

Palestinian birth-rate is much higher and over the next 20 to 40 years, Palestinians will become a majority. To preserve a Jewish state, where Jewish culture and history are dominant, we cannot live with a majority of Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims. We have to have separation on those grounds alone."

The barrier is growing on three sides of the disputed city of Jerusalem. At the Arab suburb of Abu Dis, on the eastern outskirts of the city, the wall cuts right through a crossroads on the old road to Jericho. It is covered in graffiti. One, in English, reads: "Ghetto Abu Dis."

But there are gaps where the concrete sections fail to mesh together and every day hundreds of Palestinians squeeze through on their way to work or school.

An Israeli patrol arrived while I was there and, after some shouted warnings to step away from the wall, the soldiers fired teargas into the crowd. There was chaos as people ran from the choking, stinging fumes. Men, women, elderly people with walking sticks, children carrying school books - everyone scurried away, coughing and weeping. I clambered over the wall there to get away from the gas and to meet Ziad abu Zayed - a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council.

"The wall," he says, "causes great suffering. Children cannot get to school.

Sick people cannot get to hospital. It is an apartheid wall and it is increasing hatred and will not bring security. It will prompt more Palestinians to kill themselves and kill Israelis with them."

I had to find another way back across the wall. At Abu Dis the soldiers were still there, turning everyone back. So I followed some young Palestinian men up a steep hillside track. Halfway up the hill, struggling terribly, was an old Palestinian woman - 76 years old, she said, and on her way to a hospital appointment in Jerusalem - hoping to avoid any army patrols which would turn her back. She walked slowly and cried freely as she talked.

We found ourselves on a patch of dusty white rock where the topsoil had been removed and the ground broken to receive the new fence. The clearing gave us respite from the climb but we could not stay long. We could have been caught by a military patrol. There have been many arrests there, say the Palestinians, and some beatings, too, they claim.

We could hear the bulldozers further round the hill. What exactly are they building? A prison? A fortress?

A folly? It is certainly a monument.

A monument to failure - the failure of understanding and tolerance.

. Michael Williams reports on the wall this week for BBC World Service Assignment.

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