Through the Heart

The graffiti artists have barely begun. There are a few slogans sprayed in red or black on the tall slabs of grey concrete - "Welcome to the Ghetto" and the like - but the elaborate murals and lurid colours of the Berlin wall or Belfast peace line are yet to appear. This wall is too new for that.

Israel calls it the security barrier, necessary to prevent would-be suicide bombers coming in from the West Bank. Bit by bit it is going up across those lands, sometimes in the form of a tight wire fence, sometimes solid concrete eight metres high - as it is here.

Except here is not what most people would think of as the West Bank. This is Jerusalem, the city Israel claims as its "eternal and undivided capital". While most eyes have been on the barrier as it stretches north and south, few have noticed the journey the wall is making in and around Jerusalem itself - snaking its way from neighbourhood to neighbourhood, sometimes even street to street. When it's done it should stretch for 100km; more than 20km are up already.

What's happening is not just the biggest change to the city's map since 1967 - and the first time Jerusalem has been walled in since 1535. It also represents what could prove a fatal blow to the only vision of Middle East peace that enjoys global approval: the eventual partition of the land into two states, one for Palestinians and one for Israelis. The Jerusalem wall could drive a stake through that plan's heart.

Not that the idea makes no sense. However depressing it might be to separate people with a barrier, there is a rationale. Almost all peace plans envisage an eventual division of Jerusalem, with each half serving as the capital of its respective state. Few are unrealistic enough to imagine the city surviving as a single, integrated whole. Besides, that is not its history. Jerusalemites have lived separately since the 11th century, when the city was first divided into quarters. Today it is already separated de facto: Israelis rarely venture east, Palestinians steer clear of the west. If those divisions have to be marked with a physical boundary, even a wall, then it would be dismal but not a catastrophe.

Or so says Daniel Seidemann, a US-born lawyer waging a lonely campaign through the Israeli courts to keep tabs on the wall's meandering path - and to prevent it wreaking irreversible damage to the prospects for peace. "Neither Palestinians nor Jews have been blessed with Scandinavian temperaments," he says. "We need it."

The problem is how the wall is being built: unilaterally and along a route that could exacerbate a conflict it was meant to solve.

It looks bizarre, especially here in the residential Arab neighbourhood of Abu Dis. It stands right at the end of what was a throbbing main road, as if dropped there overnight, turning a crossroads into a sudden dead end. You can still see, peeking over the top, the white-stone bricks of the houses on the other side, proof that this is no natural boundary. It is as if a massive border has been planted in the middle of a suburban street.

The Palestinians on the wrong side feel as if someone has just pressed on an artery: Jericho Road was their main access into Jerusalem and now it is blocked. What's more, their neighbourhood has been severed in two: neighbours cut off from neighbours, friends from friends, families from each other.

The strange thing is, most of the wall does not separate Palestinians from Israelis, but Palestinians from Palestinians. By hugging to the path of the municipal boundary - a notional line recognised by no government in the world besides Israel - the wall slices through Palestinian neighbourhoods like Abu Dis. If the logic of the wall is security - keeping Palestinian suicide bombers out - then its path is hard to fathom: why are some Arabs in and some out?

It's not as if the wall-builders stick faithfully to the municipal line in all places. Drive along it and you soon see that the wall bobs and weaves, usually to ensure that Israeli neighbourhoods are included and Arab ones kept out: it loops out to take in the Jewish holy site of Rachel's Tomb, for example, but swerves in to exclude the Arab neighbourhoods on the Anata Ridge. Seidemann estimates that such "gerrymandering" will leave between 60,000 and 80,000 East Jerusalem Arabs outside the city limits.

That will cut them off from a vital source of economic activity: plenty of Palestinians currently rely on Jerusalem as a source of work. But those Arabs who find themselves inside the wall are not in such luck either. Until now they have been woven into the West Bank economy, giving them access to cheaper food, services and labour: the wall will cut them off.

At its simplest, the barrier will make daily life a misery. Already children in the Kafr Akab neighbourhood north of the city are finding that a journey to school that used to take 20 minutes can now take two to three hours, as nine-year-olds wait in line at checkpoints. That hardship, long routine for West Bank Palestinians, is about to become a fact of life for the Arabs of East Jerusalem.

This is Israel's first grave error. For decades, East Jerusalemites have been quietly ambivalent. Some Palestinians accuse them of enjoying their extra economic advantage, keeping their distance from the national struggle lest they jeopardise their own position. That could be about to change. The delicate ambivalence of four decades is about to be shattered by a wall that literally tells East Jerusalemites whose side they are on. Pessimists fear that, just as a barrier goes up to fend off suicide bombers from the West Bank, a new generation is being recruited inside Jerusalem.

But the second error is the wall's impact on the landscape, political and geographic. The so-called E1 plan, on the brink of implementation, calls for a "bubble", a loop of wall that would lasso round the mega-settlement of Ma'ale Adumim east of Jerusalem, ensuring it stays on the Israeli side. In that one move, the West Bank would be cut in two, a canton of Ramallah to the north and a canton of Bethlehem to the south. If the West Bank is dismembered like that, it could never become the contiguous, viable Palestinian state that even President Bush says he supports.

Suppose E1 never goes ahead. The policy of "filling in" the Israeli side of the line - packing, say, the space between Jerusalem and Bethlehem with settlements and people - will have the same effect: rendering the future Palestine unsustainable. After all, the wall as currently planned puts 50% of the West Bank in Israeli hands.

Not many Israelis seem to have woken up to this yet, still less the Americans who used to keep such a close eye on any changes to Jerusalem, knowing its radioactive sensitivity throughout the Middle East. But they should. For if this wall ends up making a two-state solution impossible and a single state inevitable, it will be Israelis who suffer - by losing the very national home this wall is meant to protect.