Life Against the Wall

The Auynaf family was one of the wealthiest in Qalqiliya before the wall
ruined them. They spent $200,000 on their home with its sloping terra-cotta-tiled roof, its well-tended
garden. It looks like the homes in Tel Aviv's middle-class suburbs. Once the wall went up, the family's
car-parts business was wiped out. Her husband makes less than 10 percent of what he once earned.
He has trouble shipping car parts into the walled enclosure and often cannot reach suppliers. Customers,
those in Israel and in other areas of the West Bank, can no longer get to his store. He does not have
a permit to drive the family car through the checkpoint. He must stand in line, often for several
hours, to go in or out. He is away now. He is desperately trying to salvage his business. She hopes
he will be home tonight, but she does not know. The lines at the checkpoint are long. Sometimes the
soldiers get tired or bored or surly and turn people away until the next morning. "We talk and talk
about how we are going to survive, what we are going to do," she says.

On the second floor of the house is a balcony. She hangs laundry there.
Her only view is the wall. The other morning she was hanging laundry to dry, and she heard singing.
The song was by Fadl Shaker, a popular Arab singer. The singer had a sweet voice. "You who are
far away," the words go, "do not forget me. When I fall asleep I think only of your eyes. I think only
of you."

Her five boys were in the yard. They began to sing along. There was a chorus
of voices, the sweet voice and the voices of the children. She looked into the glaring sunlight to
find the singer and saw an Israeli soldier in his green uniform standing on the earthen mound
on the Israeli side of the wall, the mound onto which the army drives jeeps in order to peer down on
those below. He looked like an Olympian god. She thinks he was a Druze, one of the tiny, nominally
Islamic sect whose members live near the Syrian border and serve in the Israeli army and border police.
"He waved when the song finished," she says. "The children waved back. Then he disappeared behind
the wall."

A few days later she was on the balcony again, pinning up clothes. She
looked up and saw a soldier watching her from the top of the mound. There was no singing. His raspy
voice crackled over the megaphone mounted on the jeep, ordering her to go inside and close the shutters.
She obeyed. Her wet laundry lay behind in the basket. "I live in a zoo," she says. "They come and watch
me. I am a caged animal. They have the freedom to come and go, to look or not look, to be kind or cruel.
I have no freedom."

She fears madness. She points to the battered wreck of an elderly woman
200 feet away under a fig tree. "The wall was the end," Auynaf says. "When it was finished, she went
mad."

We watch the woman, who is on her knees, keening slightly. I walk down
the road and kneel in the shade beside her. She is missing many teeth. Her plaited hair is thick and
white. Her name is Fatme Khalil al-Bas. She is 72. Her husband died a few years ago. Next to us are the
shattered walls of an old stone house. It was her house. She was born in it and lived there until Israeli
tanks blew it up in the 1967 war. She and her family continued to work the fields around the wreck of
their home, never rebuilding. When the Israelis built the wall, they seized her land, and she was
left with a small garden lot. Her fields, the ones where she worked as a young girl, as a mother,
and as a grandmother, are inaccessible, now overgrown and untended. She left her small apartment
in town to sleep under the fig tree. She has built an improvised shelter, little more than old boards
placed across the branches. In the small patch of land, she grows tomatoes and cucumbers.

Much of what she says is incoherent. She rails against her husband's
second wife and then says softly, "He was a good man." She spits out the names of Ariel Sharon and George
W. Bush and Yasser Arafat, hissing with anger. She vows to protect her little plot with her life,
even though she says she is afraid at night, "afraid as a woman to sleep alone on the ground, afraid
for my honor."

I stand to leave. She looks at me with plaintive eyes. I turn and see Auynaf
watching us. "I am a bird in a net," the elderly wo- man tells me.

Qalqiliya IS a ghetto. It is completely surrounded by the wall, with
one small Israeli manned checkpoint to let its residents pass into the West Bank or return home.
Only those with special Israeli-issued permits can enter the town. It is not the Lodz ghetto or the
Warsaw ghetto, but it is a ghetto that would be recognizable to the 16th-century Jews in Rome who
were herded into a walled enclave by Pope Paul IV in 1555 and stranded there for generations. Qalqiliya,
like all ghettos cut off from the outside world, is dying. And dozens of ringed ghettos like it are
being created as the serpentine barrier snaking its way through the length of the West Bank
lays down nooses around Palestinian cities, towns, villages, and fields.

I walk down the main street. There is little traffic. Shop after shop
is shuttered and closed, the huge metal doors secured to the ground with thick padlocks. There are
signs in Hebrew and Arabic, fading reminders of a time when commerce was possible. Before the wall
was built, 42,000 people lived here. Mayor Marouf Zahran says at least 6,000 have left since the
Intifada. The unemployment rate is close to 70 percent. Beyond the wall, in the distance, I can see
the tops of sky- scrapers in Tel Aviv. Qalqiliya feels like a plague town, quarantined, which may
not be far from the truth. After suicide bombers slipped into Israel from here, Israeli offi-cials
reportedly began to refer to it as a "hotel for terrorists."

There are hundreds of acres of farmland on the other side of the wall,
some of the best in the West Bank, and that land now is harder and harder to reach given the gates, checkpoints,
and closures. The 32 farming villages on the outskirts of Qalqiliya are cut off from their land.
Olive groves, with trees hundreds of years old, have been bulldozed into the ground. The barrier
is wiping out the middle class in the West Bank, the last bulwark here against Islamic fundamentalism.
It is plunging the West Bank into the squalor that defines life in the Gaza Strip, where Palestinians
are struggling to survive on less than $2 a day. It will create perhaps 80 ghettos.

A U.N. report projects that when the barrier is finished in 2005, as many
as 95,000 people will be held within such enclaves. Israel will administer little Palestinian
Ban-tustans. It is ethnic cleansing, less overtly violent than the kind that I, as a journalist,
saw carried out by the Serbs in Bosnia, but as effective. Israeli fanatics, some of whom serve in
Ariel Sharon's government, use the term "transfer." Palestinians say that this is the true intent
behind the construction of the barrier: to seize and depopulate swaths of their land. Thousands
of Palestinians are leaving, never to return.