MORE than just a safety belt, as Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is attempting to sell the idea, the Israeli wall is a measure of force designed to directly intimidate 30% of the Arab population in the West Bank. Initiated June 16, 2002 and 347 kilometers in length, it has the veiled purpose of perpetuating an illegal border demarcation as the foretaste of an independent Palestine, in the event of some of the many Middle East peace initiatives bearing fruit in the near future.

In the last few days, a telling photograph has been circulating on the Internet: A father from the enclosed Palestinian side hoisting his young son over the electrified wire in the hope that his relatives on the other side will take hold of him. The break up of Palestinian families is just one of the many destabilizing effects of the Israeli occupation.

The wall is also related to the control of hydraulic resources (69% of the water mass and 36 important drinking water sources are located in the Arab zone), the seizure of the best cultivable land (14.5%), preventing access to employment in Israel, closing roads and highways or converting the sector of east Jerusalem into an island by 18 kilometers of it encircling the Holy City.

In essence, it is also a way of dividing the geography of a nation into different cantons (separating 14 villages), in order to create an administrative and territorial fragility in the future, making in practice an ungovernable monster: the phantom state.

The wall is born of the distortion of some of the demarcation lines unilaterally established by Israel following the Six Day War, given that just an irrelevant 11% of the current section fell within the UN’s so-called "green line" or the old pre-1967 border.

Since Sharon presented the plans for the wall in its totality to the Israeli public last October 24, many organizations and the United Nations in particular have reminded that government of the many violations of international law it is incurring. It is defying what is established in Article 52 of the 1907 Hague Convention and ignoring the regulations stipulated in the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits the destruction and confiscation of property in occupied territories.

For its part, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) as a whole, and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine as one of its member parties, have criticized the racist attitude of the Israeli government in its persistence to complete the task when many people worldwide are already comparing it with symptoms of South African apartheid.

A report from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs echoed Palestinians’ fears by indicating that the lives of some 680,000 people in the so-called semi-autonomous territories are at risk, given that some 400,000 of them located to the east of the barrier will be forced to cross it on a daily basis to reach their agricultural plots, jobs and families, whilst a further 11,000 will remain virtually trapped altogether.

Along with various attempts at dissuasion through letters from its Foreign Ministry, on December 11, the Palestinian side, represented by Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia, called for a process of profound reflection in the interests of avoiding major setbacks within bilateral relations that would result in acts of resistance and self-defense in the face of new Israeli annexations in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.

"It would be a terrible error to impose a solution on us by force," Qureia told the influential Israeli daily Maariv. Those words were leveled as a result of a Sharon "initiative" to contribute more million-dollar funds to the security strategy in which the wall is the key bastion. The World Bank itself has said that the construction of each kilometer of the wall costs more than 1.5 million Euros.

"Dismantling the settlements is a positive thing, but if Sharon wants to construct a fence and use it to annex Palestinian land, that is unacceptable. It won’t help, it won’t be a way out, it will only lead to disaster and unnecessary deaths on both sides", insisted the Palestinian National Authority’s prime minister.

Tel Aviv is disguising its colonialist strategy with the announcement that it is to close down dozens of the 150 illegal settlements. It is not committing itself to defining steps in line with international law through a withdrawal of its pre-1967 positions, but is manipulating the situation in order to maintain almost 60% of the West Bank, a significant section of the Gaza strip and 2% of Jerusalem.