SKIP TO THE NEXT STOP: Remaking Israel

The ground has been cleared between Jerusalem and Bethlehem for construction of the new separation wall.

At 9:30 in the morning I leave the mountains, exiting the cool air of the border hills, circling south into the heartland of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In 109-degree heat, I drive along Israel's border with Jordan. First the air is so humid my hands stick to the steering wheel, then so dry my contact lenses bug off my eyeballs. I've spelled out "TV" in duct tape on my windshield to deter threats from West Bank snipers, rock throwers and checkpoint patrols. Between checkpoints I speed, because I feel like a moving target.

Entering Jerusalem, I circle around closed streets and mobile checkpoints to the apartment of my friend, an Israeli-American television producer. She lives a block away from the house of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. At night I wake to the sounds of helicopters, the call to prayer, occasional sirens. Behind his walled compound in the heart of West Jerusalem, Sharon might also be listening to these sounds -- evidence of a warring, divided city.

Women walk outside Bethlehem toward a checkpoint to enter Jerusalem.

Such closeness of peoples is how I remembered this constrictive, sprawling village of a city. In my old neighborhood of Abu Tor, a Jewish neighbor recalled waking in the morning as a child to the sound of his father shooting in the air "so they'll know we're here." A Palestinian neighbor could recite the names of dozens of local families who had become refugees over front lines they crossed, never to return. They told me that before the intifada of the 1980s, a joint Arab-Jewish committee had met to resolve local problems. But by the late 1990s, Jews and Arabs barely said hello to each other. "United" Jerusalem still had two separate commercial centers, transportation hubs, school and banking systems, and parks. At night, neighbors would blast each other with messianic Hebrew pop songs and Arabic imports about love, desire and Palestine. Jews and Arabs did not speak, but you could read the news of the day in the police docket of noise complaints.

While I lived there, the Oslo accords were creating countless new borders in the form of checkpoints. Throughout the West Bank, the Palestinian Authority controlled most Palestinian urban areas; Israel and the Palestinians jointly controlled areas surrounding Palestinian cities; and Israel controlled Jewish settlements and rural land tracts.

Now the Seam Line Project is stretching Israeli-controlled Jerusalem to touch Bethlehem in the south and Ramallah in the north. It seems that Palestine -- despite the spread of its workers, shoppers, bombers, infiltrators -- is shrinking.

To see the borders on the ground, I travel north from Jerusalem. The main checkpoint on Highway 1 is closed. Seeking an opening, I drive in a circle and advance and retreat three or four times over the course of an hour and a half before finally entering Ramallah from the university town of Bir Zeit. Littering the cliffside street I'm on are piles of dry, orangeish stones, dumped there by Israeli bulldozers to block side roads, only to be dispersed by Palestinian drivers.

Rifka and her father pick grapes outside their Ramallah home while a curfew prevents them from leaving their walled yard.

In Ramallah, the stillness of curfew is a visible border around the city. Mine is the only car in motion. A few kids, tired of restrictions, skid by on bikes. The streets are filled with armored personnel carriers, piles of rubble and stones, and overturned dumpsters. Burn and tire marks brand the bitumen, graffiti and martyr posters layer the walls.

Near the shambles of the compound of Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasir Arafat, I call to a resident who greets me by the door of his front yard. He does not break curfew by exiting his yard: This is his border. He invites me in. His only child, 14-year-old Rifka, smiles shyly and sweetly as she brings me tea.

Rifka attends school about one day a week, when the curfew is lifted. The direct route is closed, so she walks through the mountains with a 13-year-old neighbor. Yet Rifka and her parents talk not with anger, but with sadness. They just want this to end, they say. To move. They hear the Israeli bulldozers steadily destroying Arafat's compound and the tanks down the street grinding out the auditory lines of the border. They are confined to their courtyard, where plump, sweet grapes grow in the arbor between indoor life and the war. It's as if each Palestinian is surrounded by an individual border, they say.

Israeli and Palestinian Officials Square Off: The War of the Maps

Later I talk by cell phone with Major General Uzi Dayan, Israel's former national security advisor, who directed early plans for the Seam Line Project. "This fence signifies that we failed to achieve an agreement with the Palestinians," he says. "I feel sorry. I feel strongly about it. It could have been much better. This is not the way to build a policy and a strategy." But Israel has no choice, he says. "If we don't have a partner, what do you suggest to do?"

Fencing near a checkpoint between Bethlehem and Jerusalem.

The barrier, says the general, will safeguard Israeli aims. "We have to provide personal security and safety to Israelis -- now. In the future, we have to retain a solid Jewish majority." The fence will draw West Bank Jewish settlements into Israel and exclude nearby West Bank Palestinian villages. Jewish demographic primacy, he says, "is the only way in the long run to be a Jewish democratic nation and Jewish democratic society. It's a delicate balance."

The Seam Line Project, he suggests, can be anything Israel wants it to be -- including the foundation for a two-state solution. "Israel hasn't yet decided the future of this fence," says Dayan. "We are leaving the door open to any arrangement and negotiation."

Khalil Tafakji, Palestinian Authority geographer, with a map.

Khalil Tafakji is the head geographer of the Palestinian Authority. He has devoted his professional life to articulating a Palestinian map and says that his experience can predict the future of this would-be border. During the 1980s, funded by the PLO through the Arab Studies Society, he traveled all of Israel and Palestine in his car, gathering data to produce the first Palestinian maps of unrecognized Palestinian villages inside Israel and Jewish settlements in the West Bank. In recent years he has trundled his laptop to negotiation meetings in order to present a multilayered mapped response to Israeli proposals, showing the aquifers, quarries, roads and populations under discussion.

"According to my experience at Camp David and Taba [negotiations in January 2001], the new line [the Seam Line Project barrier] under construction is close to the Israeli scenario about the future of borders," he says. He believes that Israel is effecting, on far different lines, the kind of partition that was first recommended by the United Nations in 1947. Not calling this fence a border, says Tafakji, will trap thousands of Palestinians between countries. Calling it a border will effectively be a unilateral declaration of frontiers.

"Do you think that the Israelis spend around $400 million to build the separation line," says Tafakji, "and in the end they say this is not a border?"

"What will happen to all your maps?" I ask.

He winces and looks out his window, toward the checkpoint. "For the archives," he says. "I leave it to history."