Crossing from West Bank to Israel near Bethlehem.

My last night in Jerusalem, I go to dinner at the house of my friends Yosi and Emma. Yosi, who's Israeli, was until recently a cameraman for Associated Press television -- but he's just quit to move to London. Emma, from Holland, is a reporter for Dutch television. They both seem depleted, though they just had a month-long vacation. It's been a hard year. Both have reported on the war. Yosi recently performed his military reserve duty. He says the guys in his unit were in touch months in advance, discussing whether they'd show up for service. Three didn't want to do it. Then came a series of suicide bombs, one in the seaside town of Herzliya where Yosi's family lives. The men from his unit got a call to report for reserve duty within just a few hours. They all showed up.

Click through details of old walls in Jerusalem.

Emma says Yosi's army service made her reel: By day she was a journalist in an armored car and flak jacket, dodging the soldiers and their bullets, and by night she was a woman going to visit her lover on a military base.

Yosi tells me he's going hiking and swimming with friends the next day in Tantura. But nowhere in Israel, he makes clear, is far from the conflict. "Palestinians used to go swimming there," he says. "But we killed the Palestinians, and now we swim there in their place."

"Can you create a border by building a wall?" I ask them.

"Borders are much easier to create," says Yosi, "than to break down." On television, an Israeli comedian is impersonating one of Saddam Hussein's doubles, and another is playing the wheelchair-bound Hamas leader Sheikh Yassin as a soulful violinist.

"I think it's a great idea," says Yosi. "Build a wall. Separate us for a while. Let things calm down."

This land between Jerusalem and Bethlehem belongs to a mechanic who recently received confiscation orders because the Seam Line Project will be constructed on this property.

Walking home I pass tangles of jasmine, which remind me of my old house in Jerusalem, where so much jasmine grew outside the walkway and onetime border that the scent infused the building. Smells take you back. For the first time since I arrived, I recognize the place I once loved, the place that taught me how to be a reporter, that gave me endless conversations about life and death and politics.

But the old sense of prospect feels dim. On Gaza Street, I pass the new location of Café Moment. The old Café Moment, where I once drank mint tea, was blown up by a suicide bomber. More dust than jasmine seems to fill Jerusalem.

It's the dust of the Seam Line -- stitching that promises to connect rather than separate two parts. I try to imagine how this strange weave of concrete, concertina wire, dirt, ditches, electronic sensors, highway lane dividers, bypass roads, enclosed passageways, covered corridors and mobile checkpoints can hold a state together with the lands it occupies -- can bond Israel to Palestine -- yet also keep them separate. What I see is that everyone is living behind walls.

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Credits

About the Reporter
Shulman is currently a graduate student working on a joint Master's degree in Journalism and Middle East Studies. For two years in Jerusalem, she worked for the Israeli daily Ha'aretz-International Herald Tribune, did radio news reporting and freelanced. Her articles have appeared in the The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, Newsday, The Village Voice, and other publications. She has reported from California, New York, Mexico, the United Kingdom, Denmark, Jordan, Lebanon, Qatar, Israel, the West Bank and Gaza.

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"Losing Ground, The Changing Map of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict"
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