Travel along the disputed wall

It cuts brutally through the terrain. The wall, or when truth be told: the fence. It is not very high, and has only moderate barbed wire on top. Maybe it's electric; who knows. But on the other side of the mesh there is a road, with shiny black asphalt. Along this road, Israeli military vehicles drive back and forth. It's like a déjà vu – when the Cold War created physical ice fronts between East and West.

They sparkle with their absence; the soldiers, as we walk down the small ridge of ridge that rises vertically from the fence. But it doesn't last long. The Israelis have full control over who is approaching the security zone. The moment we step down towards the fence, a car appears a few hundred yards away. It stops where the fence turns. We are under observation, by men with guns.

It's a power demonstration, of course. The Palestinians in the small village of Jayyus should know that they cannot go on their own land without being looked at and monitored. The Israelis are skilled occupiers. They know it is about humiliation and slow exhaustion.

Step by step, making it impossible to say when the revolution will start. Or when it should have started. Step by step, from bulldozers in the olive groves to physical barriers that no longer reach the fertile soil on the other side. That's what happened in Jayyus. The farmers there had the soil down in the valley. That is why Israel put the fence right here, so the Palestinians can no longer cultivate it. Because they don't come to their olive groves anymore. There is a fence in between.

From time to time the gate opens into the fields outside the village and the farmers can go through. In the afternoon, it reopens so that the Palestinians can come home for the evening.

There are no alternative truths here. Just a brutal and heartbreaking occupation.

The humiliation

Qalqilya. It was here we first traveled. It lies midway between Jerusalem and Jenin, and shares destiny with Tulkarem even farther north: both are located on top of the green line, and both will therefore be walled in.

In Qalqilya, tens of thousands of people are surrounded on all sides. The wall goes into a loop around the city, ending in a military roadblock. Here people can go in and out, if they get permission from the occupying power. Many people do not get it and must stay where they are.

It's the same story again. The farmers are cut off from their land. Those who previously worked in the Israeli economy have been cut off from their jobs. Qalqilya is a huge outdoor prison. Just outside the city center is a school. Fifty meters behind, the wall cuts right through the terrain, and here it is huge. Eight meters high, with gate here as well. But this gate is not for humans. It is for tanks, so that the Israelis can show some military muscle in the schoolyard when they feel like it.

On the way in, the roadblock is manned. But not on the way out. It is part of this humiliation that the Palestinians should never be sure when they will be stopped. On the way in, everyone is checked. On the way out it is free. It's not about security, at least not yet. Maybe it will be about that when the wall is completely finished and everything can be closed outside.

Or inside.

Discouragement and resignation

In Hebron, the wall has just begun, also here in the form of a fence. In Abu Dis, located on a hill just outside Jerusalem, the concrete blocks cut through a district. In Bethlehem, it is not the wall that is most conspicuous, but the roadblock. For the first time on our trip, we encounter a metal detector construction that everyone has to crawl through before they can pass. It is a small bow with two Israeli soldiers in front. Passports and ID papers are examined and examined before being released.

The lucky ones have to zigzag between soldiers and metal detectors on their way in and out of the city. The less fortunate do not even get that far. In Bethlehem, the streets are crowded with people. There is chaos, dust and wind, rubbish and noise. This must be a kind of concentration camp. In any case, far too many people are concentrated in too small an area.

For some reason, it is Bethlehem that is most strongly stuck in consciousness afterwards. Not Hebron, where the entire old city is about to be closed to the Palestinians in favor of rabid settlers and ultra-Orthodox Jews. Not Qalqilya, where people are walled in, and not Abu Dis where Palestinians are watching the bulldozers making the route for the rest of the wall.

But Bethlehem, where one suddenly wades into despair and resignation, and where it seems as if everyone is fighting for a place in the public space. Can they endure this, Palestinians?

They have never given Israel organized resistance. They have not, like the Kosovo Albanians, created a mass party. They have not, like the Chechens, taken up arms. They have made little use of the long-term, but effective, weapon that civil disobedience is. And they have not even tried to sabotage the fence that is now depriving them of the last remnant of freedom.

Rarely have so many people been occupied for so long and done so little. Not a piece of paper interferes with the perfect image of polished asphalt and shiny metal below Jayyus. And that despite the fact that it had only been to sneak up to the edge of the hill and throw the rubbish in the heads of the Israelis.

The Palestinians point out that in that case the whole village would have been annihilated. But really, they think they'll be wiped out anyway. When asked if this is Israel's final border, they answer that it is one of Israel's final borders.

The tenacious will

They have started two intifadas. And two intifadas have died out. Instead, today there are suicide bombers, in a morbid degeneration of the political struggle.

But there is also a tenacious will to endure the occupation. This tenacious will could give the Palestinians victory in the long run. That, together with the demographic development.

But now comes the wall. The wall destroys everything. Entire societies are falling apart. Hope dies, and social and cultural networks are in danger of weathering.

But there is another group that is also affected by the wall. And it is the settlers who will be left on the wrong side…