throughout recorded history walls and other barriers have served a single function to divide to separate this is true whether walls are built to keep people out or to keep them in prison the wall being constructed the rest of the israeli government is no different twenty five feet high studded with guard towers and armaments and incrusted with high tech sensors the wall cuts across the land separating palestinians from their own farms their own neighbors and from the israeli settlements which have sprung up rapidly as a result of lavish subsidies from the israeli government in november of two thousand and three professor james rouch of the university of california san diego explained how the political climate israel led to the building of the wall the israeli public has been clamoring for a separation wall between israel and the west bank for some time the reason is that there is a wall now or at least a fence between israel and the gaza strip and that is generally credited with keeping out terrorists in the gaza strip from infiltrating israel proper so the idea in most people's minds was let's build a fence or separation wall along the one thousand nine hundred sixty seven boundary between israel and the west bank and this wall so keep terrorists from the west bank at of israel much as the barrier between the west bank the barrier between israel the gaza strip has kept people out of israel as things have turned out the wall hasn't been built along the one hundred sixty seven boundary rather the wall has been built along the batteries for the palestinian state that were proposed in the camp david agreements not exactly but very roughly along those boundaries so it's been built entirely on the palestinian side of the sixty seven border which is meant confiscation of palestinian land and in some places in particular to take in the settlement of r e l the wall has cut very deeply into the palestinian territory there is also an eastern section of the wall being proposed and partly started which will cut off the palestinian cities from the jordan valley region and that will implement the part of the camp david accords which stated that the jordan valley region was going to keep was going to remain under indefinite and that israeli military control so in effect the wall would unilaterally implement the camp david proposals back from two thousand the territories occupied by israel have become a symbol of the new frontier for zionist settlers from around the world settlers come to israel seeking to expand the state inch by inch done by denham which is a local measure of land area equal to one thousand square meters enticed by grants of fifteen thousand dollars per settler specially reduced tax rates business subsidies and a network of bypass roads that lead directly to the new settlements and are forbidden to palestinians the israeli settlers have succeeded in confiscating fifty five percent of the land occupied by israel in the six day war with most of this expansion taking place since the one nine hundred eighty s professor rouch described how the rate of israeli settlements increased since the time of the y accords in one thousand nine hundred eight and how it continued to grow through the period of the camp david negotiations in two thousand he also explained how these settlements affect the local palestinians in one thousand nine hundred eighty eight with the signing of the  accords w y e y accords these settlements were increased or accelerated by the prime minister of israel at the time from nine to twelve thousand per year to fifteen thousand per year and the idea here was to get as many settlements built and get as many settlers into the west bank as possibly could be done before any final agreement would be concluded  so leading up to the camp david negotiations you had a continued settlement expansion through the entire oslo period with an acceleration of settlement expansion at the end of the oslo period now when we talk about settlements we need to be clear that this doesn't mean your friendly jewish neighbor moving into the house next door what this means is confiscation of land which the palestinians had used for farming or for orchards or were planning to expand their villages or cities onto this land would be confiscated by the israeli occupation authorities and then big housing development very similar to the type that you see here in southern california would be built upon the confiscated lamp then the land are the settlement would be connected to is real pre nine hundred sixty seven israel by what's known as the bypass road that is this is a special road built for use of israeli settler citizens only to connect the settlements to the rest of israel basically so that people could commute back and forth to jobs and schools and so forth the settlements also use the water supplies of the nearby palestinian communities intended to drain the water aquifers and make it hard for those communities to continue farming and to continue to be viable are about a third that are ideological settlers that is they see settlement as redeeming the land for israel for the jewish people and then there are two thirds of the settlers who are coming for economic reasons that is they are responding to incentives provided by the israeli government in terms of better better school facilities housing subsidies and so forth and these economic incentives were estimated by the world bank the ronit about one billion dollars a year nearly two hundred fifty thousand settlers already in place the israeli government has created in a trenched voting bloc of citizens and with each tenement land that is confiscated by settlers israel achieves a new bargaining position from which to negotiate the fate of the remaining palestinian territories in effect the settlements make it possible for the israeli government to say to the world we cannot go backward and dismantle our settlements they are hard facts and must be accepted as such even as we build more each day stationed outside the town of j ews steve flora by s m explains the meaning of the wall to palestinians i've been in jail you for the past about five days and our main responsibility there has been gate watch and then to give you a little explanation on what gate watch actually is a small town of about twenty eight hundred people approximately seventy five to eighty percent are farmers and now what's happened is the israeli government has erected a huge barrier known as the apartheid wall that has severed the j ews community and separated these farmers from their land israel and now the farmers don't have access to their own land they lived on and relied on for their subsist subsistence for generations and generations so now about three times a day israeli troops in jeeps and hummers come by and they open the fence to give farmers access from one side to the other side and the farmers there with the donkeys their tractors waiting for the seventeen and eighteen year old boys and girls to come by to give them access to the land that they've owned and it's just it's just like you can't even believe it is you can't even fathom the humiliation that these farmers have to go through on a daily basis sometimes we sit there at the gate and we have to wait two three hours for the soldiers to show up meanwhile there's one family with children that have to get to the other side of the fence so the kids go to school but every day the kids are late because the soldiers don't don't care they don't show up on time it's just it's it's really miserable words can't really describe it so we were there for about five days talking with families and meeting them and hearing about the suffering and it is suffering in every way and it's  explains how the separation wall has affected palestinians near the city of tokyo you know now we're trying to get into the city called qalqilya and to get here is it's a track it really is a track from j ews we have to take local transportation to a city called a zoom and from a zoom you have to transfer to another taxi to the entrance of qalqilya qalqilya is a city that's that surrounded on three sides by the apartheid wall huge twenty foot concrete wall with watch towers and all the security amenities of touchpad sensors trace pads motion detectors and everything and on the other side there's  checkpoint that we can't pass because the military will deny us access to the checkpoint so what we have to do is basically walk all the way around the way out of the way into the farmland we're here with a guide right now who's going to try to help us gain access a but we just observe that there is a tank blockading the entrance to qalqilya which is going to make our entry even more difficult so at this point it's it's a waiting game will be here for at a minimum of an hour and a half two hours trying to see if the tank moves or if to see if we can find some more farmers that we can accompany to the gate to be able to gain access but it is an extremely difficult situation to be at the mercy of  of these soldiers to have to wait for the ok to be able to move in and out of the city you can only imagine actually you can even imagine you have to experience it too to really understand and as i begin to so the world ends in the palestinians cutting them off from their businesses from their schools and from their farms on the other side of the wall thus creating islands of morph into palestinian territory territory that must be abandoned only to be absorbed by the next these are the facts on the ground a bargaining chip for the israelis first to the palestinians are finally here in the city of qalqilya and if you look to my back there is the highly controversial wall that israel has been building that israeli occupation forces have been constructing for approximately a year now the wall sometimes referred to as the apartheid wall or the isolation wall or isolation fence or even isolation cage as some individuals refer to it here the construction of the wall itself active thousands of palestinian the people here are mostly farmers and did depend on the land to survive this war was not built on the then one occasion line but on confiscated palestinian land glass form of terrorism is this daily occupation of our land  so what you see in the period about nine hundred eighty to ninety nine three is a slowdown in economic growth in israel and a kind of corresponding slowdown in economic growth in the palestinian territories in one thousand nine hundred three with the oslo agreement you have a divergence between the economic growth of the two areas so post oslo was a boom time for israel and a depression time for the west bank and g this was not what was anticipated by the oslo agreement the oslo agreement anticipated that this would be a boom time for everyone so this was a big disappointment to people in the territories and they might have expected a peace dividend much of the type that was seen in egypt after the camp david accords in one hundred seventy eight so if you look at egypt's growth compared to the rest of the world egypt grew a little bit faster than the rest of the world from the sixty's up to seventy eight camp david and a lot faster than the rest of the world post camp david so i think the year it was there was a lot of optimism certainly on the part of world bank economic officials for example that there would be a similar acceleration in economic growth a similar peace dividend in the west bank and gaza and instead you had an absolute decline in the standards of living there that is it wasn't simply that economic growth was less rapid rather people's incomes went down the reason people's incomes went down was that post ninety three there were closures of the occupied territories so that people couldn't go to work in their jobs in israel so the exact mechanism that had brought so much catch up and economic growth when the occupation began with essentially reversed and the reason for that was that some people opposed to the oslo agreements launched terror attacks in israel and israel responded by closing the borders and then those jobs were cut off and that was really the main reason for the economic decline post ninety three that is during the oslo period one thing that's lacking in this story of economic growth in the palestinian areas is some notion of an independent engine of growth for the palestinians some notion of autonomous economic development and if one looks into the root causes of this why the growth of palestine was so tightly linked to whether jobs were available in israel or not the reasons are in part and perhaps mainly the policies of the civil administration that is the occupying powers of israel relative to economic development in the territories so there were deliberate policies adopted and these were documented by israeli government studies deliberate policies adopted to discourage palestinian industry especially where that industry might compete with products made in israel itself moreover there was a system of licenses and permits set up so that it was extremely difficult to establish a business in the west bank or in the gaza strip one had to go to the occupation authorities perhaps seven to ten different offices in order to get all these different licenses and permits and whereas in a typical less developed country system this might have given rise to easy bribery or corruption or evasion here you had to deal with israeli authorities who either weren't corruptible or if they were were only corruptible of fees which were much much higher than one would have had to pay to say a corrupt official in egypt or jordan so there was a stifling of independent economic activity by these regulations economic regulations that were put into place by the israeli civil administration in the occupied territories after the oslo agreements much of these regulations stayed in place in so far as they were lifted it wasn't as helpful as it could have been because the palestinian authority basically then had to import goods into the west bank and the gaza strip through borders that were completely controlled by israel and israel held up many shipments of needed parts for manufacturing industries because they might be dual use for possibly weapons purposes so since every inspection could possibly every shipment excuse me could possibly be held up for inspection and things were sometimes delayed for months this made carrying out any sorts of manufacturing activities in the west bank and gaza strip very iffy and this discouraged i think personally that the part of the wall that will have the deepest psychological impact for the palestinians will be the part now being built around east jerusalem so that the palestinians will be cut off from access to east jerusalem this will basically mean that their hopes of a state will be desha since no palestinian that i've ever talked to would be willing to accept a palestinian state that did not have jerusalem as its capital once that is accomplished and that could be as early as a year from now my expectation is that the number of palestinians who will give up on the idea of a palestinian state and instead asked for citizenship in israel will increase right now public opinion polls in the west bank show that about twenty five percent of palestinians are prefer at this point to give up on the idea of a palestinian state and to demand citizenship in israel i my guess is that that twenty five percent will increase sharply after the wall has separated the palestinians in the west bank from east jerusalem and that ultimately the palestinian struggle for statehood will change over into an anti apartheid struggle and a struggle for citizenship most likely that won't really accelerate that process of change from a statehood struggle to an anti apartheid struggle until after the death of yasser arafat's and seize the most potent symbol of palestinian state