Israel's wall hems in livelihoods — and dreams

[vierundzwanzig]

By Sharif Omar
JAYYOUS, West Bank — When Prime Minister Ariel Sharon describes the wall Israel is building, he makes it sound harmless. But President Bush deftly cut through that façade when he noted that "the fence ... kind of meanders around the West Bank, which makes it awfully hard to develop a contiguous state." So did Secretary of State Colin Powell when he recently told the Israeli newspaper, Maariv, that he fears "the fence is developing in a way that will make it very difficult to reach the next stage of the road map."
In Jayyous, the Palestinian village on the West Bank that is my home, we began living with this problem last September, when a shepherd found a paper hanging from an olive tree. It was a military order instructing us to meet an Israeli army officer to tour the "separation" wall's path.

Hundreds of area Palestinians turned out. Most farmers expected the wall would be near the Green Line, Israel's pre-1967 border with the West Bank. But we learned that the wall would be built almost four miles east of the Green Line, as close as 90 feet from Jayyous' homes, separating our residential area from our farmland.

(I must be dreaming): http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2003-08-17-omar_x.htm