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Ramallah is an attractive city. There are steep hills and winding roads. Looking down the

slopes, you see large houses terraced along the hillside, and courtyards with trees and benches.

The streets are lined with businesses - restaurants, bakeries, clothing stores and car

dealerships.

Since the Oslo Accord, many Palestinians emigrated back to the area from the Gulf States, the

U.S. and Europe. They brought money and entrepeneurship. Ramallah was a popular place to settle

because of the good climate and amenities. It’s also where people from other towns come to shop

and vacation.

Signs of Israeli incursion are not hard to find, however. Most prominent is the demolished

compound where Yassir Arafat was blockaded for years. Driving around, you can see rubble-strewn

lots where houses were demolished. And on an a nearby hilltop, an Israeli settlement is clearly

visible from most parts of town. From the edge of the city, you can see the settler-only

highway, clean and sparsely travelled, running through the valley between the settlement and

Ramallah.

People are friendly and gracious. But there is no mood of hopefullness as there is in Israel

right now. One furniture store owner said he was taking in 5 million shekels a month a few years

ago. Now it’s 50,000 - not even enough to pay his expenses - and there are no signs that

business is picking up. Asked about the prospect of peace, he pressed two fingers close together

and said, “Sharon and Bush - like this. What can we do?”

Our host for this part of the trip is the Union of Palestinian Medical Relief Committees

(UPMRC). They are affiliated with the Democratic Alliance, a pro-Democracy party that advocates

building Palestinian civil society, and favors organized non-violent resistance to the

occupation. They got about twenty percent of the vote in the Presidential election.

Their feeling is that there has been a major political change within the territories, with the

development of a democratic culture and processes, which has created a conducive environment for

the peace process. But nothing has changed on the ground in the West Bank. There are still 725

roadblocks that make it very difficult to get from one city to another. The economic situation

is critical. The settlements are growing by leaps and bounds, and construction of the wall has

accelerated.

They showed us a map of how the wall will look when completed, according to the latest Israeli

plan. The western side still runs well east of the Green Line, stretching across the territories

to encompass Ariel and the large settlement blocks around Jerusalem. There is an Eastern side as

well, which will close the Palestinian areas off from the Jordan River. When both sides are

completed, the northern and southern part of the Palestinian areas will be bisected and cut off

from each other.

We learned independently that many physicians are now opening new offices in the northern

cities, assuming that patients will be unable to get to the southern West Bank once the wall is

completed.

Dr. Marshall of UMPRC pointed out that the wall exactly follows the map created at Oslo -

giving Palestinians Area A (ceded at Oslo to Palestinian control) but keeping for Israel Areas B

and C. Of course, the Oslo accord was never intended, or agreed on, as a final territorial

settlement. It was supposed to be a provisional arrangement to be followed by territorial

negotiations.

Dr. Tammini, a hydrologist, noted that the wall will enclose all of the discharge of the

Western aquifer - in other words, all of the West Bank land on which wells can be drilled. If

Israel keeps this territory, as it clearly wishes to do, it will have seized the whole water

supply for the West Bank.

The wall is a constant impediment to medical transport. Some towns, or parts of towns, are

entirely gated in, with no egress at night. We heard numerous tragic stories - not just from

UMPRC, but things people will mention in passing, while telling you something else: the

neighbor’s child who died after being bitten by a snake, and there was no one to open the gate to

let the ambulance in; a little boy being taken to the hospital who was refused passage by a

soldier, even though he was obviously in critial condition. He died in the ambulance at the

checkpoint.

One person told us of a friend, a physics teacher. He was well-liked, a totally non-political

person, dedicated to his students. One day the Israelis came and uprooted the olive orchard he

had inherited from his father - one thousand trees, some of them 500 years old. He went to his

class and told them to pay attention because next week, he would teach them an important lesson.

And the next week, he became a suicide bomber.

No one I’ve talked to here approves of suicide bombings, and they deplore the loss of innocent

Israeli lives. But they are all afraid that, if the wall continues, if there is no movement

toward genuine territorial negotiation, no improvement on the ground, the violence will soon

resume.