I stood there and watched from the next hill over as huge dump trucks and bulldozers went back and forth, back and forth in the distance. The army was there, too, in jeeps with blue flashing lights, going back and forth.

President Bush stood on the beach at Egypt, the sun in his eyes and the wind in his hair, telling us that the Palestinian people would have their own state by 2005. The bulldozers and workers went back and forth, back and forth. A state, not freedom, I thought to myself.

This hill happened to be Bethlehem in summer. I wiped the sweat from my forehead.

I watched as the cranes continued construction on Har Homa, the Israeli colony staring down at the Palestinian village of Beit Sahour.

Between the hill I was standing on and Har Homa, a wall was being built on confiscated land to keep “us” from “them.”

The Israeli government this week, against the wishes (but not demands) of the international community approved the continuation of the construction of a wall around and between their colonies in the West Bank, the Palestinians and Israel.

The Israeli government says the wall is needed to protect Israel from acts of violence. But rather than building the wall on the 1967 green line, it was built several miles into Palestinian land in part to include some of the colonies, expressly considered illegal by international law, on Israel’s “side.”

The 150-mile wall consists of a 10 foot high electronic-sensing wall, a six-and-a-half foot deep ditch, a military patrol road on each side, a six foot razor wire fence and surveillance cameras. The case of Qalquilya, in the northern West Bank, is particularly desperate. The Palestinian city is surrounded by this new wall on three sides and access to the city is allowed through a single Israeli military gate. Special military permission is required to do anything from going to the hospital or visiting relatives.

In “high risk areas” like Qalquilya, the wall actually is a 26- foot tall concrete barrier with watchtowers. Everything within 115 feet of it has been or will be destroyed.

To make way for the wall, orchards, fields and homes were obliterated and almost all the land taken was Palestinian land. I saw where the barrier snaked through an olive grove in Bethlehem with the land taken to either side of the wall. Aside from taking the land, the barrier made access to it and the trees on the far side impossible. Of course, the grove’s owner had no access to the other side.

Numerous Palestinian groups view the wall as one of the most pressing problems currently, dubbing it the “apartheid wall” because of its effective canton-ization of Palestinian land.

The United Nations has condemned Israel’s new wall as illegal. According to a report released this week by the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights, “Annexation of this kind, known as conquest in international law, is prohibited by the Charter of the United Nations and the Fourth Geneva Convention. The Special Rapporteur submits that the time has come to condemn the Wall as an unlawful act of annexation … ” The U.N. investigator, John Dugard, is a South African professor of international law in the Netherlands.

U.N. Special Rapporteur Dugard continues, “During the past few months the construction of the Wall, separating Israel from the WestÿBank, has been frenetically pursued … Over 210,000 Palestinians will be seriously affected by theÿWall. Palestinians living between the Wall and the Green Line will be effectively cut off from their farmlands and workplaces, schools, health clinics and other social services. This is likely to lead to a new generation of refugees or internally displaced persons.”

B’tselem, a leading Israeli human rights group, found the number (210,000) of people directly harmed and that at least thirteen Palestinian communities (more than 11,000 people) will be trapped between the wall and the Green Line. Also, B’tselem believes that at least 19 communities (128,500 people) will be turned into “isolated enclaves.”

Money talks. As taxpayers in the United States, billions of dollars in military and other aid in addition to loan guarantees are given to Israel. We must demand that Israel comply with international law as a condition for our tax dollars.

The Israeli desire for security is a fair one. That is precisely why further dispossessing and imperiling the Palestinian people in building this wall will likely have the opposite effect. For the security and freedom of both people, the barrier must be stopped and torn down. But as all the politicians flap their jaws, yellow bulldozers continue building as steady as ever, acre after acre, back and forth.