Here is a sequence of photos I took this month as I left Bethlehem in the West Bank and returned to Jerusalem. (Click on photos for fullsize image.)

The pic above was taken from the Palestinian side of the checkpoint. Driving from Israeli-controlled Jerusalem into the Palestinian-controlled Bethlehem area of the West Bank was unencumbered. Vehicles pretty much breezed right through. The Palestinians have no fear of Israeli suicide bombers coming to devastate their buses or restaurant. After all, there are no Israeli suicide bombers.

Security instructions, in Hebrew (top), then Arabic and finally English. All traffic signs in Israel appear in those three languages.

Palestinian graffitti on the Palestinian side of the security barrier.

More graffitti.

Just inside the Israeli side of the barrier is this mural. Sorry for the oblique angle - when we moved directly in front of it, I was too close to get the whole mural in one shot.

I found the mural ironic, since whatever the Israelis and Palestinians have, “love and peace” ain’t it, on either side.

Most of the entire West Bank is enclosed by a security fence, about 700 kilometers. About six percent of the distance is a wall rather than a fence because of the density of the buildings present. The fence generally follows the “Green Line,” but the Green Line is ill defined in some places. The Green Line, btw, is the ceasefire line agreed to in 1949, at the close of Irael’s war for independence. It is not actually a border of any kind.

This shot of the security wall was taken near the unused Jerusalem airport. Rock throwers shut the airport down some years ago. They threw rocks over the wall above at airliners landing or just onto the runway, the horizontal, flat gray feature just below the wall. Any pilot who may be reading can imagine how eager airline pilots were to land on runways covered in rocks.

Despite the international controversy about the fence/wall, it would be very hard to find an Israeli of any political stripe who would call for its removal. The fence was erected by a government very reluctant to do so, and was opposed by both Labor and Likud. But the bombings of the Second Intifada, begun in 2000, became so severe that the people demanded the barrier go up. Since it went up, terrorist violence inside Israel has fallen by 80-95 percent, depending on the region of the country.

The barrier has made life harder for the Palestinians, who complain that it has degraded their quality of life. The typical Israeli responds, “Our lives come before your quality of life.” Hard to argue with that.

Yossi Klein Halevi, a prominent Israeli journalist, said the barrier should be named the “Yasser Arafat Memorial Wall.”