LONDON, Aug. 21-Special to the Coastal Post: From time to time some Israeli citizen is quoted to the effect that he or she is appalled at the hatred Palestinians manifest towards Israelis. Many in the Western media accidentally or deliberately endorse this bafflement by persistently using films or photographs of Palestinian youths hurling stones or returning tear gas canisters by lobbing them at the Israeli military.

The cumulative effect of the reporting and editing-which tend to ignore cause and effect-is that one side (the Palestinian) is unreasonably entrenched in a condition of frothing rage while the other (the Israeli) does its best to cope using a measured and authoritative response.

Cause and effect, why Palestinians resist military occupation, why bombers bomb and who is responsible for jump-starting the "cycle of violence," is one of the great mysteries for most of our newspaper, TV and radio editors, not to mention the West's politicians and diplomats, who like to project a fairyland in which two equivalent forces are locked in a struggle about a contested strip of land. It could all so easily be ended, the thinking goes, if both sides would see reason, the Palestinians would docilely accept their lot and the Israelis could then decide on a suitable solution for them.

"Reason" was presumably a characteristic of the Road Map, a plan for a ceasefire, a peaceful breathing space, Palestinian elections and a Palestinian statelet by 2005. The Map was drawn up by the United Nations, the European Union and Russia with the United States as editor and promulgator. Its publication was much delayed by Israel, which loathed the idea, but finally accepted with the utmost cynicism earlier this year under a tweak of pressure from Washington. It came into play on June 30 and has been unraveling ever since. The United States has refused to force its client state remotely to follow the Map's route and the Israelis' military leaders are letting it be known that by the end of September they expect resumed bloodshed. Therefore we can foresee military action and repression on an even larger scale than during the past three years.

The obvious reason why the Road Map was doomed is that Israel never accepts a peace plan unless it can see a way of easily collapsing it if it does not suit Zionist aspirations. On the face of it, the Road Map does not. Withdrawing troops from population centres without Palestinian subservience guaranteed, freezing settlements, dismantling "outposts" and a Palestinian state of any real standing are not the aims of any conceivable Israel Government. However, Ariel Sharon knew that he could fake complying with these measures and ideas long enough to look co-operative, especially given the adulation in which Israel is held by the US press and politicians. Meanwhile, by continuing the intrusive militarized upheaval in the Occupied Territories, carrying on killing and injuring civilians and destroying land-900 acres of agricultural turf have been razed since June 30, and 1,100 acres seized by illegal Jewish settlers-he and his generals can be pretty sure that they will wind the resistance groups out of their shaky ceasefire and into armed action any time soon.

The source of the Palestinians' hatred of Israel is not hard to discern given this permanent state of assault on their livelihoods, their very being, their identity-a veritable genocidal attack on their national survival and soul. And sitting like a colossus at the centre of this assault, now, revealed in plain by the disintegration of the Road Map, is the Apartheid Wall, which Israel and compliant editors like to see referred to gently as the "security fence." I shall call it the Dividing Wall. Not only is this ugly artifact a threat to an imminent solution, but it is a physical manifestation of the planned final Zionist solution for the Palestinians, inside and outside Palestine. In fact, Mr. Sharon's friends say that this Wall has been on his drawing pad for the past 25 years and in his aggressive and acquisitive mind for the past 30.

Once again, our media have served us ill in presenting this "security fence" as an Israeli method merely of keeping Palestinians and therefore attackers inside the Occupied Territories and away from Israel and Israelis. The one documentary I have seen, a poorish effort by the BBC Correspondent programme, "balanced" its Wall story by emphasising how rough this would be on Jewish settlers as well as Palestinians, and missed the whole point of what this massive barrier is actually planned to achieve.

The fact is that this Wall is not just a blockade that will run north to south-often well on the Palestinian side of the 1967 Green Line-leaving, in just its first phase in the north of the Occupied Territories, nearly 3% of all West Bank fertile farmland effectively under Israeli control and adversely affecting 200,000 Palestinians. It is the start-up of a set of enclosures whose barriers will encircle, eventually, five blocks or bantustans of the mini-Palestine envisaged by Mr. Sharon.

One-on which work has started-will enclose an area about 45 kilometres across at its widest point, running the 70-80 kilometres from Jenin in the north to Ramallah in the south, a few miles from Jerusalem. Another will be around Jericho, an oasis near the Jordan River, some 25-30 kms from Jerusalem; the third will be in whatever is worked out for Jerusalem in the aftermath of ethnic cleansing that has demeaned and depleted the Arabs there; the fourth enclave, also of course to be walled in, will contain Bethlehem, just south of Jerusalem, and Hebron; the fifth will be the Gaza Strip, already walled in, a model for what is planned elsewhere. There will be no guaranteed links between these prison states for Palestinians, though there will be for the illegal Jewish settlers inside them.

Israeli forces will control the spaces, roads and lands between. At frequent intervals the Wall cuts into these Palestinian bantustans to place major settlement areas on the Israeli side of the Wall.

The Wall itself is eight metres high, multi-tiered, with parallel ditches and concrete pathways for armoured patrols, wide enough for tanks, and special tracks that can record footprints. It is an electronic warning system as well as a razor wire mesh with watchtowers (a number of older Israelis might well remember this sort of construction from their days of incarceration by the Nazis). There are few gates in it for Palestinians to cross back and forth on their own land.

In the first phase-the first Palestinian bantustan in the making-towns like Qalqiliya (pop. 41,000) and Tulkarm (43,000) will be sealed off from their Palestinian hinterlands. Many Palestinians will be encased by different aspects of this many-pronged "fence," which is, on average, 70 metres wide. Farmers will be cut off from their land, children from their schools, villagers from their homes, families from one another, worshippers from their mosques, citizens from their water sources and labourers from their place of work.

Israel has ordered demolition of hundreds of homes and workplaces caught the "wrong" side of the wall-illegally built because Israel will not grant more than a tiny percentage of building permits in the areas affected, which mostly come under Israeli control following the Oslo Accords. Unlike the Jewish settlers, who seize Palestinian land for their expanding families and ambitions, the Palestinians are not allowed space in which to enlarge and progress.

There is no guarantee that farmers and workers will be able to cross legally through the Wall. Israeli authorities say they will, and that permits will be issued. Everyone knows about Israeli permits, which are withheld arbitrarily or often ignored on the rare occasions they are issued. There are grave doubts about any such cross-Wall access among the Arabs and most independent observers, such as the United Nations agency for refugees, UNRWA, and reporters like myself, who have long and bitter experience of Israel's broken promises, its dismissiveness towards people's rights of movement, its carelessness of civil or human rights, its continued land theft and its intensifying brutality towards the virtually defenseless people for whom it is supposed under international law to be responsible.

Water, ever an awesome problem in the region, especially as the Israeli syphon so much of it from the Palestinians, is also under threat. Qalqiliya will lose 19 wells because of the Dividing Wall-30% of its water supply.

Doctors, nurses and health workers will be unable to reach surgeries, clinics and hospitals in areas already severely depleted by the depredations of the occupation and the post-2000 invasions and intrusions; equally, thousands of patients will be unable to reach medical help that finds itself on Israel's side of the barrier.

There are many, many villages that will suffer this new level of apartheid misery, like Qafin, a town of 9,000 souls to the north of Tulkarm. One thousand five hundred acres of its land will be beyond the dividing wall, affecting 750 families, around 5,000 people, more than half its population. The Israelis have cut down 12,000 olive trees, many in full harvest. The Wall will separate Qafin from Tulkarm, its main neighbor, and from three smaller towns with which there are strong family ties. Before the Aqsa Intifada broke out in late 2000, 90% of the labour force of Qafin worked in Israel; now no-one does, and unemployment is 70%.

It is not difficult to see the Israeli long-term plan, already launched in the face of the Road Map and a devastating counterpoint to the optimistic noises our politicians and media have been making as Ariel Sharon has talked of ending the occupation and hailed the birth of a Palestinian state.

The plan-being forged in concrete and wire-is to isolate, debilitate and demoralize the Palestinian population, walled up in its separate cages, starved of commerce, freedom and hope. Gradually, the young, the educated, the ambitious and the mobile will leave the enclaves and thus Palestine to seek work and freedom elsewhere, leaving Israel in control of the land. Left behind will be a diminishing core of the old, weary and disillusioned who cannot or will not make the effort to break out of their boxes. These will, in their carved up form, live in a cod state in 10% of the original Palestine. These people will, in Mr. Sharon's view, have surrendered. The Palestine case will be laid to rest.

The plan is doomed, naturally. No such immoral and impractical an exercise can work. But what hell there will be while it fails. Like the Zionist project itself, it is a colonial fantasy, an experiment in national and social engineering that is the stuff that nightmares are made of. The beginnings of the hellish nightmare are already being lived. Meanwhile, the US hyper-power that purports to protect and sustain Israel has as little understanding of how to do so effectively as it does of organizing the oil, electricity or the politics of Iraq, and is allowing it to rumble on towards a regional disaster.

Here in Britain, our leaders stand helplessly, mutely on the sidelines, dodging their responsibilities at least to speak up and post a warning. Perhaps it would be useless anyway, as we enter the paralysis of 14 months of American vote-purchasing, a regular phenomenon Ariel Sharon was well able to factor into his evil equations.

Tim Llewellyn is a former BBC Middle East Correspondent and an executive board member of the Council for Arab British Understanding and the Arab British Centre in London, England.