Luc Debieuvre: Upon the wall I write your name, freedom

Fifteen years ago, the Berlin Wall collapsed under the weight of a people's desire to be free. And now, in 2004, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon carries on with the construction of another wall of shame.

A common characteristic of liars is their constancy in distorting facts. The erection of an eight-metre high concrete wall on Palestinian land is the latest travesty of the truth. There is nothing new about this, but as long as life goes on, no sensible human being should stop opposing this. Whatever you call it, a "protective fence" or an "anti-terrorist barrier", a wall is a wall and the fact that it may not be eight metres high throughout, or may be painted with bright colours, changes little.

A wall divides a continuous entity. If that entity is your property, it just splits into two parts, with your fields or your cattle on one side and your house on the other; if that entity is your country, you are separated from your work, your family, a hospital, a school... Is it necessary to describe the kind of despair a population held hostage may suffer from such a violent, although apparently static, action?

Avraham Shalom, a former chief of the Israeli internal security agency Shin Beth, wrote, "To make a wall a good thing, both parties should agree on it. Nobody will believe us if we limit ourselves to saying that the only reason for the wall is fighting terrorism. If that had been the case, it would have followed the 1987 Green Line. Security cannot exist if it is not accompanied by a political opening."

But Sharon goes on hushing people like cattle in a cowshed and putting free human beings behind the bars of a concrete jail. Hostage, ghettos... words that mankind hoped had disappeared, come back to mind. Does a violated child have to violate? And forget what was done to him?

The wall is morally repugnant, as it is against the natural principle of people living together. The rest is insignificant. Who would argue about the legality of a genocide or discuss the efficiency of torture, if one admits that torture is morally unacceptable?

Pope John Paul II recently told Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qorei, "What the Holy Land needs is reconciliation; forgiveness and not revenge; bridges and not walls." Even though the International Court of Justice, ICJ, would rule that the wall is illegal, Sharon won't budge. He will rest peacefully, unless the present corruption charges against him keep him awake. He wouldn't bother about another useless resolution from the United Nations General Assembly since, as everybody knows, only resolutions against Iraq have a chance of being enforced.

The wall, however, fits within a more global policy: "The barrier he (Sharon) is building between Israel and the West Bank is closely linked to his Gaza withdrawal plan" writes the Wall Street Journal, to whose conventional wisdom, "it is not occupation that drives terrorism but terrorism that keeps occupation alive".

Before asking who will erect the wall that will protect Palestinians from the regular incursions by the Israeli army into their cities, one has to realise that Sharon has been trying from the very beginning to get rid of the "silly" roadmap, which contemplates the existence of two states, a viable Palestinian state, living side by side with Israel.

As far as he is concerned, any Palestinian entity, be it a "state", a "Palestinian Authority" or a bantustan, will never ever be allowed by Israel to rule itself on a territory larger than about 45 per cent of the present West Bank. The main challenge is to prevent the US from intervening in the matter. As the presidential campaign is currently underway in the US, there should be nothing to fear (presidential-candidate Bush did not even mention the word "Palestine" or "Israel" in his "State of the Union" speech two weeks ago).

What is done, is done, and any advantage gained on the field has better chances to survive. Sharon, who recommended the building of several Jewish colonies that would divide the Gaza strip, long believed that "Netzarim was the same as Tel Aviv" and therefore, "evacuating Netzarim will only encourage terrorism and increase pressure on us".

So why is he leaving now in a "land-for-nothing" move if not because the wall is killing any chance of progress towards a two-state solution? A unilateral decision to evacuate this land, remove some illegal colonies (which remains to be seen) and withdraw within a territory – significantly extended thanks to the wall - may be accepted later on by the US, whoever the new president is.

Of course, this looks like bargaining and this is probably why it is so shocking, because the matter of the bargain is human lives – not Jewish of course, but still human lives. Some local Arabs, having carefully been kept within under-developed economic conditions, will thus be retained, in order to provide cheap labour for the new masters. The Arab world will go on crying on the streets and some politicians will take the subsidies European governments will go on paying, in order to keep their own conscience clear.

This is why the construction of the wall must be stopped. How many Israelis will have to die and for how long young Palestinians will have no other choice in life than to die for their homeland? How long will the continuing Israeli violence forbid them from living in their own country?

"It would have been hard, in the aftermath of World War II, to imagine that the state of Israel, whose creation was intended by its Zionist founders as a cure for the malignancy of anti-Semitism, would itself be seen as being the heart of this disease's re-occurrence. Preventing injustice should hold a higher priority for friends of Israel – and Israelis – than preventing exploitation of criticism of that injustice by anti-Semites," writes Henry Siegman in Britain's Financial Times. "If Israel's policies are unjust, we should say so."

We do, but who listens? Isn't it time to start getting rid of Sharon: let's judge him for what he did in Lebanon, what he provoked when he took his stroll at the Dome of the Rock and remind him that there is no more need to run, since there is no Nobel Prize for hatred. As for us, "Upon the destroyed villages, Upon the crushed houses, Upon the wall of the shame, I write your name, Freedom..."

Luc Debieuvre is a French political analyst and writer on economic issues.