The wall will increase the same pressures that caused the Palestinians in the past 17 years to erupt in two spontaneous intifadas against Israeli occupation. Here, in its most basic form, has been the most dramatic expression of the modern Arab will to live in freedom and dignity. The sentiments that prompted millions of Palestinians to resist - first peacefully, then violently - the Israeli military occupation and political colonization of their lands are building up in an obvious and dangerous way in the Jerusalem region. This is impossible to miss, and it is due to the stark way the wall separates Arab regions of Jerusalem from each other and the entire Arab East Jerusalem from its hinterland in the West Bank.

Palestinians who are confined in ever narrower circles of imprisonment will come to see themselves as prisoners, and this is already happening in Jerusalem, Ramallah, Nablus, Hebron, Qalqilya, Tulkarem, Gaza, and other, smaller, Palestinian towns. The Gaza withdrawal and completion of the wall do not aim to improve Palestinian lives or prod political negotiations; they aim rather to punish, encircle, isolate, and humiliate the Palestinians, until they surrender and accept Israel's terms for long-term national subservience and vassalage. This will not happen. There is little time left before the Israeli wall around Jerusalem brings on another catastrophic round of violence by both sides. The best available means to avoid the grave, destructive and imminent consequences of the wall project is for those in a position to do so - Arabs, Israelis, Americans, Europeans - to engage more seriously in diplomatic efforts that could achieve that which the wall will never achieve: security for both peoples, based on equal dignity and national rights, in adjacent sovereign states. Diplomats of all stripes should be racing against the clock.

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