It has only been three days since construction began on a security barrier to divide Israeli and Palestinian areas, but it is already being called a sign of "apartheid of the 21st century", or another Berlin Wall.

Others even say it might well have cost the lives of 20 people, who died in a Palestinian suicide bombing on a Jerusalem bus on Tuesday.

Work began on June 16 on the first 110km stretch of the fence that will eventually run more than 350km from Salem to the nearby Palestinian town of Umm Al Fahm.

It will eventually separate Israeli towns to the west of the former "green line" — the pre-1967 border between Israel and the then Jordanian-controlled West Bank — from Israeli-occupied Palestinian areas, with what Tel Aviv says is the aim of preventing suicide and other attacks.

Running from the northern tip of the West Bank to Megiddo, the fencing work is expected to last a full year.

The overall plan is to separate the West Bank from Arab East Jerusalem, which Palestinians want as capital of an independent state. Palestinians and Arabs view the physical barrier with hostility, the United States with uneasiness and some degree of opposition has emanated from within Israel too.

Nullifies peace deal

The Palestinians claim the move effectively nullifies all the peace deals signed with the Jewish state. They complain that the fence will continue the encroachment of Israel into the occupied territories of the West Bank, where 42 percent of the land has already been effectively annexed by Israeli settlements.

Israel argues that work on the first section of 110km is the start of an exercise with purely "security separation" motives and has nothing to do with "political demarcation".

The whole fence is expected to cost nearly US$250 million and will include tracking strips, roadblocks for cars, electronic identification equipment and fences, trenches and watchtowers.

For once, the Palestinians have support from some Israeli quarters in opposition to the fence — though for different reasons.

The Jewish settlers in the West Bank argue that Tel Aviv's real motive is not security "but rather to establish a political border", which will make them vulnerable to Palestinian attacks. Right-wingers too fear that this will become a permanent border in case of a political settlement and deny their claim to the Palestinian territories.

The Palestinians have been unrestrained in their criticism of the fencing work. Secretary-General of the Arab League Amr Mussa has compared the fence to "a new Berlin Wall", in reference to the barrier that divided the German capital from 1961 to 1989 and signified division and hatred.

The Syrian government daily newspaper 'Tishrin condemned the barrier as a "racist separation and an expression of the Zionist racism that governs Israeli policy".

Adding fuel to fire

Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat accused Israel of dividing Palestinian areas into boroughs and starting "a new apartheid system" worse than that in South Africa. "This will add fuel to fire," Erekat told Qatar-based Al Jazeera television on Monday.

Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, chief of the radical Palestinian group Hizbollah, said the Tuesday suicide blast in Jerusalem proved that Israel could not stop suicide attacks even with a security fence on its West Bank frontier.

Political posturing apart, the fence will have a disastrous impact on the common people.

The barrier will cripple the lifeline of thousands of Palestinians who cross over illegally before daybreak to work in Israel. Climbing across the fence would be a dangerous proposition for any civilian.

Some Palestinians have also complained that ancestral land has been usurped to accommodate the fence. "My relatives in the West Bank called to tell me that my uncle's generations-old olive land had been confiscated. This is an oppressive and immoral world, where the evil prevail over the weak," Mohmoud Mansour, a Palestinian laundry owner in the UAE, told IPS .

Ghassan Al Jashi, a political analyst for the Al Itihaad newspaper in the UAE, says that the Hizbollah chief's assessment that suicide bombings cannot be stopped by the fence is right.

"You cannot stop more than 50 years of anger and frustration with physical barricades. Every move to deny the Palestinians their rights will be reciprocated by innovative acts of resistance, which the Israelis will not be able to stop," he said in an interview.

"The way forward is through confidence-building measures — an end to incursions, assassinations and illegal settlements. Resuming the stalled peace process, which will result in a permanent settlement and a Palestinian state, should follow. The fence that is being erected doesn't fit into the scheme of peace in the long run," Jashi said.

Reacting to the Tuesday bombing, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon dismissed the idea of creating even a provisional Palestinian state, one of the options US President George W Bush is likely to announce in days.

'Provisional' Palestinian state

Reports suggest that Bush may opt to create a "provisional" Palestinian state and call an international conference to discuss the matter.

The Arab daily Al Hayat said on Tuesday that Bush would "underline his support for the creation of an independent Palestinian state in zones A and B".

Zone A covers the areas under the complete control of the Palestinian National Authority in line with the 1993 Oslo autonomy accords and Zone B refers to areas where Palestinians have administrative control while Israel is in charge of security.

"This state would have a seat at the United Nations and would be recognised at the international level and would negotiate" with Israel the questions regarding its final status, the report said, referring to borders, Jewish settlements, Palestinian refugees' right of return and the status of Jerusalem.

Though the paper did not say if the US plan lays down a timetable — as demanded by both the Palestinians and Arab countries — for the declaration of a Palestinian state and a final settlement, the Palestinian leadership has, over the last fortnight, rejected the idea of interim accords and provisional statehood.

Meantime, some say the future remains bleak. "For decades we have been dreaming of an independent Palestine with Holy Jerusalem as the capital. And for decades we have got nothing but false promises, postponements, deaths, suffering and disappointments," said the launderer Mansour. "Yesterday it was the Israeli wall, today it is the bomb blast and tomorrow, I don't know what."