The road to division

By Martin Asser BBC News Online, Jerusalem

'The problem is apparent on arrival here'

Travelling from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, indeed for the entire journey from London to Jerusalem via Tel Aviv, one is repeatedly reminded of the sorry, tragic state of Israeli-Palestinian affairs.

I am coming to Jerusalem for the third time in less than 18 months for BBC News Online's coverage of this region - but never have I arrived with the future looking so bleak.

It is clear on the faces of my fellow travellers as we wait to board the British Airways flight to Tel Aviv at Heathrow airport.

Subdued, nervous glances are all that are exchanged between passengers - none of the jocular bonding and bickering that is the pre-flight ritual on so many other Middle East-bound flights I have been on.

Perhaps it is the possibility that anyone could be on that plane, and it is not fully clear from our appearance where our allegiances lie.

Black-and-white-garbed or skull-capped Orthodox Jewish men and their wives are identifiable enough - but tell-tale signs among the rest of us are less in evidence.

Likely terrorist

You could have heard a pin drop in the corridor as we waited for the bus to take us to the plane.

How unlike my last flight - on the Israeli carrier El-Al last year - when the Israeli passengers raised a great hubbub at Heathrow, as if we had already arrived before we had set off.

Not that I could join in the party, having been singled out as a likely terrorist by El-Al security, which meant I had to be taken off and swabbed and patted down time and time again before being allowed on the plane - the last precaution being the removal of my shoes for X-ray just before boarding!

The crux of the problem continues to rest on illegal developments

The flight was made no less surreal when I found my economy class seat was just next to the one occupied by the then-Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey (who informed me he had undergone similar, albeit not quite so stringent, security measures before being allowed on).

Today, my progress was less eventful. And it is events at our destination that are causing apprehension.

Palestinian militant groups have called off their hudna - or temporary ceasefire - and after last week's devastating suicide bombing are now threatening to take quick and bloody revenge for a series of Israeli assassinations of their senior figures in the last few days.

As we flew over Tel Aviv, I half expected to see a stricken bus, belching smoke and flames, across one of the city's tree-lined boulevards stretching out below our aircraft.

Happily it was not the case.

After landing the mood lightened - Israelis happy to be back home, other Jews looking forward perhaps to being united with relatives, and the rest of us happy that the oppressive atmosphere had lifted as we emerged into the bright Mediterranean sunshine.

A couple of cursory security questions after the passport check ("What is the origin of your name? Who did you meet when you went to Egypt?") and I was able to collect my luggage and head straight to the Jerusalem taxi rank.

Great divide

To the uninitiated, the road from the airport to Jerusalem might appear nothing out of the ordinary.

A short drive through rich agricultural plains, becoming rolling foothills which grow steadily steeper and pass near built-up areas of varying degrees of newness and dilapidation.

It is a pleasant enough trip - but in fact it takes you almost immediately to the heart of one of the bloodiest and most intractable conflicts of modern times.

Without any markings to indicate it, we enter the West Bank - just a few minutes on this highway illustrates the problem here

The new-looking towns - signposted Bet Horon and Giv'at Ze'ev - are Jewish settlements, built in violation of international law on occupied land.

The tatty-looking older towns - linked by dirt tracks but cut off from the main road by iron gates and heaps of earth and rubble - are Palestinian towns. They are un-signposted, but my (Palestinian-produced) map identifies them as Kharbata, Beit Ur, al-Tira and al-Jib.

So without any markings to indicate it, we have entered the West Bank.

And just a few minutes on this highway graphically illustrates the nub of the problem here - what to do with land that the Palestinians claim for their future state but which Israel has colonised for itself.

I crane my neck to see any evidence of the notorious "security barrier" that appears to be Israel's current answer to the problem - but in vain.

We are too far south and it has not reached here yet.

A few minutes later and we are in the north-western suburbs of Jerusalem.

Massive housing developments, again on what was once the Palestinian side of the Green Line that divided Israel from the West Bank before 1967, but now designated by Israel as part of its "eternal, indivisible capital".