Background to this scene, pictured from the campus of Bethlehem University, is the Israeli "settlement" of Har Homa.

A sprawling colony whose residents are exclusively Jewish, Har Homa is marked by its own exit signs on a modern highway. Its homes are just as modern, fixed to Israeli water systems and electricity grids.

In other words, Har Homa has long since ceased to be a settlement; it is an assertion of permanence, part of a ring of Jerusalem "suburbs" that has illegally and seemingly irrevocably swallowed the city whole. This is what stands in the way of a Palestinian capital in Jerusalem.

This and a legal regime that cannot but evoke Apartheid. A legal regime that has kept my Bethlehem University tour guide, a Palestinian Christian, out of Jerusalem for 15 years. Though she can make it out from this hill, she can't get the required Israeli permit to travel the mere miles between her and the Old City.

"Ghada" -- a soft-spoken middle-aged woman who gets endearing smiles as we walk through this pristine campus -- has been deemed a security threat.


A message to the Wall-makers. Right seems to have been expunged from the lexicon of peacemaking in the Middle East.

But Palestinians -- and many Israelis -- have not forgotten the fundamental wrongs here: this Wall, the "break their bones" policy that violated a generation's trust in peace, and the original sin of 1948, which displaced three-quarter of a million innocent Palestinians and literally erased 400 of their villages.

As I prepare to leave Bethlehem, my mother's home, I marvel at my people's perseverance in this land and I mourn the essential fact that she, like millions of disenfranchised Palestinians the world over, cannot be here with me. That, simply, is wrong.

React: samer@helpUPA.com