They set out along Road Number One, the old border between East and West Jerusalem. Ramallah, the nominal seat of Palestinian power, lay just ten miles to the north. A checkpoint appeared before them. On the opposite side lay the Kalandiya refugee camp—ten thousand Palestinians piled into a few hundred square yards of breeze-block apartments. To the right, spread over a small hill, were the orderly red roofs of the Psagot Jewish settlement. Rising above it all was an enormous portrait of Yasir Arafat. The inscription, in Arabic, read: ALWAYS WITH YOU.

Yonatan jerked his thumb toward the backseat and said, “Put those things on.”

Gabriel, looking over his shoulder, saw an armored vest with a high collar and a metal combat helmet. He’d not worn a helmet since his brief stint in the IDF. The one Yonatan had brought along was too big, and it fell forward over his eyes. “Now you look like a real soldier,” Yonatan said. Then he smiled. “Well, almost.”

An infantryman waved them through the checkpoint, then, seeing who was behind the wheel, smiled and said, “Hey, Yonatan.” Discipline within the ranks of the IDF, like the Office, was notoriously lax. First names were the norm, and a salute was almost unheard of.

Gabriel, through his cloudy bulletproof window, studied the scene on the other side of the checkpoint. A pair of soldiers, weapons leveled, were ordering men to open their coats and lift their shirts to make certain they weren’t wearing bomb belts beneath their clothing. Women underwent the same search behind a barrier that shielded them from the eyes of their men. Beyond the checkpoint snaked a line several hundred yards in length—a wait, Gabriel calculated, of three to four hours. The suicide bombers had inflicted misery on both sides of the Green Line, but it was the honest Palestinians—the workers trying to get to jobs in Israel, the farmers who wanted only to sell their produce—who had paid the highest price in sheer inconvenience.

Gabriel looked beyond the checkpoint, toward the Separation Fence.

“What do you think of it?” Yonatan asked.

“It’s certainly nothing to be proud of.”

“I think it’s an ugly scar across this beautiful land of ours. It’s our new Wailing Wall, much longer than the first, and different because now people are wailing on both sides of the wall. But I’m afraid we have no other choice. With good intelligence we’ve managed to stop most of the suicide attacks, but we’ll never be able to stop them all. We need this fence.”

“But it’s not the only reason we’re building it.”