There is nothing quaint about a modern day's journey to Bethlehem. For the few pilgrims that still venture there, the first encounter is a shock. Taking the bus from Jerusalem, in less than a half hour's time the visitor is suddenly confronted by a massive wall of reinforced concrete eight meters high, circled with layers of barbed wire and interrupted every so often by a menacing watch tower. The bus circles around past the former main road that led into Bethlehem, now walled shut, and passengers are left to straggle in through the Israeli checkpoint.

Inside, one Palestinian man is scrutinized. Though he has got to be nearly 70 years old, he is questioned repeatedly by an annoyed looking Israeli soldier, an Ethiopian girl no more than 25 years old. The man cannot figure out how exactly he is supposed to place his hand in the space-age scanner that must check his identity in a database, but after multiple tries and some assistance from the Palestinian next in line, he is waved through.

Palestinians and visitors emerge from the concrete and metal structure into a railed walkway that follows the wall's course on the other side down to the old main road that leads into downtown Bethlehem. From this position on higher ground, one can see the wall snake around the town, and in the bright sunlight the olive trees beyond the wall seem to shimmer beneath the sky. These are the trees the Bethlehemites can no longer reach, the ones so many depended on to feed their families.

A line of about two dozen empty taxis waits at the bottom of the path. Drivers mill about talking to one another.

"I've been here since seven o'clock in the morning," says Suliman, a taxi driver. "And I haven't had one customer all day." It's one o'clock in the afternoon.

"I hope for my sons and daughters that they can leave this place. For me, it is too late. I'm just worried for them, for their future. This is not a life." The ride through Bethlehem's streets reveals one shop after another, all white stone facades with their green doors shut for good.

In 2003, the Israeli government started walling Bethlehem in, saying the move was necessary for security. It was not long after Palestinian fighters were dislodged from the Church of the Nativity, where they had holed up under siege in the spring of 2002.

By 2005, the enormous concrete slabs that have come to characterise the Separation Barrier were being put in place. Proponents say the Barrier is a security measure, and that since the building began terrorist attacks carried out by Palestinians in Israel have declined by 90 per cent.

But to see in intricate detail the path that the Wall is wending through the hillsides in Bethlehem, it's obvious that its affects go beyond providing security.

One would imagine the main city square, aptly named Manger Square, to be a bustling center full of tourists, since it is also home to the Church of the Nativity. The fourth-century church is built in the place where according to Scripture, Jesus was born.

Instead, the three sides of the square across from the church are lined with idle Palestinian youths.

"Unemployment is as high as 65 per cent," says the city's Palestinian Mayor, Victor Batarseh. "And about half of our people suffer some form of malnutrition."

"Many of our people, including refugees in the camps, worked inside Jerusalem. Now they can't get a permit to enter Jerusalem, not even to pray on their holy days," Mr. Batarseh says.

"We have no work, we cannot reach our agricultural lands, and tourism has been killed. We are already in a stranglehold, it has happened. We live in an open-air prison. And we can last only a few more months like this, not much more," he says.

Commerce within the West Bank itself has also been crippled, he says, as the short trip to Ramallah is beset with hours-long check points and diversions that make doing business impossible.

The only tour buses that make the trip come from Jerusalem for a few hours, long enough to take a look at the Church, then continue on their way. In fact, locals say, tourists are told it can be dangerous, and they are advised to make a straight line for the Church and a straight line back to the bus. Tourists eat and sleep in Jerusalem, and we, Mr. Batarseh says, "are left with nothing. Pilgrims buy cheap package tours that give us only a passing mention."

The industry, people in Bethlehem say, is almost completely controlled by Israeli companies.

Meanwhile, Israeli settlements continue to mushroom on all the surrounding hilltops, resembling bright white artichokes because of the peculiar architectural habit of building in concentric circles from the top down. The once wooded hills, formerly Palestinian land, are also left bereft of trees.

"You'll also see that often there is a single line of houses that shoots out across the bottom of a hilltop from a settlement," says Eoin Murray, the Palestine program officer for Trocaire, the Irish Caritas organisation. "That means that they'll soon be building on all the land that lies above that line too. The settlers take it."

Under agreements set out by the roadmap for peace, laid out by the "Quartet" of the U.S., the United Nations, the European Union and Russia, Israel committed itself to halting all settlement activity in Gaza and the West Bank, lands occupied during the 1967 Six-Day War. The international community views all settlement activity as illegal, while Israel says the lands were ownerless or needed for defense.

In the Bethlehem district, which includes the villages of Beit Sahour and Beit Jala, more than 80,000 Israelis are living in 20 different settlements, in addition to a number of "outposts" no bigger than a few trailer homes that aim to grow into larger settlements.

The path of the Separation Barrier encases these settlements on the Israeli side and annexes them to what is now called "Greater Jerusalem," though all of this land lies several kilometers beyond the Green Line inside the West Bank. The Green Line, defining Israel's borders before the 1967 war, was to be the basis for a future two-state solution in peace negotiations in the late 1990s.

Once peace talks appeared to be making progress, though, there was a push to lay claim to as much land as possible, to change the so-called "facts on the ground."

Some chalk that up to comments made by Ariel Sharon in 1998 as peace was looking more likely. "Everybody has to move, run and grab as many hilltops as they can to enlarge the settlements because everything we take now will stay ours... Everything we don't grab will go to them," the then Israeli Foreign Minister said to a group from the right-wing Tsomet party.

In 2005, Sharon, as Prime Minister, went on to expel 9,480 Jewish settlers from 21 settlements in Gaza and four settlements in the northern West Bank, in what was seen as a change of his previous views. He also founded a new political party calling for a two-state solution. But meanwhile, other West Bank settlements continued to grow. Israeli human rights organisation B'tselem states: "Israel has the right and duty to protect its citizens from attacks. However, the building of the Separation Barrier as a means to prevent attacks inside Israel is the most extreme solution that causes the greatest harm to the local population. Israel preferred this solution over alternate options that would cause less harm to the Palestinians. Even if we accept Israel's claim that the only way to prevent attacks is to erect a barrier, it must be built along the Green Line or on Israeli territory." The changing facts on the ground, in the words of Ha'aretz journalist Amira Haas, have killed the two-state solution in a deliberate way. The Palestinian state, in its fragments and urban ghettos, is no longer viable.

"The wall is not about security, said Father Raed Abusahlia, the Latin Catholic parish priest of the West Bank's only entirely Christian town, Taybeh, near Ramallah.

"If it continues like this," he said, "Bethlehem will explode."