WASHINGTON — As Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates head out Monday on a rare joint trip to the Middle East, it's not clear what they can accomplish.

Aides to Rice and Gates say the trip has three primary goals, each crucial: to persuade Iraq’s neighbors to do more to help stabilize the country, to counter Iran’s growing ambitions and to try to get real movement on peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

But America's credibility in the region has plummeted. The U.S. has failed to stabilize Iraq, destroy al Qaida, pacify Lebanon, isolate Syria or bolster moderate Palestinians. Instead, its policies have fueled Sunni Muslim extremism and emboldened Shiite Iran, which America's moderate Arab allies consider the two greatest threats to their rule.

So far, its support for Israel's ill-fated war in Lebanon and its efforts to undermine popular radical groups such as Hamas in the Gaza Strip and Hezbollah in Lebanon have borne little fruit. Along with its support for autocrats such as Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, such actions have undercut American claims that it's championing Muslim democracy.

Meanwhile, the clock is ticking on the Bush administration’s time in office. Leaders of friendly Arab states have lost confidence in President Bush’s ability to deliver on his promises and are wary of sticking their necks out too far to cooperate, according to diplomats and some U.S. officials.

“Our credibility is in tatters. They are not going to commit because they don’t trust us. That doesn’t mean they are not concerned about Iran. It just means they just don’t know what we are going to do,” said one senior State Department official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to speak to reporters.

There are also signs of disarray within the administration.

On the eve of the trip, unnamed U.S. officials told The New York Times that Washington believes Saudi Arabia has been unhelpful in Iraq by not supporting Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki's government. The administration publicly disavowed the report, but said that Saudi Arabia could do more to help. The leaked complaint seems unlikely to make life easier for Rice and Gates when they arrive in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, early in the trip.

The Bush administration also is divided over Iran, with Vice President Dick Cheney’s office pushing for an aggressive military response to Iran's reported aid and training for Shiite militias attacking U.S. troops in Iraq, senior officials said.

Gates and Rice will attend meetings together in Sharm al Sheikh, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. Rice will then head for Israel and the Palestinian territories to meet with Israeli leaders and Mahmoud Abbas, the weakened Palestinian Authority president whose administration was run out of Gaza by the Islamist group Hamas. Gates is scheduled to visit other gulf states.

Senior Pentagon and State Department officials said the trip is intended to reassure Arab leaders that the U.S. will uphold its security commitments in the region, even as Congress debates pulling troops out of Iraq.

But Arab diplomats in Washington said their governments need more than reassurance. They said that while the U.S. has promised a more active role, they haven't seen a clear plan for Middle East peace or regional security.

Indeed, after Bush called two weeks ago for an international Middle East peace conference, some Arab leaders concluded that the speech lacked specific goals and simply repeated the broad hopes that he's articulated before — stability in the region and moderate, inclusive governments.

“There is no clarity,” one Arab diplomat said on condition of anonymity because he didn't want to disagree publicly with the administration. “The trip in and of itself is not important. What’s important is that the administration commit to dealing with the substantive issues.”

The gulf states want to know how a possible drawdown of troops in Iraq would affect their security and whether it would lead to fewer troops in other parts of the region.

More than what Rice and Gates say on the trip, “people are monitoring the debate in Washington. Everybody is watching that very closely and then will draw their own conclusions,” an Arab official in Washington said.

Sunni-led gulf states fear Iran, but aren't confident that the United States has a strategy for dealing with Tehran, the diplomats said. U.S. officials say they're in the early stages of building an alliance with the gulf states.

“Iraq may be an immediate destabilizing influence. But Iran is something we collectively need to deal with in the long term,” said Geoff Morrell, a Pentagon spokesman.

On the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and other U.S. allies in the region want the United States to reach out to Hamas, which now controls Gaza. But Rice has repeatedly ruled out dealing with the group, which is on the U.S. list of terrorist organizations.

"The strategy is based on the assumption that you could isolate, weaken ... Hamas," while strengthening Abbas and his Fatah faction, said Shibley Telhami, a Middle East expert at the University of Maryland. "It cannot succeed. ... Everybody agrees that you can't simply isolate Hamas."

Gates and Rice will encourage Arab leaders to attend the international meeting on Middle East peace that Bush called for in a July 16 speech. The gathering is tentatively scheduled to take place this fall.

Israel and the United States hope that officials from Saudi Arabia, other Persian Gulf states and Morocco — none of which recognizes Israel — will attend. But that appears far from assured.

Before the Iraq war, Washington had strong ties with the gulf states, especially Saudi Arabia. But the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s Sunni-dominated government and the rise to power of Iraq’s majority Shiites shifted the balance in the region. With an unstable Iraq and their own Shiite minorities politically awakened, many governments feel U.S. actions have weakened their grip on power.

Some countries, such as Egypt, have maintained close ties with Washington, but Saudi Arabia and others have begun to distance themselves.

Rice and Gates have their work cut out for them. With 18 months left in office, it will be difficult to reshape the way the region sees the United States, said William Quandt, a professor of international relations at the University of Virginia, who as an aide to President Jimmy Carter helped craft the 1978 Camp David accords between Israel and Egypt.

“I don’t think they have a real strategy that has much chance of working,” Quandt said. Gates, who joined the administration in December, “may be able to calm things down a little. But that won’t change the course.”

First of two parts

On a recent November morning, in between his administrative hospital rounds and amid various workers’ strikes, continuing political uncertainty and growing worry that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was on the verge of yet another cycle of spiraling violence, Dr. Tawfiq Nasser pulled out his wallet and showed a visitor his identification cards.

“In this country, we have a habit of collecting cards,” the Palestinian doctor said dryly.

He held up three cards in quick succession: a magnetic security card to expedite his way through Israeli checkpoints; an identification card issued by the Palestinian Authority; and a third card certifying that he works for a nongovernmental organization: in this case, for the Lutheran World Federation, for which he serves as head of the Augusta Victoria Hospital in Jerusalem and also oversees the hospital’s program of village health clinics in various parts of the West Bank.

Nasser’s main focus, and worry, however, was about a permit due to expire the next day that allowed him to enter Israeli territory and return to his office in Jerusalem. A strike by Israeli bureaucrats was suddenly complicating his life -- without a new permit, he and his staff would be stranded.

The sudden concern about the permit overtook Nasser’s rapid-fire explanation about the fragmented health care system in the Palestinian territories. He argued that as long as an occupation exists, with its attendant checkpoints, delays and transportation snafus, villagers closer to one city to will be forced to go to another for their basic health care. And as a result, their health will suffer.

With a sudden, unexpected snafu about permits added to the mix, Nasser began to lose patience, becoming increasingly impassioned and angry as he spoke to a visitor. “All of our lives are run by bureaucrats in a settlement. You tell me this is no occupation, that it this is just security,” he said.

“Tomorrow, I don’t know if I can go to work,” he said, his voice rising. “And who is punished? The patients. Hamas, they’re not punished. It’s my patients.”

Declarations of impatience, frustration and outright anger are becoming increasingly common among Palestinians these days -- particularly those whose faces and voices are too rarely seen or heard in depictions of Palestinian reality in the West.

The “moderate” sector of teachers, academics, students, government officials and doctors -- the vanguard of Palestinian “civil society” who are not questioning the permanence of the state of Israel, even though they are clearly fed up with the politics of the Israeli occupation -- have, by dint of professional training and patience, kept day-to-day Palestinian society running. They have done so amid an ongoing political stalemate between rival political factions, militants and the Israeli government, and a humanitarian situation that has been worsening by the week.

Weary of politics but keenly aware that just about everything in their contested land is highly political, they are increasingly pessimistic about any resolution to their plight.

Something of their situation was summed up recently by Latin Patriarch Michel Sabbah of Jerusalem, a longtime champion of Palestinian rights, when he met earlier this month with a group of American journalists who write for Catholic publications.

Speaking of the situation in the Gaza Strip but also about the fate of Palestinians generally, Sabbah said: “They are not terrorists; they are people who are living under oppression and who are reacting. And not all of them are reacting. There are Palestinians who don’t react at all, who go on living their lives in despair and humiliation and poverty. They go on living under occupation without any reaction.”

Others feel similarly -- with a pronounced touch of pessimism. “We’re going nowhere,” Rafik Husseini, the chief of staff to President Mahmoud Abbas, said during an interview at the Palestinian Authority’s headquarters in Ramallah.

Sulieman Harb Shalaldeh, the mayor of the municipality of Sier, near the city of Hebron, expressed the hope that he could soon govern normally.

“Let us keep the politics outside so that our people can continue their lives,” Shalaldeh said recently to the group of journalists. Shalaldeh has to deal with competing political claims, day-to-day-tensions, and now strikes by frustrated Palestinian workers who have not been paid since U.S.-led international sanctions and cuts to the Palestinian Authority by the Israeli government were imposed in March. The cuts by the Israelis alone have resulted in a monthly loss of $50 million in customs receipts.

The mayor’s comments were echoed by a teacher who greeted her American guests with fresh fruit, cakes and tea. “The majority of Palestinians, 90 percent, have no relationship with politics,” she said. “But politics are reflected severely in their daily life.”

So is history. To an outsider what is perhaps most striking in Palestinian refugee settlements and other public spaces are murals depicting uprooted villages lost for 50 years or more, with some still clinging to keys and land titles of areas now occupied by Israeli homes, public spaces and even shopping malls.

Given the overwhelming sense of history and grievance that prevails here, the teacher’s name is all the more revealing. The woman speaking was named Palestine Hussein.

Facts on the ground

The phrase “facts on the ground” is often used to describe the reality of what Palestinians see as the things that make a viable Palestinian state and society difficult if not outright impossible: Israeli settlements, outposts, settler roads, checkpoints, the routing of a 420-mile separation barrier. But it just as easily could describe the deleterious humanitarian situation in the Palestinian territories themselves.

The territories’ gross domestic product stands at $1,183 per capita, according to the World Health Organization. Unemployment rates overall stand at 25.3 percent, while rates of poverty overall are 56 percent. The poverty rate in the impoverished Gaza Strip stands at an astonishing 80 percent.

“The population’s socioeconomic conditions and access to health care are severely affected by lack of contiguity between the West Bank and Gaza and restrictions on movements,” the World Health Organization said in a recent summary.

Current conditions -- exacerbated by an unsettled political situation -- are believed to have worsened humanitarian problems: Chronic malnutrition has long been a problem in the territories and has been particularly acute in Gaza, where a 2003 study by CARE International indicated that 13.3 percent of small children in Gaza suffered from chronic malnutrition -- 11 percent higher than a “normally nourished” population would suffer.

What precipitated the current crisis was the January victory of the political faction Hamas in Palestinian Legislative Council elections. Hamas’ victory in turn led to international sanctions that have cut assistance to the Palestinian Authority -- a move that Palestinians have decried as unfair and unjust.

“You wanted democracy and now when you see the fruit of our democracy you say, ‘No, we will boycott you.’ ” Sabbah said about the popular reaction to the move: “This is wrong, unfair and unjust for the Palestinian people.”

The Israeli and U.S. governments said sanctions are justified because Hamas is a terrorist organization. Palestinians -- and this includes those aligned with the rival political faction Fatah -- acknowledge and even embrace Hamas’ militancy. But they have also stressed what they say is Hamas’ political and humanitarian roots and argue that Hamas is no al-Qaeda. In fact, they contend, beginning in the 1970s, Israel itself helped foster the creation of Hamas as an Islamic alternative to the secular Palestine Liberation Organization.

The Israeli and U.S. governments have interpreted the Hamas victory as a worrisome sign of growing Palestinian and Islamic militancy, while Palestinians have tended to view the Hamas victory as a protest vote and a referendum on what they say was a corrupt and out-of-touch Fatah elite that had, the sentiment went, cravenly compromised with Israel during the 1990s. (While Hamas controls the Palestinian legislature, President Mahmoud Abbas is aligned with Fatah.)

Over dinner at a Ramallah restaurant, Nader Said, a development studies specialist who teaches at Birzeit University, said public sentiment went something like this: “Let’s try Hamas; we know Hamas won’t work, but let’s stick to our identity.” He said that Hamas had hit a deep public nerve.

However one defines Hamas and interprets the elections, the results proved a smashing blow in at least one respect: Western sanctions remain in place against the Palestinian government, with assistance being cut off until Hamas recognizes Israel’s right to exist and renounces violence against Israel.

These demands form the core of contention between various the Palestinian factions and were cause for continued dispute recently between Hamas and Fatah over a new compromise prime minister. The current prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas, has said he would resign if it would help restore international assistance to the Palestinian government.

The practical result of all of this is that salaries for some 140,000 government workers are not being paid -- prompting a joke by Husseini, the presidential chief of staff. He said recently on a Sunday evening that he was beginning his second work shift, at no pay. “I knew this would be a 75 percent reduction of pay,” he said. “I didn’t expect it would be 100 percent.”

Jokes aside, the sanctions have not only caused obvious hardships but also prompted a 70-day teachers’ strike, as well as walkouts by other public employees. Worsening day-to-day public services have become the norm.

“The boycott has had a devastating and cumulative effect,” said Tom Garofalo, the Jerusalem-based country representative for Catholic Relief Services. “Things are declining geometrically.”

Maybe not indefinitely, however: The end of the teachers’ strike Nov. 11 proved a major relief, and Arab nations that had joined the boycott have announced they will drop it, in part because of anger over a recent Israeli military attack in Gaza.

Nonetheless, reminders of what has been a stark, confusing and dispiriting time are everywhere: A school built with assistance from Catholic Relief Services in the village of Sier recently stood empty. A group of school administrators and parents huddled around a small administrative office and said both they and students have felt stranded and isolated by the strike and the international boycott, which they said have worsened the day-to-day hardships imposed by the occupation.

“What can we do?” said headmaster Ahed Mohid Jebreen who, like the parents, spoke about their coping mechanisms in an economy that has stalled -- be it borrowing from shop owners (and piling up debts), or selling family jewelry to pay bills.

“All the world is punishing us for our democracy, and that is not fair,” Jebreen said. Such punishment, he and the others stressed, is not punishing Hamas, but punishing the struggling Palestinian middle class and poor people.

A recent survey spearheaded by Said’s Development Studies Program confirmed those anecdotal observations: Of 1,200 persons surveyed in September, nearly three-quarters said their daily lives and living conditions had become worst since the January elections.

The survey also revealed that while Hamas’ popularity has declined precipitously -- from 50 percent in April to a mere 31 percent five months later -- a majority of those polled still thought Hamas should form a coalition government. And a majority, 62.3 percent, also said Hamas should not be expected to recognize Israel immediately. The poll also found that distrust of the United States was as widespread and deep as could possibly be: a full 94.4 percent said the United States had not played a constructive role in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian standoff.

This tense environment has also affected the response of American humanitarian agencies, such as Catholic Relief Services, that receive U.S. government funding for projects in the Palestinian territories. Catholic Relief Services has to abide by a no-contact rule with all Hamas officials, though it can still keep contact with such national bodies as the Palestinian president’s office.

As a practical result, that means the Catholic agency “has had to roll with some big changes,” Garofalo said. It has also made it occasionally difficult for local staff who, like any “on-the-ground” humanitarian workers, must deal with local authorities and governments no matter what their political affiliation. “We can function, but it has been difficult for our staff who work in Hebron, Bethlehem and Gaza,” Garofalo said.

These and other difficulties have changed a society that despite its many challenges was, in Said’s words, vibrant and hopeful. Now, day-to-day life seems more fragmentary and pinched, with horizons eclipsing. “The whole dream of a Palestinian state is in danger,” he said.

“We’ll do the small things we do each day,” he said. “But the big picture is desperate.”

He paused for a moment. “We’re asked, “Why do you have fundamentalists?” he said. His response: “It’s because you are closing all of the windows of fresh air.”

That is perhaps nowhere more evident than in Gaza, a place other Palestinians call everything from a prison to a mental asylum.

Potential powder keg

It doesn’t take long to learn that Gaza can break your heart.

A sunny Mediterranean outpost that contains some of the most crowded and densely populated urban areas on the planet, Gaza is an impoverished and dispiriting place until you listen to college-age students and young people speak passionately about furthering their skills in computer sciences and English -- although they do so amid the more-than-occasional and not terribly distant cracks of gunfire rounds.

Kidnappings are common here -- though it is said that they often stem more from boredom than from any political or even monetary motivation -- and have added to the sense of a powder keg in the making.

Now in the hands of the Palestinian Authority after a series of well-publicized withdrawals by Israel, Gaza is distinctly different from the West Bank, where Israeli and Palestinian communities collide and jut into each other. In Gaza, a sense of isolation and even imprisonment has taken root, resulting in ennui at best, contempt and extremism at worst.

“Throw whatever you want at us” is how presidential chief of staff Husseini describes popular sentiment in Gaza. “They are desperate. They have no hope. And they have nothing to lose but their chains.”

It is from Gaza that small, homemade rockets are often fired into Israel, prompting what Palestinians have called Israeli overreaction, but what Israel has declared as justified security measures of self-defense.

“I know the Gaza people are suffering,” said Bahij Mansour, a one-time member of the Israeli diplomatic corps who now heads Israel’s department of religious affairs and who spoke on Israeli policies recently to a group of Americans. But he said that Israel feels justified in protecting its borders along the Gaza Strip.

It is Gaza, in the town of Beit Hanoun, that drew worldwide focus recently when Israeli artillery killed 18 Palestinians -- including 13 members of a single family -- in a military operation that was criticized internationally and resulted in a United Nations Security Council resolution of condemnation that was vetoed by the United States. Israel, apparently embarrassed by an incident that killed primarily women and children, called the shelling “a mistake.” The move prompted new threats of suicide bombings, as well as fury throughout the Arab-speaking world and even talk of a third intifada within the occupied territories.

If the long-term ramifications of the Israeli action and the Palestinian response remain to be seen, it is not hard to imagine that the voices of Palestinian moderates in Gaza may become harder to hear.

Mohammed Ismail, 22, is one such voice. Active in a Gaza youth leadership program, Ismail is a one-time English student, an avid reader of Ernest Hemingway, and has hopes of studying English at the graduate level. He acknowledged that Gaza residents have reached a level of anger where they are “not afraid of losing everything.”

At the same time, though, he knows there are liberals in Israel who do not support their government’s policies toward the Palestinians and wishes there was a way for them to make common cause with Palestinians like himself.

One reason he believes that should remain a priority is because of a simple truism, recognized by many but maybe by not all on both the Palestinian and Israeli divide.

“We are here, they are there. We’re not leaving, and they’re not leaving.”

Chris Herlinger, a New York freelance journalist, recently traveled to Israel and the Palestinian territories as part of a prize for Catholic Relief Services’ Eileen Egan Award for Journalistic Excellence, which he won for reporting on Darfur for NCR in 2005. Photographer Paul Jeffrey, also an Egan Award winner, assisted with the reporting for this article.

We are either living in a reverie or in denial. When someone you know gets injured in this conflict, you expect to have feelings of outrage, deep sadness, or at least the manifestation of these feelings should be the normal outpourings of grief, sorrow and concern. And yet, news of casualties of a latest Israeli atrocity or an inter-factional battle does not faze people as it once did.

I want to be in hysterics. I know it is not something ordinary to say, but the truth is, this conflict has made people accept as normal, things that elsewhere would elicit deep reactions of wailing, or at least tears, or the momentary satisfaction of venting anger by breaking dishes across a room. Are the restrained reactions that many Palestinians have are merely a self-defense mechanism? Or are we really in denial about what is going on in down town Ramallah or on the beaches of the Gaza Strip? Has the daily dose of grim stories become such an ordinary thing in our life that we wake up each morning, wanting, needing a fix of the usual blood-drenched front page that we pour over while doing something as normal as having our morning coffee and scrambled eggs?

So, shouldn’t I be in hysterics? When I heard that a photojournalist that I know, Osama Silwadi, had been shot while doing something quite unexciting as to look out his office window during a procession on Ramallah’s main street, I cannot describe the feelings that went through my head. Funny, but I thought emotions are not supposed to be cerebral, and yet, I block feelings, like so many Palestinians (and even some foreigners living among us) have become used to doing, in order not to allow myself the luxury of sinking into a depression every time I hear a story of a child killed or a family annihilated, because there are far too many to count. Many of us have learned over the years that if you allow yourself the slightest chance to let the situation overcome you, you are done for and you will be unable to function.

Osama used to be a photojournalist for AFP and Reuters before he decided to become a freelancer and create a Palestinian image bank (www.apollo.ps). He is a father of three children, who now lies in a coma in a hospital bed in Tel Aviv, so far away from his family and friends in Ramallah that no one can visit him or offer his wife the support she needs at this time.

As Osama watched the procession below on Ramallah’s main street from his office window this past Sunday, boys were shooting into the air to commemorate a fallen comrade. I say boys because my (female) mind cannot accept the fact that mature men would be so irresponsible as to shoot in the air in a densely populated area, where the chance of a stray bullet hitting someone is not a remote possibility, but a certainty. And so, the bullet traveled from the barrel of one of those boys’ guns into Osama’s now non-existent spleen, up near his heart to lodge finally in his spinal cord.

The prognosis is not good and we all hope and pray for his recovery, knowing that when he finally wakes up from his coma, he will find that his reality has changed so dramatically around him and he will have to grapple with whether or not he will be able to resume his life as he had once lived it. All those times in the field when he knew that he was a taking chance on life by snapping shots of stone-throwing youths confronting soldiers, or non-violent protestors against the Wall, did he never stop to think that life is so fragile in any case that even a simple walk under rickety scaffolding or taking the wrong turn in a road can result in a fatal accident?

Not to sound like a cliché, but such is life, whether you have lived in a conflict zone all your life or not, you cannot cower in your house forever in the off-chance that you might be struck by lightening. Perhaps, however, people who have gone through trauma feel invincible and the sense of danger is blunted and lightly brushed aside, and so it could quite have possibly been those thoughts that went through Osama’s mind seconds before the impact of the bullet ripped through his body.

It is odd how yesterday morning, when I heard the news, all I could think about is how ordinary this news sounded, despite the fact that Osama had been on my mind quite often these past few days, because I was looking at some recent photos I had taken with his voice about light, lines and frame running through my head. I realized with some unease that I lost the ability to be shocked, indeed a friend told me once that he also lost the ability to be astonished by such things as the first flowering of spring or the birth of a child and that is how I feel sometimes, like I am a car in neutral mode most of the time. And while I am deeply saddened by what has happened to Osama, I am unable to reach down into that deep place where I will allow myself to feel more than the very superficial of feelings and I know that tears will not come.

It completely worries me, this sense that we are becoming a nation of zombies, who have turned off the tap of basic human responses to bad and good news alike that something like the recent inter-factional fighting is not so shocking or unexpected. Once you stop being shocked, then you stop being afraid, and once you stop being afraid, you can do anything out of the bounds of acceptable human behavior. The signs of intimidating armed men running unrestrained among the population should be dealt with immediately and decisively.

More importantly, the indications that we are heading toward a civil war that so many are trying to suppress and deny, will become a full-blown reality if this is allowed to continue and then there will be no turning back to a time when Palestinians put the national interests before the factional, if ever there were such a time. If that should happen, there will be more innocent bystanders like Osama, who will pay the heavy price of the craziness that we have sunken to in recent months, and ultimately Palestine will hemorrhage outwards and be drained of its wealth of people, who today still have the ability to save it from becoming yet another tragic tale for the history books.

By Lion's Gate I sat down and surveyed the Valley of Jehosophat. Well, actually, we Arabs call it Nutmeg Valley after the trees that used to grow here in abundance. Opposite me, across the valley, is the Mount of Olives where the pine trees favoured by Israelis to give a European look to the landscape are overtaking the indigenous olive. At the top of the hill to my right the UN has placed its offices - unwisely perhaps, for to the Biblically minded this is the Hill of Evil Counsel where Jesus' arrest was planned in the house of Caiaphas. Behind me are the walls of al-Haram al-Sharif, the great enclosure housing the al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock.

I have just walked away from the gate to the Haram because the Israeli soldiers would not allow my non-Muslim friends to go in with me. Signalling to me from behind the soldiers, the Palestinian caretaker apologised and said he would have welcomed us all in but these were "their" regulations.

We were in Jerusalem, Ramallah and Bethlehem for the Palestine festival of literature which I, Brigid Keenan, Eleanor O'Keeffe, Victoria Brittain and other friends had put together. It ran from May 7 to 11 and in every city our venues were filled to the rafters and our authors rode high on the enthusiasm of the audience. Roddy Doyle in Bethlehem got thunderous laughter and applause when he said he would be seeking reparations from the residents for the slaps he had received at his Irish school for saying baby Jesus was born in Nazareth. His books sold out in three days. A young man at Birzeit University was overwhelmed to meet Ian Jack; he had kept up his subscription to Granta since moving back from the US nine years ago. Schoolkids cried with joy when they met Khaled Abdalla; they had just seen The Kite Runner.

Every night we bedded down in a different hotel, and every morning we packed up and got on the bus and off at a checkpoint. At Qalandiya, we left our heavy luggage on the bus and learned to squeeze through the metal cages of the turnstiles without leaving a gap; the cages rotate a given number of times then stop. Once through, we were told we had to turn round and go through again - carrying our luggage. We saw a weeping woman, cradling her baby and propping up her husband, who was so ill he had tubes coming out of him and looked like her grandfather. The soldiers had turned them back. We could do nothing for her. At Bethlehem University the students were so taken by Jamal Mahjoub they asked for his novels to be put on the syllabus. The young women on Andy O'Hagan's and Pankaj Mishra's workshops asked if we couldn't run longer courses.

Now I'm standing in the Muslim cemetery and below me Christian and Jewish graves, too, cover large tracts of ground. Everyone wants to be buried here, in Nutmeg Valley, for it is here that the trumpet shall sound and the dead shall rise. Silwan, the Palestinian village nestled in the corner to the right, has for centuries found employment tending the graves. We walk round the mellow walls of the Old City till we are overlooking the village. An Israeli friend (call her "B") is showing us the excavations that burrow through the ground towards al-Aqsa. They are undertaken, she says, in an "ideological spirit". A guard at al-Aqsa once showed me the great well that used to store oil for the lamps: "This is where they plan to come in," he said. B tells us that 60% of Silwan has been taken over by settlers and the remaining villagers are fighting to stay on their land. She teaches us to read the landscape, to see the three small, fiercely antennaed hilltop settlements placed to cut off the main approaches to East Jerusalem, to trace the giant tunnel linking the Hebrew University on Mount Scopus to the (illegal) settlement of Ma'ale Adumim. We cluster around her maps and diagrams. Our group is dwarfed by tourists getting off giant coaches marked "Jewish National Fund".

Esther Freud and Hanan al-Shaykh decide to walk to the hotel. They take a short cut across some waste ground behind the building and are surrounded by a pack of growling dogs. Israeli soldiers appear and question the two writers. The soldiers tell them they're in a military zone and they'd been watching them and could have shot them. By the entrance to Western Wall Plaza, a massive billboard from the Israeli ministry of tourism proclaims that Jews pray there to express their "faith in the rebuilding of the Temple", and in a slick shop nearby they sell drawings of the Haram cleansed of al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock. They show plans and raise funds for the Third Temple rising in their place.

In al-Khalil/Hebron, we walked through the emptied streets of the old town past the shuttered shops of what had been the beating commercial heart of Palestine. Groups of robust American settlers jogged by us in shorts with machine guns. We saw the houses where Palestinian families who refused to leave were not allowed to use their front doors but had to climb into their homes through the back windows. And the houses where they were forbidden to lock their doors because the Israeli soldiers came in to check on them every night between midnight and 3am.

We were very silent when we left. But in Bethlehem that night the al-Funoun Troupe danced and flew across the stage in their brilliant costumes, and the audience stomped and yelled and whistled and, next morning, the students jostled and laughed and argued. We're here, the Palestinians were saying, we read and question and blog and shop and play and dance. We live.

I thought it was bad three years ago. Now the landscape itself is changed. New settlements spring up everywhere; more than 60 since I was here last. You can watch their metamorphosis from a handful of caravans, to some Portakabins, then basic bungalows and, finally, the bristling, concrete hilltop fortress that is an Israeli settlement. Hardly a Palestinian village exists without an Israeli settlement lowering down on it from above. Everywhere there is construction going on - illegally: wide, Israeli-only highways to connect the settlements to each other, great mounds of rubble and yellow steel gates to block the old roads between Palestinian villages. And there are people waiting; waiting with bundles, with briefcases, with babies, at gates, at roadblocks, at checkpoints, waiting to perform the most ordinary tasks of their everyday lives.

All this, Israel tells the world, is in the cause of security. On my first morning here we drive up through the West Bank to see the biggest construction of all: Israel's "security fence", a monster barrier of steel and concrete that separates farmers from their land and refugees from their homes. Brute technology hacking away at a living body of land and people. It rears up to block the sunset and the evening breeze from the people of Qalqilya, then spreads out to swallow great stretches of land cultivated over hundreds of years by the neighbouring villages.

This section of the barrier has been built right up close to the western side of the village of Jayyus. From the windows of the village hall you see it slide down the hill, snake into a huge S and vanish around the farmland to the right. Running along the inside of the barbed wire is a deep trench. There is also a patrol road, a swept sand track to reveal footprints and an electronic fence with hidden cameras. Alongside this barrier, at short intervals, red signs in Arabic, English and Hebrew proclaim: ANY PERSON WHO PASSES OR DAMAGES THE FENCE ENDANGERS HIS LIFE.

You cannot read the signs from here, but you can see them punctuating the acres that the mayor of this village has spent the past 40 years of his life cultivating. From his office window he can watch - on his land on the other side of the barrier - his olive trees waiting to be harvested, his guava trees dropping their ripe fruit on the ground. In each of his three greenhouses, 40,000 kilograms of cucumbers are hardening.

From this village of 3,000 souls, 2,300 acres have been confiscated for the barrier. And on the other side of the barrier another 2,150 acres, with six groundwater wells, are inaccessible, 12,000 olive trees stand unharvested, and the vegetables in 120 giant greenhouses are spoiling. Three thousand five hundred sheep have been driven off the land; actually, 3,498, because one man has lost two lambs. Three hundred families are totally dependent on their farms. Now their harvest is rotting before their eyes and they cannot get to it. They are feeding their flocks the husks from last year's planting.

There are yellow steel gates in the barbed wire but they are closed. Farmers are busy making phone calls, some are going to see the Israeli military to demand that the gates be opened. Eventually, soldiers arrive. Harvesting is a family affair so the soldiers face a crowd of men, women and children. What they do is this. First they collect all their identity papers. Then they call the people out one by one. Today they have decided that no male between the ages of 12 and 38 will be allowed on his land. Also, no woman will be allowed unless she is over 28 and married. So the majority of the farmers - men, women and teenagers - stand at the gate, the Israeli soldiers and the barrier between them and the harvest that is their sustenance and income for the coming year.

Two men set off to try and find a way of infiltrating their own land. The rest make their way back to the village hall. On the mayor's desk lie some 600 permits that appeared in the village this morning. They are issued by the Israeli authorities and made out to individual farmers. About half of them are in the names of people who can't use them: babies, infants, a couple of men who have been in Australia for 15 years. But that is not the point. The point is that the people know that if they use these permits they are implicitly accepting their terms: three months' access with no recognition of any rights to the land. They suspect that after three months Israel will start playing games with them. Permits like these were one of the mechanisms by which their parents and grandparents were dispossessed of their land in 1948. What should they do? Use the permits and try to salvage their crops and deal with the rest later? Boycott the permits and starve?

The next day a Jewish Israeli woman gives me a copy of the military order on which the permits are based. It names the West Bank land now trapped between the barrier and Israel's borders the "Seam Zone". It states that the people who have the right to be in the Seam Zone without permits are Israelis or anyone who can come to Israel under the Law of Return. That is, any Jewish person from anywhere in the world. But in this district alone, 11,550 Palestinians have their homes in the Seam Zone. "It is Nuremberg all over again," she says.

Today, the mayor is beside himself as he tries to get advice from the governor. One man tells me that his father, who is 65, is talking of buying explosives. "There will be no life for us anyway without the land," he says. The fighters and the suicide bombers have generally come from the urban deprivation of the camps. Now they will come from the villages, too.

Monday, Jerusalem al-Quds

Our taxi driver says: "The Israelis are clever. They build the wall and now everybody is talking about the wall. The wall is just a wall. It was built and it can be removed. The real questions are the borders, the settlements, Jerusalem and the refugees."

Wednesday, Bethlehem

It is less than two months to Christmas and the streets of Bethlehem are empty. There are no tourists, no pilgrims. On Star Street many of the shops are closed. The market where the neighbouring villages brought their produce to feed the town is deserted. The closures imposed by the Israeli army mean that farmers cannot come into Bethlehem and Bethlehemites cannot leave the town. The Monument to Peace built to celebrate Bethlehem 2000 has been demolished by Israeli tanks. The International Peace Centre - built on land where Turkish, then British, then Jordanian police stations each stood in turn - was used by the Israeli army as its headquarters when it besieged the Church of the Nativity. "They put up a crane with a box on top," says the friend who is taking us round, "with lights and a camera and an automatic sniper. And recordings. They played terrible sounds: explosions, animals, people screaming. All the time. Into the church."

In the church today, an old priest dozes on a chair. Two Franciscan monks are silently busy about the Armenian altar. A young man - one of the besieged "gunmen" - explains the Tree of Life mosaic to a group of schoolgirls. Three young women in hijab sit in a pew reading. And Christ and the Madonna observe us from the walls.

The settlements of Gilo, Har Gilo and Har Homa surround the city. Israel's military edicts are doing their best to strangle her, but Bethlehem will not lie down and die. The Peace Centre hosts an exhibition of Nativity scenes sent in by schools from all over the world. Annadwa, a new cultural centre, is buzzing with activity. The staff there are young and dedicated. They are headed by the softly spoken Reverend Dr Mitri al-Raheb, a gentle and impressive man who is fluent in many languages and has a beautiful and stylish wife. They run an exhibition space currently featuring a Norwegian artist, a gift shop that sells its merchandise on the internet, a workshop, a state-of-the-art media centre and a theatre. Today, Al-Raheb has been refused a permit to travel to a church meeting in Washington DC.

Every road out of Bethlehem is blocked by mounds of dirt and a checkpoint. Imagine driving along as you have always done, between Hampstead, say, and Regent's Park, when you come upon a barrier of earth thrown up the night before. Soldiers stand at the barrier in full battle gear, yelling at you in a strange language or a pidgin version of your own. They tell you to get out of your car - you're not allowed to drive here any more. If you're allowed to carry on, you will do so on foot. They yell at you to line up and they take their time checking your papers, questioning you - Where are you going? Why do you want to go there? Prove to me that your daughter/best friend/dentist/music teacher lives there. A few metres away you can see the new highway that cuts across your old road. Cars are speeding along on it, driven by men and women of that other people, the people that the soldiers belong to.

We stand at one of these checkpoints, my son taking photographs of the pedestrians waiting to be allowed to walk to the next village. Two soldiers leave the checkpoint and stride towards us, raising their M16s to the level of our heads and shouting: "No photographs! Give me your camera. You! No photos."

"Where's the notice that says no photography?" we call.

"Everyone knows. Give me the camera. I can shoot you. You take photo of me..."

"We took photos of the people waiting."

"You took photo of me. I can shoot you..."

"What's the problem? Are you ashamed of what you're doing? Show me the paper that says we can't take photos." This is Tony, our Palestinian guide. He's a film editor with an international press agency and has a US passport.

"I don't need no fucking paper. I can shoot you, that's my paper."

"Show me the paper."

"This is Israel, I do what I like. I can shoot you. Here I do what I like."

"This isn't Israel. This is the West Bank."

"West Bank? What is this West Bank?" The soldier turns to his friend questioningly.

My son tries to chip in but I stamp on his foot.

"Look: in there, is Palestine. You do what you want. Here is Israel. In your country, can you take pictures of secret soldiers?"

After a bit more of this Tony gets out his mobile and phones the army. The soldiers take off their shades and turn into unhappy young men: "You think I like to do this? You think I like to stand all day wearing this, and this, and this? This I have to do so my mother is safe in Tel Aviv." We suggest it might be a happier situation all round if they did this on the green line. "Green line? They can creep under the green line. Look: we give them everything. They always want more. We give them land, we give them water, we give them electricity. They want more..."

"But you are stealing these people's land. What about the settlements?"

"That is for the politicians. We don't know about that. It is the politicians." They go back to the checkpoint. We keep the camera. Tony has to take our photos to the army censor for clearance within 48 hours.

Tony's family's business is on Star Street, close to Manger Square. Four years ago he and his father pooled their savings and built a spacious home on five floors: one each for Tony and his three sisters, the parents at the top. He is married to a diaspora Palestinian who has come back from Europe to live with him in Bethlehem. Two weeks ago his first child was born. I guess he is thinking a lot about what kind of life his child will have here. On the walls in the street the portrait of Edward Said has taken its place alongside the pictures of Christine Saada, the 10-year-old girl shot in her father's car in March, and Abed Ismail, the 11-year-old boy killed by a sniper in Manger Square.

"Look at it! Look at it!" The arc of Tony's arm takes in the brand-new conference centre completed in 2000 and shelled by the Israelis a few months later. The large hotel and leisure complex set up next to Solomon's Pools and also shelled by the Israelis. And then the wall. Here it comes, creeping up on the west of Bethlehem...

Saturday, Birzeit

Three years ago, Birzeit university was 20 minutes' drive from Ramallah. Now, on a good day, it takes over an hour to get there. The Israeli army has blocked the road at Surda and though today the checkpoint is not manned, people have to get out of their transport and climb on foot over the rubble. I'm told that anyone attempting to remove rubble is shot at and that the rubble is replenished from time to time by the army.

We climb over and proceed on foot for one kilometre till the next roadblock. Alongside the road a market has sprung up with stalls selling food, drinks and housewares. There are horses and donkeys for hire, mule-drawn carriages and small carts pushed by men. There are also some young volunteers with wheelchairs for the infirm and elderly.

We walk along in the crush and I'm thinking of how one of the tasks of the occupation is to push people into more and more primitive conditions. But I am also thinking that this doesn't really matter, that it's manageable, that it's not the worst thing that can happen. Then I hear a low but spreading murmur - "They've come, they've come" - and a Humvee appears at my shoulder. The car is squat and broad and its windows are completely black. It is shouting incomprehensible commands throughits Tannoy as it moves in jagged, erratic bursts among the crowd. People step quietly out of the way but no one looks up. This, in general, is how the people treat the Israeli army: by ignoring it as much as possible. But I can feel in my stomach and my spine that the Humvee is here to show us all who is master, who runs this road.

Getting to class here is an act of resistance and at the university the Kamal Nasser Auditorium is full. No one wants to talk about the occupation. For three hours, these students and their teachers want to talk literature, theatre, music. And they want to do it in English.

But over lunch they tell me that earlier in the day the Humvee had parked across the university gates and the Tannoy had sputtered insults. "Provocation. They provoke the students and hope one of them throws something then they can begin to shoot." One young man tells me that a few days before, when the checkpoint was manned, he had been among some 200 students that the soldiers had detained there. Eventually, as the students protested about being made late for class, one soldier had a bright idea: every young man who had gel in his hair could go through. "Today," he said, "gel will buy you an education."

Sunday, Jerusalem al-Quds

Daphna Golan teaches human rights at the Hebrew University. She takes her students out to the "field", the West Bank, to research specific topics. The right to education, for example. Today, they have been south of al-Khalil (Hebron). The settlers there have been terrorising children on their way to and from school. The kids' journey should take 20 minutes but to avoid the settlers they go by back routes which take them two hours. I ask how old the children are. "Seven or eight. Today they went the short way because we were with them and the settlers could not harm them but we could see that the children were very, very frightened." I ask how the settlers terrorise them. "They beat them. And they are armed. It is very strange," she says. "You know, these are not the settlers that you imagine. These are young people like hippies. Long hair, bright clothes, rasta hats. They grow organic vegetables. They carry their guitars and their guns and they are vicious."

How many stories can I tell? How many can you read? In the end they all point in the same direction. Every Palestinian I meet (and many Israelis) tells me the same thing: what Israel wants is a Palestine as free of Arabs as possible. This is the big push, the second instalment of 1948. Israeli policies make life unbearable so that every Palestinian who has a choice will go. The ones left behind - the ones with no options - will be a captive population, severed from their land, from their community, caged behind barriers, walls and gates. This is the labour that will work in the industrial zones Israel is already building near the barrier.

The Palestinians describe what is happening as ethnic cleansing. They also say that they have lived through 1948 and there is no way they are leaving. Dr Nazmi al-Ju'ba has the optimistic job of restoring old Arab architecture in Palestine. "The Palestinians have many options," he tells me, smiling. "We can live in a binational state, we can live in a Palestinian state, we can live under occupation - but we will live in any case. And we will live as a collective; as a Palestinian nation."

Thursday November 20, Jayyus

The farmers took the permits. Finally, they could not bear to watch their harvest die. And then the games began. Abdullatif Khalid, the engineer who runs the Emergency Centre at Jayyus, tells me he has just come back from a smallholding owned by four brothers. They are struggling to feed their flock of 150 sheep. Since the beginning of November they, like all the other farmers, have been dividing a day's food over five days. They are trying to slow down the process of starvation. Some of their ewes have miscarried and some of their lambs have died. They drive their sheep to the yellow steel gate in the barrier. They have their permits and the Israeli soldiers have no problem letting them through to their pasture. But they refuse to let in the sheep. They have no orders, they say, to let in sheep.

Khalid says that all the sheep owned by the village are going to starve, while their pastures lie across the Israeli security barrier. "Can somebody intervene here?" he asks. "You know when birds get stuck in oil slicks or whales get beached, everybody rushes to help them. Maybe helping the Palestinians is complicated. But the world could help the sheep. That should be simple."

Source: The Guardian

Edward Said, who died yesterday, was not just a formidable thinker and writer - he was a loyal and thoughtful friend

It was 12 years ago that Edward called me, early on a summer evening, to tell me he had just been diagnosed with leukemia. There was no hushed tone, no sadness, no fear in his voice. There was surprise and anger. It was "Guess what? I've got fucking leukemia. Apparently I'm dying." I said: "You can't be dying."

It was an impossibility as far as I was concerned, and continued to be an impossibility - until today. Our loss cannot be measured. For 22 years Edward has been my friend. And the friendship started in a way typical of him. He heard I was in New York. He had read my first published story. He phoned up and invited me and my husband to dinner at his house. We met Maryam, his wife, Wadi and Najla, his kids, and a few others. At the end of the evening he walked Ian and me out. At the door of the lift we all shook hands then he opened his arms and gave me a huge hug. We had become old friends.

Now I say to myself: he was 68, he had a wonderful family, he saw his children grown up and had huge happiness and pride in them, he leaves us his work, he has touched and influenced millions of people across the world and, in the end, death comes for each and every one of us. But it brings no comfort.

The loss to his family I cannot speak of. For us, his friends, we are orphaned. What shall we do without him? He brought love and concern and loyalty and charm to his friendships, and he kept them in good repair. He was ready with help before you even knew you needed it. Many times, alone in a strange city, my hotel phone would ring and it would be a friend of Edward's: "He said I had to look after you so I'm coming round to take you out."

When I told him last Christmas that I was going to Rome, he gave me a phone number: "Get in touch with her. She's a wonderful woman. You'll love her." It was his music teacher, from Cairo, from half a century ago. She still adored him. She said he had never lost touch and that she and her husband prayed for him every night. "Edward and his 3,000 close friends" is how one of us puts it.

Yet when you were with him, you always felt unique. He noticed if you wore your hair differently, he commented on your clothes, on what you chose to eat. In my car, recently: "Would you mind switching off this dreadful racket?" of a currently popular Egyptian singer. And then, turning to me: "But if you like this stuff, how can you bear not to live in Cairo?"

It is a measure of his no-holds-barred friendship that, when I was alone one night some two years ago, with the diagnosis of my husband's lung cancer just off the fax, it was to Edward in New York that I turned. He talked me through that first hour and gave me phone numbers of doctors, medical centres and friends who had been through it. When I made contact I found he had already called them and told them, again, to "look after" me.

At the last two of his public events that I attended with him - one in Brighton, the other in Hay - people were coming up afterwards just to touch him. It was as though he was a talisman. He laughed it off: "You know me, I'm just an old demagogue," he said.

But he wasn't. He was a guide and an example. In the most private conversation, as well as in public, he was always human, always fair, always inclusive. "What is the matter with these people?" he asked after a recent debate. "Why does no one mention truth or justice any more?" He believed that ordinary people, all over the world, still cared about truth and justice. My life and many others' are desolate without him.

Source: The Guardian

Dear Mr. Blair,

London,

It is midnight now and I have spent these last three days of Easter here, in London, moving between TV channels, the Internet and the walls of my home as the Israeli army moves into the towns of the West Bank. I feel a tremendous anger and a tremendous frustration. And thousands in Britain, millions in the world, feel the same way. We hate what is happening. We fear what is about to happen. On Saturday I received an e-mail signed by eight Palestinian and 17 Israeli academics. They say, among other things: "We call for the international community not to wait for massacres on the scale of those in Sabra and Shatila in 1982; the time for action is now." Now, Mr. Blair, now. When you were elected, much was made of your "ethical" foreign policy. Where are the ethics of your foreign policy now, Mr. Blair? Women and children are trapped in their homes. Men are blindfolded and shot in the streets. An entire civilian population is being terrorized in the name of rooting out terror - will you do nothing about it?

Two months ago, in a talk in central London, the Israeli anti-occupation activist Jeff Halper told us that Israel will never, ever pull out of the West Bank voluntarily. And why should it? After all, this is how Israel first came into being. Bands of settlers taking over land and driving out the original inhabitants. The policy that was adopted in 1905 and which remains unchanged is "talk peace and create facts on the ground". This is what every Israeli government has done so far. The Sharons are simply more upfront about their intentions than the Baraks. But there are differences between then and now. One is that some young Israelis, born in Israel and loyal to their country, are beginning to think differently. Some of them are the soldiers now (numbering 384) who are bravely refusing to serve in the occupied territories. Here is one, Gil Nemesh, staff sergeant, engineering: "Those terrible things happening in the territories have little to do with the security of Israel and stopping terror. It is all about the settlements. Choking and starving and humiliating millions of people, to provide safety to the settlements."

Another difference between then and now is the Palestinian people. They have learned the lessons of 1948; have learned what happens to you once you let yourself be terrorized off your land. And so they are staying to the bitter end. Not that the duration has been any less bitter. They have gone the way of negotiations and talks and discussions, and have seen that in 32 years it has led them nowhere. That in the nine years since the Oslo accord the illegal settlements have doubled while the world is lulled by talk of "peace processes" and "stages" and "negotiations". Now their backs are to the wall. Bring the occupation to an end and you will have peace in the time it takes to withdraw the Israeli army and the illegal settlers to within the Green Line. The situation is still retrievable - but only just.

The vast majority of Palestinians do not condone suicide attacks-or any attacks - upon civilians. Here is another Israeli soldier: Tal Belo, staff sergeant, armored corps: "The women of Gaza were the true heroes. While the men were busy tending to the miseries of life and looking for ways to liberate themselves from this or that occupation, the women were busy taking care of the kids, preparing the food and working in the groves... All alone there, they cried for their youth and for their dreams; for the sons who were killed or sent to prison, or for the sons who will be killed or will be sent to prison." But now young girls strap explosives to their bodies and blow themselves up. Can you imagine the despair and the anger that would lead a young woman to such an act? Do you know what happens in the West Bank and Gaza, Mr. Blair? What has been happening there for years? Let me tell you - or better still, let another Israeli soldier tell you. You see, Mr. Blair, I am quoting heavily from these young men.

This is to make up the credibility I may lack as a UK citizen of Egyptian origin and to dispel the prevailing myth that this is a "religious" conflict rather than a political one. So listen to Assaf Oron, Sergeant, first class, Infantry: "...when, as a sergeant, I found myself in charge, something cracked inside me. Without thinking, I turned into the perfect occupation enforcer. I settled accounts with 'upstarts' who didn't show enough respect. I tore up the personal documents of men my father's age. I hit, harassed, served as a bad example... I was no aberration. I was exactly the norm..." Have you seen the pictures of the Israeli army stationed on the roofs of people's houses? Do you know what that is like, day by day, hour by hour? Listen to Avner Kohavi, sergeant first class, infantry: "First, the external walls of the house were black with coffee leftovers spilled by the soldiers from the roof. The yard was full of shit and toilet papers because it served as the soldiers' latrine. On the roof there were piles of trash and empty cans. The military vehicle bringing every new shift in would shatter the pavement and entrance to the house. When a shift changed at 2am, all the tenants would wake up, and since there was a baby in the house he would start wailing. I remember the look on the face of the tenants whenever I bumped into them on the stairway: a look of humiliation." And this was in the good old days, before they started making men strip to their underwear to walk through the checkpoints, before they started digging trenches so that people couldn't get to work, before they placed their tanks at hospital gates so women delivered their babies in the streets, before they started the executions. So tell them, Mr. Blair, tell them that this life, with no end in sight, is preferable to blowing themselves up and taking a few of their tormentors with them. The people who get blown up are often not their specific tormentors. A sad and terrible truth. But still, as Tamir Sorek, sergeant first class, army intelligence, writes: "The deprived (Palestinian) habitants are still desperately demanding their rights. The obvious facts that their uprising includes hideous assaults against innocent privileged (Israeli) people do not subtract from the legitimacy of their claim for freedom from non-elected rule.”

How is that for straight, moral thinking? Do something to stop the occupation, Mr. Blair. For days presidents and world leaders have been pleading with Sharon not to harm Chairman Arafat. Arafat's life is not worth more than any other and the man is no picture, but filmed by candlelight he looked like a Rembrandt on the television screen. That is the image that will fuel the years of anguish that will surely follow if anything happens to him.

The occupation is not negotiable. It is illegal by all accepted international laws. It is immoral, obscene, corrupting. Negotiations about the other issues in question should take place after the occupation is ended. The calls for help are coming not only from the Palestinians but from Israelis too. Listen to them. And tell your friend in the White House that Israel needs to be bound by international law. Tell him that the Arabs' quarrel with America is because of its dishonesty on the Israeli issue; that it cannot pick a fight with Iraq for not heeding international law and at the same time fund the Israeli slaughter of Palestinians with American taxpayers' money. As Sgt. Oron writes: "We are the Chinese young man standing in front of the tank (in Tiananmen Square). And you? If you are nowhere to be seen, you are probably inside the tank, advising the driver."

Yours,

Ahdaf Soueif. (GNS)