Abir Dandis, the mother of the two girls who were murdered in the Negev town of Al-Fura’a last week, couldn't find a police officer to listen to her warnings, neither in Arad nor in Ma’ale Adumim. Both police stations operate in areas where Israel wants to gather the Bedouin into permanent communities, against their will, in order to clear more land for Jewish communities. The dismissive treatment Dandis received shows how the Bedouin are considered simply to be lawbreakers by their very nature. But as a resident of the West Bank asking for help for her daughters, whose father was Israeli, Dandis faced the legal-bureaucratic maze created by the Oslo Accords.

The Palestinian police is not allowed to arrest Israeli civilians. It must hand suspects over to the Israel Police. The Palestinian police complain that in cases of Israelis suspected of committing crimes against Palestinian residents, the Israel Police tend not to investigate or prosecute them.

In addition, the town of Al-Azaria, where Dandis lives, is in Area B, under Palestinian civilian authority and Israeli security authority. According to the testimony of Palestinian residents, neither the IDF nor the Israel Police has any interest in internal Palestinian crime even though they have both the authority and the obligation to act in Area B.

The Palestinian police are limited in what it can do in Area B. Bringing in reinforcements or carrying weapons in emergency situations requires coordination with, and obtaining permission from, the IDF. If Dandis fears that the man who murdered her daughters is going to attack her as well, she has plenty of reason to fear that she will not receive appropriate, immediate police protection from either the Israelis or the Palestinians.

Dandis told Jack Khoury of Haaretz that the Ma’ale Adumim police referred her to the Palestinian Civil Affairs Coordination and Liaison Committee. Theoretically, this committee (which is subordinate to the Civil Affairs Ministry) is the logical place to go for such matters. Its parallel agency in Israel is the Civilian Liaison Committee (which is part of the Coordination and Liaison Administration - a part of the Civil Administration under the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories).

In their meetings, they are supposed to discuss matters such as settlers’ complaints about the high volume of the loudspeakers at mosques or Palestinians’ complaints about attacks by settlers. But the Palestinians see the Liaison Committee as a place to submit requests for permission to travel to Israel, and get the impression that its clerks do not have much power when faced with their Israeli counterparts. In any case, the coordination process is cumbersome and long.

The Palestinian police has a family welfare unit, and activists in Palestinian women’s organizations say that in recent years, its performance has improved. But, as stated, it has no authority over Israeli civilians and residents. Several non-governmental women’s groups also operate in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem, and women in similar situations approach them for help. The manager of one such organization told Haaretz that Dandis also fell victim to this confusing duplication of procedures and laws. Had Dandis approached her, she said, she would have referred her to Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, which has expertise in navigating Israel’s laws and authorities.

John Kerry revealed his long-awaited plan for peace in the Middle East on Sunday, hinging on a $4bn (£2.6bn) investment in the Palestinian private sector.

The US secretary of state, speaking at the World Economic Forum on the Jordanian shores of the Dead Sea, told an audience including Israeli president Shimon Peres and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas that an independent Palestinian economy is essential to achieving a sustainable peace.

Speaking under the conference banner "Breaking the Impasse", Kerry announced a plan that he promised would be "bigger, bolder and more ambitious" than anything since the Oslo accords, more than 20 years ago.

Tony Blair is to lead a group of private sector leaders in devising a plan to release the Palestinian economy from its dependence on international donors. The initial findings of Blair's taskforce, Kerry boasted, were "stunning", predicting a 50% increase in Palestinian GDP over three years, a cut of two-thirds in unemployment rates and almost double the Palestinian median wage. Currently, 40% of the Palestinian economy is supplied by donor aid.

Kerry assured Abbas that the economic plan was not a substitute for a political solution, which remains the US's "top priority".

Peres, who had taken the stage just minutes before, also issued a personal plea to his Palestinian counterpart to return to the negotiations.

"Let me say to my dear friend President Abbas," Peres said, "Should we really dance around the table? Lets sit together. You'll be surprised how much can be achieved in open, direct and organised meetings."

Thick locks hug the front gates of shuttered shops, now covered in graffiti and dust from lack of use. Only a handful of customers pass along the dimly lit road, sometimes stopping to check the ripeness of fruits and vegetables, or ordering meat in near-empty butcher shops.

“All the shops are closed. I’m the only one open. This used to be the best place,” said 64-year-old Mustafa Sunocret, selling vegetables out of a small storefront in the marketplace near his family’s home in the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City.

Amidst the brightly coloured scarves, clothes and carpets, ceramic pottery and religious souvenirs filling the shops of Jerusalem’s historic Old City, Palestinian merchants are struggling to keep their businesses alive.

Faced with worsening health problems, Sunocret told IPS that he cannot work outside of the Old City, even as the cost of maintaining his shop, with high electricity, water and municipal tax bills to pay, weighs on him.

“I only have this shop,” he said. “There is no other work. I’m tired.”

Abed Ajloni, the owner of an antiques shop in the Old City, owes the Jerusalem municipality 250,000 Israeli shekels (68,300 U.S. dollars) in taxes. He told IPS that almost every day, the city’s tax collectors come into the Old City, accompanied by Israeli police and soldiers, to pressure people there to pay.

“It feels like they’re coming again to occupy the city, with the soldiers and police,” Ajloni, who has owned the same shop for 35 years, told IPS. “But where can I go? What can I do? All my life I was in this place.”

He added, “Does Jerusalem belong to us, or to someone else? Who’s responsible for Jerusalem? Who?”

Illegal annexation

Israel occupied East Jerusalem, including the Old City, in 1967. In July 1980, it passed a law stating that “Jerusalem, complete and united, is the capital of Israel”. But Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem and subsequent application of Israeli laws over the entire city remain unrecognised by the international community.

Under international law, East Jerusalem is considered occupied territory – along with the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Syrian Golan Heights – and Palestinian residents of the city are protected under the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Jerusalem has historically been the economic, political and cultural centre of life for the entire Palestinian population. But after decades languishing under destructive Israeli policies meant to isolate the city from the rest of the Occupied Territories and a lack of municipal services and investment, East Jerusalem has slipped into a state of poverty and neglect.

“After some 45 years of occupation, Arab Jerusalemites suffer from political and cultural schizophrenia, simultaneously connected with and isolated from their two hinterlands: Ramallah and the West Bank to their east, West Jerusalem and Israel to the west,” the International Crisis Group recently wrote.

Israeli restrictions on planning and building, home demolitions, lack of investment in education and jobs, construction of an eight-foot-high separation barrier between and around Palestinian neighbourhoods and the creation of a permit system to enter Jerusalem have all contributed to the city’s isolation.

Formal Palestinian political groups have also been banned from the city, and between 2001-2009, Israel closed an estimated 26 organisations, including the former Palestinian Liberation Organisation headquarters in Jerusalem, the Orient House and the Jerusalem Chamber of Commerce.

Extreme poverty

Israel’s policies have also led to higher prices for basic goods and services and forced many Palestinian business owners to close shop and move to Ramallah or other Palestinian neighbourhoods on the other side of the wall. Many Palestinian Jerusalemites also prefer to do their shopping in the West Bank, or in West Jerusalem, where prices are lower.

While Palestinians constitute 39 percent of the city’s population today, almost 80 percent of East Jerusalem residents, including 85 percent of children, live below the poverty line.

“How could you develop [an] economy if you don’t control your resources? How could you develop [an] economy if you don’t have any control of your borders?” said Zakaria Odeh, director of the Civic Coalition for Palestinian Rights in Jerusalem, of “this kind of fragmentation, checkpoints, closure”.

“Without freedom of movement of goods and human beings, how could you develop an economy?” he asked.

“You can’t talk about independent economy in Jerusalem or the West Bank or in all of Palestine without a political solution. We don’t have a Palestinian economy; we have economic activities. That’s all we have,” Odeh told IPS.

Israel’s separation barrier alone, according to a new report by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTD), has caused a direct loss of over one billion dollars to Palestinians in Jerusalem, and continues to incur 200 million dollars per year in lost opportunities.

Israel’s severing and control over the Jerusalem-Jericho road – the historical trade route that connected Jerusalem to the rest of the West Bank and Middle East – has also contributed to the city’s economic downturn.

Separation of Jerusalem from West Bank

Before the First Intifada (Arabic for “uprising”) began in the late 1980s, East Jerusalem contributed approximately 14 to 15 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) in the Occupied Palestinian territories (OPT). By 2000, that number had dropped to less than eight percent; in 2010, the East Jerusalem economy, compared to the rest of the OPT, was estimated at only seven percent.

“Economic separation resulted in the contraction in the relative size of the East Jerusalem economy, its detachment from the remaining OPT and the gradual redirection of East Jerusalem employment towards the Israeli labour market,” the U.N. report found.

Decades ago, Israel adopted a policy to maintain a so-called “demographic balance” in Jerusalem and attempt to limit Palestinian residents of the city to 26.5 percent or less of the total population.

To maintain this composition, Israel built numerous Jewish-Israeli settlements inside and in a ring around Jerusalem and changed the municipal boundaries to encompass Jewish neighbourhoods while excluding Palestinian ones.

It is now estimated that 90,000 Palestinians holding Jerusalem residency rights live on the other side of the separation barrier and must cross through Israeli checkpoints in order to reach Jerusalem for school, medical treatment, work, and other services.

“Israel is using all kinds of tools to push the Palestinians to leave; sometimes they are visible, and sometimes invisible tools,” explained Ziad al-Hammouri, director of the Jerusalem Centre for Social and Economic Rights (JCSER).

Al-Hammouri told IPS that at least 25 percent of the 1,000 Palestinian shops in the Old City were closed in recent years as a result of high municipal taxes and a lack of customers. “Taxation is an invisible tool…as dangerous as revoking ID cards and demolishing houses,” he said. “Israel will use this as pressure and as a tool in the future to confiscate these shops and properties.”

Some of the women wore smart suits. Many modestly covered their hair. Only one wore the most conservative Islamic dress, cloaking herself head to toe in black.

Members of the Women's Affairs Technical Committee of Palestine, they had gathered in June in a hotel conference room in Gaza City for a symposium titled "After the Withdrawal From Gaza."

They were not happy with what they were hearing over the crash of the surf beyond the windows.

Like Palestinians generally, these women wanted to hear precisely what the Palestinian leadership planned to do. They knew that the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, said he would withdraw Israeli settlers and soldiers from the Gaza Strip next year. They knew that Palestinian factions had begun struggling over who will govern Gaza and how, whether it will be ruled by agreement, by ballot, by force, or not at all.

They did not think they had heard answers from the first panel, composed of a legislator, a former minister and a militant leader.

"You make me so depressed," said Rida Awadallah, 59, of the Working Women's Union, when she got her chance to ask a question. "Maybe I'm dumb, but I've heard all this before. What's the preparation for the next stage?"

Some Palestinians glimpse in an Israeli pullout a new chance at statehood, a chance to create a model of self-rule that will spread to the West Bank, leading to a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital.

But 10 years after Yasir Arafat returned in triumph to Gaza under a previous experiment in self-rule, the Oslo peace process, these would-be leaders are scrambling for a way forward. The alternative, they say, is all too clear: a destitute enclave ruled by warlords and militants, an outcome they fear will doom their national movement.

As the panelists suffered under the lacerating questions, one of them, a Palestinian legislator and political scientist named Ziad Abu Amr, finally fired back: "Do you want us to lie to you concerning the depression you are suffering from? You know who is determining everything. Arafat hasn't proposed a vision for the Palestinian people."

While he spoke, a murmur swept the room. Flanked by beefy bodyguards, Muhammad Dahlan strode through the door. He was to give the next talk, "An Independent Vision."

Mr. Dahlan, for years the leader of the Preventive Security Force in Gaza, is more feared than loved here.

But he is favored by Israeli, European and American officials as strong enough to run Gaza, and he has embarked on a political campaign. He sees the Israeli withdrawal as an opportunity - for the Palestinians and maybe for himself - and he is determined to take advantage of it.

Like many other Palestinians, he says Israel has deliberately sown chaos by striking at the Palestinian Authority during the conflict, an accusation Israel denies. Now, he argues, if the Palestinians fail here, Israel will point to the example and refuse to cede more of the West Bank.

Mr. Dahlan is not a reckless man, and his speech was cautious. But then came the barrage of questions. The moderators tried to avoid the woman in black, but she would not be denied, seizing the microphone to stridently challenge what she saw as a muddled speech.

Mr. Dahlan raised his own voice in return, and his message grew stronger as well. He asked if Palestine wanted to go the way of Iraq or Libya. Palestinians could either build a model in Gaza, or embrace "chaos and destruction."

Over and over, Palestinian leaders had exaggerated their achievements, he continued. "We are deceiving ourselves," he said. "We failed to make peace and to make war. We failed at both. We have to decide now: Are we going to have war or peace? If it's war, I will be the first to pick up a machine gun."

In an interview in his office one recent evening, Mr. Dahlan tore a blank sheet of paper from a notebook and held it up. That was all the orders he had ever received in 25 years within Mr. Arafat's dominant movement, Fatah, he said. "They are against the intifada; at the same time, they are with the intifada," he said of Fatah's leaders, without naming the top one. "They are against the terror, and they are with the terror."

It was time, he said, to choose.

"We are in the junction," he said, "either to get to Palestinian independence, or to get back to Somalia."

Trying, Grimly, to Be Normal

It is something of a historical paradox that Gaza - poorer and sharper-edged than the West Bank - would emerge as the proving ground of a Palestinian state. But Mr. Dahlan and other Palestinian politicians sense beneath the militancy an exhaustion with death and despair and a hunger for change. "Enough is enough," he said.

That attitude is hard to see in the pictures and paintings of the dead that are everywhere here. Their message is usually the same: not of pathos and loss, but of heroism, sacrifice, glamour.

In one painting, Hamdi Mohsin appears vivid and proud, wearing fatigues and holding a rifle in a ferocious battle, against a sky burning red and gold.

Hamdi was not a militant, but a 14-year-old shot dead while throwing stones at Israeli soldiers. When his parents commissioned the painting from Fayez al-Hasani, 52, they asked him to show their boy as a fighter.

Mr. Hasani, who longs to paint "something beautiful," like the dark-eyed women who fill his canvases from before the uprising, worries about his own young son, who rushes out to watch whenever the Israeli soldiers raid Gaza City. "I call it watching death," he said. "It scares me."

Armed struggle may still fire the imagination of many Palestinians, or comfort them, and it draws the attention of the world. But while people here rage at Israeli tactics, they also yearn for a more normal, secure life. This struggle is not celebrated in posters, but it is no less insistent.

Palestinian fishing boats still string a necklace of light along the coast at night; bathers still crowd the beaches by day. In the Rafah refugee camp at the southern end of the Gaza Strip, the area most wracked by violence in the conflict, Mahmoud Juma, 40, is rebuilding his zoo, flattened by Israel during an incursion in May. He hired Hani al-Najar, 23, to paint a new mural on one rebuilt wall.

On a blazing June morning, Mr. Najar was relishing sketching a rose-breasted cockatoo, rather than the kind of mural that makes up most of his commissions. "People will enjoy this," he said. "Children love it. The intifada is all about death."

One evening in June, along the breakwater that forms Gaza City's small harbor, Fuad al-Habeel, a 20-year-old commercial fisherman, stretched his arms in an arching swan dive from the pale-blue deckhouse of a fishing boat.

Sabbagh Ghanem, a 44-year-old school counselor, watched quietly as dozens of sport fishermen lined the breakwater. They dangled a paste of flour and water from their hooks, not catching much of anything but enjoying the calm and the sight of Gaza City burnished by the setting sun.

Yet no one could set aside the conflict for long. Mr. Habeel chafed at Israeli restrictions that limited fishermen like him to a patch of sea. Mr. Ghanem said he was thinking about a 14-year-old student who was wetting his bed. "He wants to die, because everything is sad," Mr. Ghanem said

After diving off a nearby dock, two boys emerged dripping from the sea. One of them, Muhammad Salama, 14, lifted the hem of his trunks to show a puckered scar on his left thigh. He was shot when, with thousands of other children, he rushed to watch the same Israeli incursion in which Hamdi Mohsin died.

Muhammad said his dream was to become a doctor at a Gaza hospital, "to treat people who get wounded."

After the 1948 Arab-Israeli war at Israel's creation, Gaza fell under the control of Egypt, the West Bank under the control of Jordan.

Unlike the Jordanians, the Egyptians did not give citizenship or passports to Palestinians. From the West Bank, Palestinians traveled for schooling and jobs that made some of them wealthy and many of them worldly. Gaza stagnated. Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza in the war of 1967.

Now, 64 percent of Gazans live under a poverty line of about $2 a day, compared to just over a third of Palestinians in the West Bank.

Unlike in the West Bank, Hamas, the Islamic militant group, is slightly more popular than Mr. Arafat's Fatah movement in Gaza, according to polling by Khalil Shikaki, a political scientist with the Palestine Center for Policy and Survey Research. Hamas commands the support of a bit more than a quarter of the population, Fatah a bit less.

But that is not the same as saying the ideology of Hamas is triumphing. "To the contrary," Dr. Shikaki said, "the Palestinian public has never been as willing to compromise as it is today." Even in Gaza, more than 70 percent of Palestinians support reconciling with Israel after a peace agreement, according to a poll in March by Dr. Shikaki. (The poll had a margin of error of three percentage points.)

The growing support for Hamas appears to have less to do with its doctrine than with disgust with the Palestinian Authority and Fatah, which dominates the government.

The pain here has bred anger not only at Israel, but also at the Palestinian leadership. In late June, one group of Palestinian protesters demanding housing blocked a road leading to the Egyptian border, threatening to kidnap any Palestinian minister who passed by. The next day, Gaza City demonstrators demanding jobs stoned a personnel office of the Palestinian Authority. "Our kids, what are they going to do?" asked one of the demonstrators, Ahmed Suker, 37. "Become thieves? Murderers? Terrorists?"

In interviews, protesters said they blamed not Mr. Arafat, who they said was powerless under Israeli siege, but rather the ministers around him.

Mr. Dahlan recognized more than two years ago that the Palestinian Authority was losing support and even legitimacy. He resigned his post as a security chief and distanced himself from the top leadership.

At 43, Mr. Dahlan is part of a generation of Fatah men who grew up under the Israeli occupation, then commanded the first uprising against Israel in the late 1980's. In Israeli prisons, they learned Hebrew and read Israeli newspapers. Then they became legislators or security chiefs when Mr. Arafat and other revolutionaries returned from exile. Some, like Mr. Dahlan, made themselves very rich in their government posts.

Yet these men also watched in dismay as what they call "the opposition" - Hamas - gained popularity during the second uprising, which began in September 2000.

Understanding Palestinians, they realized how the collapse of peace talks, which were supported by Fatah, had discredited their faction. But also understanding Israelis, they saw how Fatah's bloody role in the new uprising was distancing them from their dream of a state.

"There are two ways to achieve change," Mr. Dahlan told the women's group. "Coup or elections. A coup is not part of the mentality of the Palestinians."

Mr. Dahlan has successfully pressed Mr. Arafat to permit elections in Gaza within Fatah. These elections are under way, and to those who demanded them, they are a revolution. Mr. Dahlan is hoping that they will result in a new governing body for Fatah by early next year, giving him and his allies legitimacy to set policy for Fatah and govern Gaza.

Some of Mr. Dahlan's allies say it is time for Mr. Arafat to go. "He's leading us to nowhere," said one, Khaled Yazji, the head of a nongovernmental organization in Gaza. Mr. Yazji is Mr. Arafat's former chief of protocol.

Mr. Dahlan is careful not to challenge Mr. Arafat directly. Told that Mr. Arafat's representatives here claimed their candidates were winning the Fatah elections, Mr. Dahlan grinned. "That's excellent," he said. "That means we are part of Arafat. We are not against Arafat. We are against the people around Arafat who are corrupted."

He said he wanted Mr. Arafat "to bless the results."

While Mr. Dahlan pursues his own strategy, Mr. Arafat's representatives are conducting negotiations among the Palestinian factions over governing Gaza after an Israeli withdrawal.

Hamas refused to play a role in the Palestinian Authority, a creation of Oslo, which Hamas opposed. Since Mr. Sharon wants to withdraw without a peace agreement, Hamas leaders say they now feel free now to take part.

Egypt is mediating, pressing the factions to stop attacks while urging the Israelis to withdraw completely. Palestinian officials say they have asked the Egyptians for guarantees that Israel will permit Gaza's airport and seaport to open, perhaps under international supervision, and that it will remove its armored cordon along Gaza's border with Egypt.

The gamble is that an Israeli withdrawal, coupled with an infusion of foreign aid, will give Gazans a new stake in tranquility and turn them against militant groups that put it at risk.

The details are critical, but hazy. If attacks continue in Israel or the West Bank, Israel may strike back at the Hamas leaders in Gaza; if Israel does not allow the ports to function freely - and it says it will not, at least in the short term - Hamas may consider that a deal-breaker.

If Palestinian leaders fail, said Dr. Shikaki, the social scientist, "The threats are tremendous." He listed "the empowerment of Hamas, the fragmentation of the Palestinian nationalist movement, and the disintegration of the Palestinian Authority."

Violence Turns Inward, Too

In 1996, on Mr. Arafat's orders, Mr. Dahlan cracked down on Hamas, earning a reputation for ruthlessness. That was during the Oslo peace process. During this uprising he, like other Fatah leaders, contended they could not take such action.

In an interview in the fall of 2001, shortly after he left his security post, Mr. Dahlan said the Palestinian Authority could not hope for public support to act against violence when Israeli was killing militants and putting military pressure on the Palestinians.

"The Palestinian Authority cannot succeed under the circumstances," he said then. "They're asking the P.A. to attack Palestinians, and that's not possible."

More than two years later, the Palestinian Authority is far weaker. Having failed for so long to act, the security forces are viewed less as law enforcement agencies than as private militias in the service of Mr. Arafat and others. Through allies, Mr. Dahlan retains control of the Preventive Security Force, Palestinian officials and Western diplomats say.

Recently, Gaza's security forces have clashed with one another and with powerful families here.

There is no shortage of active, armed security men in Gaza - some 24,000 in all, far more than in the West Bank. What they lack, in the view of Palestinian analysts, is political legitimacy to move against militants or even criminals.

"That's why it's so important to get an agreement among the factions," said Maj. Gen. Saeb al-Ajez, a commander of the National Security forces here who is particularly close to the Egyptians. "Then we will have the right to enforce the law." He sat in his office in Gaza City, its windows cross-hatched with tape against the possibility of an Israeli missile strike.

General Ajez said he was asking Egypt for riot control equipment, including shields, tear gas and rubber bullets. He said that after a new government was formed, he would act against people "with no political goals but destruction" who "fire on Israel to ruin this agreement."

Any such action seems a very long way off. General Ajez is in charge of the Palestinian investigation into the bombing of an American diplomatic convoy here on Oct. 15, which killed three American security specialists.

He suggested that he had identified suspects, but said he could reveal no names for fear the culprits might escape. Asked why he did not arrest the suspects, he said: "During this bad security situation, how can we arrest someone? It will endanger the situation."

The killings have badly strained the already weakened ties between the Bush administration and the Palestinian Authority. American diplomats have stopped coming to Gaza. General Ajez approved of that decision.

"I encourage the Americans not to come here," he said. "I cannot ensure their safety."

As the security forces stand by, the martyr posters multiply, and violence drags at the society.

Mr. Arafat's top representative here, Ahmed Helis, has an elegant office lined with large photographs of his son, Muhammad. Muhammad died early this year fighting Israeli soldiers on a raid into Gaza City that had forced his school to close. He was 17. Mr. Helis said that he was afraid for his son as he left the house with his gun instead of his school bag, but that he did not try to stop him. "I can't push people to go and fight, and not let my son go," he said.

"Would you say he had the desire to go and fight, or that it was imposed on him?" he asked. "Would you call him a terrorist?"

A few blocks away, in the same Gaza neighborhood, Umm Nidal Farahat, 55, also surrounds herself with pictures of the dead.

A backlighted sign, roughly four feet long and two feet high, sits above the entrance to her cinderblock home. Against a backdrop of flames, it bears pictures of two of her sons, both Hamas militants. Two other sons have been wounded in the fighting and a fifth, of six, is in an Israeli prison.

Mrs. Farahat, who wants to drive Israel out of all historical Palestine, saw her sons as carrying the fight to the Israelis. Mr. Helis, who favors a two-state solution, saw his son as defending Gaza against invaders.

Yet one of Mrs. Farahat's sons, Nidal, was an engineer of the crude rockets that Hamas fires over Gaza's fenced boundary into Israel. And it was on a raid to stop Hamas from firing such rockets that Israeli forces killed Muhammad Helis. Maybe, if Hamas was not pursuing its own form of conflict, Muhammad Helis might have gone to school.

Nidal Farahat left behind a four-year-old boy, Imad, who dreams of his father and begs his grandmother to bring him home. "I tell him, 'You will be a martyr one day, and then you will go and see your dad,' " she said.

A Sad 'Might Have Been' Four years ago, Palestinian negotiators were debating with Israeli counterparts how to share Jerusalem. Now, with not only the United States but also the United Nations and Egypt lining up behind Mr. Sharon, Palestinian leaders are haggling with each other over how to run Gaza.

There is an elegiac quality to the way some Palestinian reformers and other politicians talk now about the Oslo years and their own faded visions of a democratic Palestine with its capital in Jerusalem.

They hold Israel - its occupation, its military pressure on the Palestinians, its attacks on the Palestinian Authority - ultimately responsible. But they also say that Palestinians lost control of their national movement and international image, failing to adapt as American, European and Arab attitudes shifted under the shock of the attacks on the United States on Sept. 11, 2001.

They speak of historic opportunities lost, obliterated by inchoate violence that has scarred a generation. They wonder how a process of reconciliation symbolized by a handshake on the White House lawn became a process of separation and alienation symbolized by the Israeli barrier around Gaza, and the new one rising at the West Bank.

There was a time when Elias Khoury thought of himself as a bridge between Israelis and Palestinians. His family lost its land to Israel in the 1948 war, but his father took citizenship in Israel and believed he could work patiently through Israeli law to get the land back. Elias Khoury went to Hebrew University and became a lawyer himself.

In 1975, Mr. Khoury's father, Daoud, was crossing Jerusalem Zion Square when a bomb planted by Palestinians exploded, killing him and 13 others.

Elias Khoury went on to win landmark legal cases against Israeli settlements. He sent his children to a Jerusalem school that blended the city's Jewish, Muslim and Christian children.

Then, one evening this March, his son George went for a jog in Jerusalem's French Hill neighborhood and was shot dead by members of Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades, the militant group linked to Fatah. The group put out a statement boasting that it had killed a settler. French Hill sits on land that Israel occupied in 1967.

Fluent in Arabic, Hebrew and English, friends with Arabs and Jews, George Khoury was studying at Hebrew University. He spoke by telephone every day with his older brother, David, away at school in Scotland, to compare business ideas that each jotted in small notebooks. He played the piano and wanted to learn the saxophone, and he left behind a list of jazz concerts he would attend. Dead at 20, he embodied the might-have-beens of what was known, a few years ago, as the New Middle East.

He left behind a father who called him "my beloved," and who longed for sleep in the hope of seeing his son in his dreams.

In a conversation in his home this spring, Elias Khoury said he had been thinking about what could explain his losses. When his father was killed in 1975, he said, there was no Hamas, no Oslo process, no Yasir Arafat in Ramallah.

"Only the occupation was there," he said, sitting in his darkened living room with George's bronzed baby shoes on a nearby table. "I came to the conclusion that what happened to us, what happened to me, to my father and my son and to others, to Israelis who lost their beloved, this is a diagnosis of the sickness. And the sickness is occupation."

The occupation is coarsening both societies, he said. Israel does not have the same values it held 20 years ago. Yet, he said, Israel was now "mature" enough to accept a Palestinian state. But he said the Palestinians needed outside help to run their affairs. He invoked a Koranic verse that he said explained why, after escaping Egypt, the Jews wandered in the desert for 40 years before reaching the land of Israel. The reason, he said, was that those who had lived in slavery were not capable of building a state.

"It's painful, but we have to look at the truth," he said. "As a lawyer, I look at the facts. The first fact is that the Palestinian society, as a collective, is not ready to lead itself."

The Palestinian leadership had abandoned law and order, he said, and it had shown little respect for basic values. "One of the most important values is the sacredness of life," he said.

After Al Aksa Martyrs discovered its mistake in French Hill, it put out a statement expressing regret and declaring George Khoury to be a shahid, a martyr. "It harmed me more," Mr. Khoury said. "Let's say Yitzhak had been running that evening. It would have been okay if he had been killed? This is how we are going to build our state?"

Mr. Khoury wanted no part of a culture that could celebrate the death of its own sons, or anyone else's. "My son," he said, "was not a shahid."

JENIN, West Bank - Sitting in his office beneath two signs deploring smoking, Salahaldin Mousa listens all day as his fellow citizens interrupt his paperwork to complain about their utility bills or to demand jobs. He wonders whom they may be connected to, and if they have guns.

"We live without a social contract now," he said. "We rely on our own relationships."

Across town, in the Jenin refugee camp, Zacaria Zubeidah addresses the same matters, as well as some that are more dire: theft, robbery, even murder.

Mr. Mousa and Mr. Zubeidah met in prison in 1989, as teenagers who joined in the first Palestinian uprising against Israel. In this uprising, this current intifada, now in its fourth year, they have taken very different paths: Mr. Mousa, 34, is the administrative manager of Jenin, and he disavows violence. Mr. Zubeidah, 28, is the leader of Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades, the militant group most feared by Israel.

With a masters degree in law and human rights from a Swedish university, Mr. Mousa dreams of becoming the Palestinian minister of justice. But it is Mr. Zubeidah, with his silver Smith & Wesson pistol at his hip, who administers what passes for law.

"I am the highest authority," Mr. Zubeidah said, echoing a view widely held in Jenin. A slender man with an easy smile, he sat in white tennis shoes, blue jeans and a brown T-shirt on a torn couch in a home in the camp.

For Palestinians, it is a mocking contradiction: President Bush and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon speak of a state of Palestine as almost a historical inevitability. But on the ground, after years of Israeli military raids and blockades and Palestinian political paralysis, the economy is growing more dependent on foreign donors, and institutions of statehood are crumbling.

In the West Bank and Gaza, a contest is under way between warlords and democrats, between Islamists and secular leaders, between those who would destroy Israel and those who would live beside it, between enclaves like Jenin and Gaza and the very idea of a unified national state.

The bulldozers are at work again in Jenin camp. Hundreds of homes are rising to replace those leveled when soldiers squared off with gunmen during an Israeli offensive two years ago. Out in the fields beyond the camp stands another legacy of the conflict, Israel's barrier against West Bank Palestinians.

For Israel, the barrier is a sign that after 37 years of occupying the West Bank and Gaza, it is deciding what it wants: to cut itself off from the Palestinians, to give up Gaza, to hold onto as much of the West Bank as it can, and to retrain a Jewish majority in a democratic state.

But for Palestinians, there is no such clarity; they have made no national decisions, and the mechanisms for making and enforcing any are breaking down.

For many residents of Jenin, their city of 45,000 has become an island, relying on itself rather than the Palestinian Authority.

"Over three years, Jenin turned back into a small village that must depend on itself," said its mayor, Waleed A. Mwais. "Israel destroyed all forms of authority. Everyone has their own weapon. This is the problem of Jenin: We have an absolute state of chaos."

Criticism of the aging Palestinian leadership, and even of Yasir Arafat, has reached a new pitch. But reform-minded leaders are struggling to find a way to start over, now that more than 3,200 Palestinians and almost 1,000 Israelis have died violently in a conflict that has become a way of life.

"You'd like to feel something has a connection to tomorrow," said Muhammad Horani, a Palestinian legislator from Hebron who has been trying for years for democratic change.

Private investment has all but vanished. But donors stepped in, doubling their contributions, to a billion dollars a year, an amount equal to one-third the Palestinian gross national product last year of $3.1 billion. That works out to roughly $310 a person, more aid per capita than any country has received since World War II, the World Bank says.

With the help of Arabs, Europeans and others, the Palestinian Authority continues running schools and paying salaries that support tens of thousands of families. This national dependency is obvious here. In the camp, some residents whose houses survived the raid envy those getting keys to new homes, built by the United Nations with help from the United Arab Emirates.

Like Palestinian society in general, Jenin is losing ground, but it is enduring. It is muddling through. This is a story of decay, not of sudden collapse; of the corrosion of an educated, relatively affluent society that Palestinian and Israeli officials say may still have the makings of a model democracy.

The Palestinian national dream has not died. There are still people fighting to hold life together, to pick up the garbage, light the streets and salvage a chance at better days. But for some of them, the breakdown in leadership seems complete.

After sunset here recently, Mr. Mousa went to his windswept rooftop to show off his view of the city he loves, and grieves for. He believes that Jenin has become a kind of "mini-state," but controlled by no one.

"We are running this place, we are not ruling it," he said, as he looked down on the lights of Jenin. "Just running, running, running. Because we have no choice."

Zubeidah, the Militant Leader

"I was busy solving a problem related to the construction," Mr. Zubeidah said, explaining his late arrival to a recent meeting. A resident had opened fire on the office of the United Nations agency that oversees the camp. The man was angry at the pace of construction of his new home.

Mr. Zubeidah, who is known throughout the city simply as Zacaria, said he managed to fill "about 70 percent" of the "absence of law" that he said was caused by Israeli pressure on the Palestinian Authority. Indeed, Mr. Zubeidah, who like others complained that too many Palestinians here have guns, appears to spend more time on internal matters than on Al Aksa's stated goal: resisting the Israeli occupation.

Since September 2000, 28 suicide bombings or shootings originated in Jenin - 38 percent of all such attacks, according to Israeli security officials. Since the Israeli barrier went up in the northern West Bank, however, the number has dropped. So far this year, the number is zero, though attempts continue.

In Israeli cities like Tel Aviv and Haifa, it is possible now to forget about the conflict, at least for a time. But on this side of the barrier, the conflict suffuses life. In June, Israeli forces regularly raided Jenin by night, arresting or killing young men the Army accused of being militants.

Jenin is a place where everyone seems to have lost a relative or friend to violence or prison. "Every second," said Mahmoud Ajawi, 45, when asked how often he thought of his boy, Anas, dead at 17. "No father would push his son in that direction."

Jamilah Nubani, 58, goes every evening to the Martyrs' Cemetery to mourn two sons and a son-in-law buried there. All were fighters or members of the security services. "God, we ask you for your mercy," she said, gripping one son's headstone to pull herself to her feet, before making her way to her other son's grave.

On his radio show, "The Town," Ziad Shelbak, 44, debates himself endlessly over the right mix of morale-boosting nationalist songs and love songs. As the conflict has worn on, he has begun playing more love songs, which he prefers, switching back to nationalist ones only if a Palestinian is killed locally. "If someone is killed in Nablus or Ramallah, I don't switch to national songs, unless it's a big character," he said.

Jenin is also place where, in spite of the conflict, life goes on. Along Faisal Hussein Street through the middle of town, men gather in the evenings to play cards for hours and drink glasses of sweet tea for a shekel apiece. (A shekel is worth about 22 cents.)

People with a little more money may go to the Gardens restaurant at the edge of town, to sip tea for three shekels a glass. The Gardens also has a pool, and at 10:45 one recent night, a swimmer did a back flip off the high dive.

But in a sign of the times, the Gardens has established a separate seating area for the shebab, the rowdy young men and fighters who unnerve the other guests.

By midnight, the card-players and tea drinkers return home, abandoning the dark streets to the fighters, who cruise in the stolen Israeli cars that somehow still manage to make it past the barrier and into Jenin. Gunfire rings out most nights.

About two years ago, Israel began forbidding the Palestinian police here and in other West Bank cities to carry guns. The police and other security men were firing on Israelis, they said. Now, in tidy blue uniforms, policemen cluster on the sidewalks during the day, but they do nothing to enforce the law, residents and city officials said.

The lack of enforcement ripples through the society. At the Jenin driving school, Abdul Karim Jarrar, 40, cannot pay his modest electricity bill. The police do not enforce traffic laws, so few new drivers bother to get licenses or instruction, he said.

Yassin Abu Saryeh, 32, a city employee who tries to collect fees for utilities, said he understood that Mr. Jarrar could not pay. But he said he also understood that Nidal Jaradat simply would not.

"You're not going to pay?" he asked on a recent visit to Mr. Jaradat's sundries store. He said that Mr. Jaradat, 40, had three years' worth of accumulated bills, amounting to thousands of shekels.

Standing behind racks jammed with candy, Mr. Jaradat argued that since his brother, a militant, was in an Israeli prison, he should not have to pay. The city owes millions of dollars for electricity and water supplied by Israeli companies. The mayor says that without a new infusion of foreign aid, the municipality will shut its doors later this year. Already, it has had to stop repaving the Palestinian-American Friendship Road, a rutted track around the city. Bill-collection rates are running at about 15 percent, and collections agents have been threatened and even attacked.

Mr. Jaradat said that if Mr. Abu Saryeh pressed the matter, he would go to the municipality to explain.

"If they don't listen to me, I'll bring some people along," Mr. Jaradat added. "My brother is well known." He added hastily to a reporter that while some people might make threats, he was not doing so.

During the Israeli incursion into the Jenin camp, Israeli bulldozers flattened Jamal Nashrati's home. He escaped with his family to his brother's house, where, as the fighting continued for days, they were forced finally to drink water from the toilet, he said.

Mr. Nashrati, 47, spent his own money to dig a cistern beneath a courtyard in his new house, built by the United Nations. Above it, he set a fountain clad in blue tile, a safe place for his children to play. Behind the fountain, in the wall, he installed an enlarged version of his United Nations refugee card, certifying that his family was dispossessed in the Israeli-Arab war of 1948.

He wants the fountain to help his children "forget what happened" two years ago and "live a normal life." He put up the display, he said, "because I want my children to keep in their memory that we come from a village called Zaharin."

Asked if he expected to return to his old village, Zaharin, in what is now Israel, Mr. Nashrati said: "This is impossible. I know that."

While Mr. Nashrati, who once worked as a welder in Israel, spoke of peace and a two-state solution, his children, maturing in this time of violence and separation, sounded a harsher note. Rukon, 10 years old, said he wanted to grow up to be a fighter like Mahmoud Tawalbe, an Islamic Jihad leader killed in the raid two years ago.

"I'm disturbed when I hear my son say that," Mr. Nashrati said. "This is a general problem for us, that we don't feel we can control our children."

Asked if he thought he could be friends with an Israeli boy his age, Rukon drew a hand across his throat. "I want only to stab him," he said.

Mr. Nashrati hastily said Rukon was young and ignorant. "This son is old enough to understand," he said, indicating Munir, 20.

Asked if he could be friends with an Israeli his age, Munir Nashrati said, "It's impossible."

Asked whom he admired among Palestinian leaders, he replied, "Zacaria.''

Arafat, the Absent Leader When Israel briefly lifted its siege on Mr. Arafat's compound in Ramallah more than two years ago, the Palestinian leader paid a visit to Jenin. But for fear of hecklers or even assailants, Mr. Arafat did not stop in the wrecked camp. Hundreds of residents clustered before a podium set up by a giant portrait of Mr. Arafat, but his motorcade whisked by behind them. Someone cut down the portrait, while a young man in a baseball cap muttered, "He didn't want to get his shoes dusty."

Now, Mr. Arafat's face still beams down from the wall of every public office, but Palestinians here freely criticize him.

"He doesn't care," Zacaria Zubeidah said of the leader of his faction, Fatah.

Of Mr. Arafat's leadership generally, he said, "For me, the one sitting in Ramallah, in his villa, in his air-conditioned room while we suffer in the heat - he's closing his windows so he doesn't hear the noise of the tanks we hear."

Last year, Mr. Zubeidah and his gunmen kidnapped Jenin's governor, a Fatah member appointed by Mr. Arafat, and held him for several hours. Released after pleas from Mr. Arafat, the man fled to Jordan.

"He was making a lot of mistakes," Mr. Zubeidah said of the governor. "We kept waiting for two years for the Palestinian leadership to do something. They did nothing."

Both Mr. Zubeidah and Mr. Mousa, the city manager, grew up in Mr. Arafat's Fatah movement, the mainstream secular faction that embraced the Oslo peace process and dominates the Palestinian Authority. Their diverging paths illustrate the ideological confusion that has upended Fatah and sown chaos in the West Bank and Gaza. It is a confusion fed by the turmoil of Palestinian politics and the social and class divides in cities like this one.

While Mr. Zubeidah speaks of achievements from this uprising, Mr. Mousa rolls his eyes at claims about the intifada made by other Palestinians he calls "the heroes of the satellite channels."

"I will never worship any leadership again," he said.

Mousa, the Optimistic Leader

Like Mr. Zubeidah, Mr. Mousa has credentials as a fighter. He spent seven years in Israeli prisons for beating a settler during the first intifada. He was released at the outset of the Oslo peace process.

The Israeli judge who sentenced him asked what he would have done with his life had he not found himself facing prison. The whole courtroom burst into laughter, he recalled, when he replied that he dreamed of being a lawyer.

"I kept dreaming about this," he said, "and now I am a lawyer."

While Mr. Mousa seized on the possibilities of Oslo, Mr. Zubeidah was shaped by its failure. Sentenced to more than four years in the first uprising, he was also released in the mid-1990's.

In prison, he said, other Palestinians taught him the primacy of armed struggle. But once released, he "faced a new reality." With an Israeli woman, his mother began staging plays here about Palestinian suffering and the hope of peace. For Israeli visitors, Mr. Zubeidah would translate from Arabic into the fluent Hebrew he learned in prison.

But after the uprising began he, unlike Mr. Mousa, again felt the pull of armed struggle.

Fatah members initially led the fighting in the second intifada. It was not until five months after the conflict began that Hamas conducted its first suicide bombing of the uprising. In the view of some Palestinian politicians, that early leadership by Fatah legitimized Hamas violence for the Palestinian public.

As Hamas then began to gain popularity, Fatah found itself competing to conduct sensational attacks. The very name of the Fatah militia - Al Aksa Martyrs Brigade - reflects what some Palestinian officials lament is an Islamicization of the faction, as it tried to top Hamas.

In January 2002, as Israel struck back and the conflict intensified, Al Aksa Martyrs Brigade added suicide to its arsenal.

Hamas vs. Al Aksa

Hamas is officially bent on Israel's destruction, while Mr. Arafat has endorsed a two-state solution. Many Fatah leaders believe Fatah should confine its attacks to Israeli soldiers and settlers in the territory that Israel occupied in the 1967 war.

But Al Aksa Martyrs Brigade began attacking Israeli civilians outside the West Bank and Gaza, persuading Israelis that Fatah had the same goal as Hamas and confusing Palestinians about what the faction stood for.

Mr. Zubeidah says he opposes killing civilians and seeks a state in the West Bank and Gaza, with its capital in Jerusalem. But, referring to the so-called Green Line between Israel and the West Bank, he asked, "Why is the '67 line something I should respect, while they don't?"

Many if not most Al Aksa gunmen, like Hamas members, emerged from the refugee camps. Nurturing a desire to return to homes in what is now Israel, residents of camps like Jenin's remained apart from city life, not even taking part in municipal elections.

The camps bred militancy against Israel, giving Al Aksa Martyrs its hard edge. They also bred a sense of grievance against Palestinians living in the cities, who were seen as soft and rich, and prejudiced against refugees. That has fueled some violence and extortion by the group against city residents.

This reporter first interviewed Mr. Zubeidah in the fall of 2001, when he was a low-ranking gunman walking through Jenin's market. Mr. Zubeidah had just been wounded when a bomb he was preparing blew up in his face, scorching it black. He rejected any talk of peace. "I lost my face!" he said at the time. "What did I achieve? I'm a refugee still."

Since then, Mr. Zubeidah has lost his mother, killed in an Israeli raid, and a brother, killed fighting in the big offensive two years ago. Almost all the young actors in his mother's theater have died. Mr. Zubeidah was promoted through the ranks quite literally by a process of elimination. His two predecessors died violently, and Israeli forces have tried to kill him; during a conversation here, he pulled up his shirt to show bullet scars in his shoulder and back.

After paying a higher price than most Palestinians, members of Al Aksa Martyrs Brigade are reluctant to lay down their weapons for anything less than the sovereignty this uprising was supposed to achieve. They may have another reason to keep fighting: Israeli security officials say some Al Aksa cells in this part of the West Bank have begun receiving money from Iran, through the Lebanese guerrilla group Hezbollah.

For a year, Fatah has been trying to rein in Mr. Zubeidah, along with other Al Aska leaders. In June, he rejected an overture by the Palestinian Authority to integrate Al Aksa into the security forces. Many Palestinian officials and analysts say it is Al Aksa, not the overall leadership, that is showing initiative. In late June, the militants issued a 10-page manifesto attacking corruption in the Palestinian Authority and demanding political change.

Yet Mr. Zubeidah, who endorsed the manifesto, said Palestinians could not hope for any effective government until the Israelis ended their occupation.

"Until we have a state, no one is going to rule us," he said. "Anyone can say he is the leader of the Palestinians. It doesn't concern me."

Kadoura Mousa, the top Fatah leader in Jenin, played down Al Aksa Martyrs Brigade as a passing phenomenon. "When occupation ends, this phenomenon will disappear," he said, "and everything will return back to Fatah."

In the meantime, he said, Mr. Zubeidah was useful as a "striking force against any person who tries to misuse power." He did not appear to find it odd that a group created to fight Israelis would be turned instead against Palestinians.

Mr. Mousa spoke while sitting by a grape arbor in his garden above Jenin, watching the sun sink beyond the barrier, behind the Carmel hills. He said the conflict had set Jenin back 20 years. But that did not matter, he continued.

"We still have people living in tents in other places," he said. "We are seeking independence and freedom, not comfortable living conditions."

Despite the high profile of Al Aksa, some local leaders say that Fatah is on its way out, and that Hamas would win any municipal election here.

The most influential Muslim prayer leader here, Khaled Suleiman, 37, said Fatah's internal contradictions were tearing it apart.

"In my opinion, Fatah is at a crossroads now," said the imam, who is not officially connected to any faction but is seen here as close to Hamas. "Its existence is based on the survival of Arafat. Without Arafat, it will be split."

Asked to describe the split, he replied: "Between Gaza and the West Bank, between village and city, between city and camp. Because it's a movement that has no political thought. It's based on the leader."

Mr. Mousa, the city manager, also believes that Fatah is at a crossroads, with two options left to reassert leadership. The first is to dissolve the Palestinian Authority and declare that Israel has left Palestinians no choice but all-out war. The second option, which he favors, is one very few Palestinians speak of.

"The Palestinian Authority should stand in front of the people and say, 'We are defeated,' " Mr. Mousa said over dinner one evening. " 'But this is not the end of the world. This is a new stage of our life.' And then you say to the world, 'Please help us.' "

After years of saving money for his own apartment, Mr. Mousa married in June - a sign, he said, of his enduring hope of a better future. He declined the offer of Palestinian fighters to supply a volley of celebratory gunfire.

By throwing his support on Wednesday behind an Israeli plan to withdraw from the Gaza Strip, President Bush provided diplomatic assurances that represented a victory for Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

Mr. Sharon wanted three commitments: backing for the Gaza withdrawal, American recognition that Israel would hold on to parts of the West Bank, and an American rejection of the right of millions of Palestinian refugees from the Arab-Israeli war of 1948 and their descendants to return to their lands in what is now Israel. He got them all by promising to trade something Israelis overwhelmingly do not want any more: the Gaza settlements and a handful of settlements in the West Bank. And he got them without having to negotiate with the Palestinians.

Palestinian officials knew that Israel strongly opposed yielding the whole West Bank or accepting the "right of return," and they had explored compromises in the past. But they relied on both demands as formidable negotiating levers. Mr. Bush has now moved to pluck both from their hands.

"Imagine if Palestinians said, `O.K., we give California to Canada,' " said Michael Tarazi, a legal adviser for the Palestine Liberation Organization. "Americans should stop wondering why they have so little credibility in the Middle East."

For the first time in American diplomacy in the Middle East, Mr. Bush announced that major Jewish settlements on the West Bank had achieved the status they aimed for: rooted "facts on the ground," or, as Mr. Bush called them, "already existing major Israeli population centers." The innovative, though risky, element in Mr. Sharon's strategy was to trade his concessions in Gaza and the West Bank not to the Palestinians as part of a negotiated agreement but to the Americans, over outraged Palestinian opposition.

For Israel, the risk is that the Palestinians will now reject as imposed on them any peace plan along the lines Mr. Bush laid out, in his White House statement and a letter he gave Mr. Sharon. For the United States, the risk is that, with Arabs and Muslims already suspicious of American motives, the Bush administration will be seen as teaming with Israel to void Palestinian rights.

Mr. Bush emphasized his support for an eventual Palestinian state. He repeatedly indicated that he was merely sketching the realistic outline of any peace agreement, as suggested by past, American-brokered negotiations over issues like settlements and the right of return. But Palestinians were not mollified.

"As far as I'm concerned, Sharon and Bush can decide to cancel Ramadan," Saeb Erekat, a senior Palestinian negotiator, said, referring to the Muslim holy month. "But that doesn't mean that Muslims will not fast."

All smiles and gentle jokes as they stood side by side at the White House Wednesday, Mr. Sharon and Mr. Bush looked like leaders who saw strong political and policy reasons for a close alliance.

Mr. Bush's statements will doubtless appeal to Jewish and Christian supporters of Israel in the United States. They are also consistent with the policy tilt toward Israel evident since he entered office, refusing to meet with Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader, whom he accused of being an obstacle to peace.

That tilt became more pronounced after the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States, which led Mr. Bush to declare a war on terrorism that has often seemed to emulate Israel's military tactics, and to mirror its fears. Mr. Bush has rarely emphasized any role of Israeli settlements as an "obstacle to peace," the longstanding formulation in American policy. Noting that West Bank settlements doubled in size after the Oslo peace accords were signed, Palestinians point to them as evidence that Israel never intends to part with much of the West Bank.

Asked on Monday if settlements were an obstacle to his Middle East peace initiative, the road map, Mr. Bush spoke instead about terrorism. "The problem is, is that there's terrorists who will kill people in order to stop the process," he said.

For Mr. Sharon, the political benefits of Mr. Bush's statement and accompanying letter are obvious. Facing tough opposition from his political right, he can now present his withdrawal as an American-Israeli initiative in a referendum to take place in his Likud faction on May 2. Those who vote against him will now be voting against Israel's most important ally. Mr. Sharon, who has a record of relying greatly, and sometimes disastrously, on his own judgment, is once again taking a tremendous gamble. It was not without cause that Mr. Bush called his intentions "historic and courageous."

Settlers are vehemently opposed to any withdrawal. Many view the territory that Israel conquered in the 1967 war as part of Jews' birthright, delivered to them by God through what they consider Israel's miraculous victory. "Transfer Sharon, not settlements," read a sign one protester carried outside Mr. Sharon's residence here on Wednesday.

The most ideologically committed settlers — the very ones who live in the fringe settlements Mr. Sharon wants to evacuate, rather than in the sprawling, bedroom communities he wants to keep — view leaving a single settlement as shattering the rationale for retaining any. Many Israeli doves supportive of Mr. Sharon's plan share that view. They think that once Israel begins withdrawing from settlements, it will pull back from almost all of them.

Mr. Sharon is betting that he can use Mr. Bush's commitments to stop the withdrawal where he chooses and retain as much as half of the West Bank, a senior Israeli official said. This official compared the proposed withdrawal to a tactic he said baffled him when he first watched an American football game: he said he was astonished to see the ball hiked backward before it moved forward.

Mr. Sharon told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz last week that he was pursuing his plan now because "a situation has been created in which it is possible to do the things I want and to get an American commitment."

But if far-right parties bolt Mr. Sharon's governing coalition over the withdrawal plan, he could be compelled to turn to his left, to the Labor party, for support. Labor would almost certainly push for a more sweeping withdrawal, as well as renewed negotiations.

For Mr. Sharon, who is not a religious man, the settlements have always been an instrument of security and of negotiating leverage. He intended them to thicken Israel's borders against possible Arab attack. After the 1967 war, Mr. Sharon and other Israeli leaders saw moving civilians into the West Bank and Gaza as giving legitimacy to Israel's grip on that territory in a way that an occupation army alone never could.

Further, Mr. Sharon viewed settlements as deepening Israelis' attachment to the land and giving them incentive to hold it. "Yes, I want to put the children before the tanks," he told The New York Times more than 25 years ago.

But Mr. Sharon, who drew up the settlement plan in Gaza, believes that Israel's grip there has become a liability. In Gaza, just 7,500 Israelis live in fortified enclaves among 1.3 million Palestinians. In the West Bank, about 230,000 settlers live among 2.3 million Palestinians. Another 200,000 Israelis live in areas of Jerusalem that Israel captured in 1967. Mr. Sharon argues that his plan means Israel will no longer be held responsible by the world for the well-being of Palestinians, at least in Gaza. That may be something of a leap of faith, since Mr. Sharon intends to keep military control of Gaza's boundaries, airport and seaport.

It is also not certain if, as some Middle East analysts have suggested, the United States will find itself with new obligations in Gaza, now that Mr. Bush has blessed Mr. Sharon's approach.

In fact, for all the points of American-Israeli agreement on Wednesday, there were hints of divergence in long-term strategy. Mr. Bush insisted that Mr. Sharon's approach would fit with his own road map and "open the door to progress toward a peaceful, democratic, viable Palestinian state." But Mr. Sharon, arguing that the Palestinians have proven themselves unworthy as peace partners for now, has said his approach closes the door to substantive negotiations and a Palestinian state for years. "It will bring their dreams to an end," he told the Israeli newspaper Maariv recently.

The barrier Israel is building against West Bank Palestinians has had a striking, if unintended, effect: It has stirred a sustained, bloodless protest movement among Palestinians for the first time in more than three years of conflict.

As the bulldozers have swept south toward Jerusalem and cut deeper into West Bank land, villagers who have mostly stayed on the sidelines of the uprising have joined with Israeli leftists to demonstrate. In places, as in this hamlet, they have blocked the machines with their bodies.

"I am totally against touching civilians," said Naim Morar, 50, a leader of the movement here, as he walked hand in hand on Friday with his 5-year-old son, Mashal, for another demonstration along the 50-yard-wide gash the construction has opened through the village fields.

To that statement of principle, he added a more pragmatic consideration: "If there was shooting at the wall, it would have been finished the next day. But our peaceful resistance forced them to stop." Often, teenagers throw stones at the end of the demonstrations, but the organizers say they discourage that.

This new approach raises a basic, discomfiting question: Why should such tactics seem unusual? Why has the Palestinian national movement become defined instead by increasingly nihilistic violence, like the suicide bombing on a Jerusalem bus last Sunday that killed eight passengers?

It is to stop such suicide attacks that Israel says it needs to build this barrier. Palestinians say it is actually a land grab.

The answer to the question about tactics shines a light into several corners of the conflict, including the jihadic visions of militant Islam, the strategy of anti-colonial movements of the 20th century, the structure of Palestinian society and the nature of the Israeli occupation.

One also must not ignore the appetites of the news media. It is not as though the Palestinians just discovered the existence of peaceful tactics. Some Palestinians complain that sporadic strikes and marches get little international attention.

As the protest unfolded here - with hundreds chanting as they faced off with about 20 Israeli soldiers and policemen at the construction site - demonstrators at the next village, Qibiya, began throwing stones. Then from the Israeli side came the inevitable booms, and the telltale gray trails of tear-gas canisters streaked toward the protesters. Most of the handful of news photographers covering this rally hurried toward that scene, a quarter-mile away.

On Thursday, in a similar anti-barrier demonstration in the village of Biddo, Israeli forces responded to stone throwers with deadly fire, killing two Palestinians.

In advocating civil disobedience, Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. had a bedrock faith in the essential humanity of their oppressors. As this conflict grinds on, it is tempting to conclude that any chance of glimpsing a shared humanity has been blown away.

Yet demonstrations like the one here suggest that is not necessarily so. On her way to the protest, an elderly Palestinian woman in a white head scarf paused atop a heap of rocks and reached back to help a gray-haired Israeli woman. They cleared the obstacle, then kept holding hands as they walked toward the crowd.

The Palestinians have never had a mainstream leader committed to nonviolent tactics, despite their official acceptance of Israel's right to exist.

"The predominant paradigm was that this is a war of liberation," said Martin Kramer, an expert on Islam and Arab politics. "Their model was Algeria. It was armed struggle against a colonial power, and you had to bleed them."

Under American pressure last year, Yasir Arafat appointed Mahmoud Abbas, an opponent of the armed uprising, as his prime minister.

Last April, as Mr. Abbas was confirmed by the Palestinian parliament, one legislator, Abdel Jawad Saleh, said Mr. Abbas was making a mistake in trying to end the uprising without offering an alternative form of resistance. "You should be a Gandhi," Mr. Saleh told him. No Gandhi, Mr. Abbas lasted less than five months in the job.

The main political competition for Mr. Arafat's mainstream Fatah faction is even sharper-edged - the fundamentalist groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad, which remain officially bent on erasing Israel.

With no one in power exhorting them to try other tactics, Fatah militants, in theory members of a secular faction, have tried to out-Hamas Hamas. They adopted an Islamic name for their violent wing, the Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades, and took up suicide bombing along with the language of martyrdom.

Mirroring a widespread Israeli opinion of Palestinians, most Palestinians take it as axiomatic that Israelis respond to nothing but force. "They have ample precedent to cite," Dr. Kramer said.

It is not lost on Palestinians that, during the relatively quiet days under the Oslo peace accords between the two Palestinian uprisings, Israeli settlements in the occupied territories doubled in size.

Further, it was to the neighboring village, Qibiya, in 1953 that a young commando named Ariel Sharon led a reprisal raid for the killing of an Israeli woman and her two toddlers. Mr. Sharon later said that he and his men believed that the 45 houses they blew up were empty. But 69 Arabs were killed, half of them women and children. People here are accustomed to the trading of an eye for an eye.

Yet there are reasons to understand why peaceful protest could catch hold in these villages and also why it may not spread far beyond them.

When Mr. Sharon raided Qibiya, it was controlled by Jordan. Now, Israeli forces can move freely here. That is a practical reason for peaceful protest: any militant would be quickly arrested or killed. Palestinian gunmen have largely retreated to the city centers and refugee camps, where they can hide more easily.

Villagers in this area of the West Bank, within sight of the towers of Tel Aviv, are rather accustomed to Israelis. Many have worked in Israel and speak Hebrew. Forming alliances with left-wing Israelis - even the young people who show up to demonstrate with multiple piercings in ears, nose and lips - does not seem as outlandish as it does to Palestinians who have known only Israeli soldiers or settlers.

Then there is the barrier itself. It is consuming the fields and orchards of many farming families without a history of militancy, driving them to protest. It is cutting Palestinian workers off from Israeli jobs. Further, as Palestinians have taken to calling it the "apartheid wall" and foreign activists have focused their attention on it, it has emerged as a tangible, telegenic object of mass protest.

The path of the barrier, which looks like a dirt runway through the West Bank, halted in the middle of an olive orchard here in early January, after peaceful demonstrations to block the bulldozers.

Days later, Naim Morar and his brother, Ayed, were separately arrested by Israeli forces in what was seen here as an effort to break the demonstrations. In each case, an Israeli judge ordered the man's release, saying there was no evidence of ties to terrorism. "I felt that the mere reason for the arrest pertained to the anti-fence protest and nothing beyond that," wrote the judge in his order releasing Naim Morar.

Ayed Morar, 42, has a shiny, puckered scar on his left bicep from a bullet wound in the first intifada. He was throwing stones, he said.

"In my life, I experienced a lot of ways to struggle," he said. "But we are not against the Israelis, and we are not against the Jews. We are just against occupation. We have the right to struggle, but we have to choose the best way." He added that Palestinians were being seen as terrorists around the world, and that "we need international governments to be with us."

That sounds more like a pragmatic argument than a clarion call for nonviolence. Rather than pointing to a break with the past, these demonstrations increasingly offer a return to it - to the first intifada, when protesters and stone-throwing youths stood up to heavily armed soldiers. That David-and-Goliath imagery gained the Palestinians sympathy worldwide.

As the demonstrators left the construction site and climbed the hill toward the village Friday, a few teenagers ineffectually flung stones toward the soldiers. The soldiers responded with tear gas, sending everyone off with watering eyes and stinging throats.

"The first intifada was more popular because of the stones," said Sanad Shahadi, 18, holding a sling fashioned from rope and a nylon strap.

Asked if the violence conflicted with the demonstration, he said: "It's a symbol. If you throw a stone at a soldier, you won't kill him. It's a message against occupation, not a message to kill."