West Bank - As Palestinians trudge across a barbed-wire passage leading to Jerusalem from the West Bank city of Ramallah, hawkers and taxi drivers greet them with a din of multilingual chants.

"To the checkpoint. To the makhsom," one Palestinian driver yells, advertising in Hebrew for a two-shekel ride that will ferry Palestinians from a main Israeli checkpoint near Ramallah to another closer to the center of Arab East Jerusalem.

Palestinians are increasingly dotting their Arabic with Hebrew words -- using Hebrew vocabulary not just for communicating with Israeli soldiers, but also among themselves.

The language is a barometer of just how intertwined Israeli and Palestinian societies are even as Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon pursues a plan to "disengage" physically from the Palestinians.

But the Hebrew words that most pepper Palestinian Arabic are also inextricably linked to the conflict.

It is the men from Mishmar Hagvul, the Border Police, who many Palestinians fear most. The paramilitary security force may stop them on the street to ask for identity cards or to check if they have a valid "ishur," or permit.

If there is a "seger," or closure, or if the Palestinians don't have the proper papers, there could be a big "balagan," which means a major mess in modern Hebrew.

The soldiers may address the Palestinians in broken Arabic. But even if they cannot speak a word of Arabic, Palestinians understand when they say "taamod poh," or stand here, in Hebrew.

If soldiers get angry at Palestinian complaints of delays at the checkpoints, they may shout at them "tishtok," which means shut up, and Palestinians will understand.

Some Palestinians, angry at Israel for killing at least 3,000 people during a nearly four-year-old Palestinian uprising in which more than 900 Israelis have also died, swear they do not utter a single word of Hebrew.

The use of Hebrew flouts long-standing public sentiment across the Arab world rejecting any normalization with Israel.

But from Palestinians who eat Israeli-style chicken schnitzel sandwiches at beach cafes in occupied Gaza to men who chat incessantly on the "makhshir," a walkie-talkie mobile telephone popular among Arab youth, Hebrew is inescapable.

"I tell my students not to use these words. They are Hebrew. I tell them they are alien words in the Arabic language," al-Quds University professor Munther Dajani said.

But he said he did not expect the words to have staying power in Arabic if Israel withdraws from the West Bank and Gaza Strip, occupied since the 1967 Middle East war.

"You never hear someone saying 'I am going to buy bread' in Hebrew. I will start to worry if I hear things like that," he added.

Israeli Arabs, descended from families that stayed while hundreds of thousands of Arabs fled or were forced out during the 1948 war that led to Israel's creation, were among the first to use Hebrew.

Its sway later spread to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, where Israel built settlements and long pursued a policy of economic integration.

Use of Hebrew is not limited to military terms. Palestinians and fellow Israeli Arabs also use it to describe ordinary life -- words like traffic light or car alarm -- even when suitable Arabic alternatives exist.

One Israeli Arab waiter at a restaurant in the coastal town of Jaffa, near Tel Aviv, that is patronized by both Jews and Arabs seamlessly mixes the two languages.

"Do you want to sit outside in the open air or inside with the mazgan," he asks patrons, using the Hebrew word for air conditioner in an Arabic sentence.

Israel is not the first occupying power to have influence over Palestinian Arabic. English from the British Mandate is widely spoken and some holdover Ottoman-era Turkish words are still understood.

Hebrew has also taken on words from Arabic -- borrowing slang from the dialects of Jewish immigrants from Arab countries as well as from the Palestinians.

Although they may mock their Israeli Arab brethren for being "too Israeli" in speech and dress, most Palestinians understand at least basic words in Hebrew, a Semitic tongue that Arabs find easy to learn.

Some are completely fluent, having picked up Hebrew on the job, from television, at school -- or during a stint in an Israeli jail.

Mohammed Dahlan, a former minister seen as a possible successor to Palestinian President Yasser Arafat, learned Hebrew in Israeli prisons and has proved his fluency in interviews with Israeli media.

"The occupied always has a stronger interest to study the language of the occupier, for his survival," said David Grossman, an Israeli author who describes the Arabicized Hebrew words as the linguistic "metal joints of the occupation."

"It really reflects the place of the occupation in their lives. It is the places where they are stopped, held, interrogated, threatened. So they use these words," he said.

Even when Palestinians complain about Israel's grip on the West Bank and Gaza, many do so using Hebrew terms.

One Palestinian taxi driver in Jerusalem, lamenting he can no longer drive direct to Ramallah but must drop passengers off at one of two checkpoints on the way, does so in a mixture of Hebrew and Arabic.

"From makhsom to makhsom," he says, referring to the army roadblocks. "What can we do?"