Despair reigns in the Holy Land

The Palestinian policemen

Mohammed Abu Ghosh, 19, a policeman in Yasser Arafat's National Security Service, is angry not only at the Israelis but also at his own leaders. He is based in Beit Rima, a village amid olive groves where last month two of his comrades were shot by Israeli soldiers. Three others were killed manning the checkpoint at the entrance to the village.

With tired resignation he points to where his friends died, during an operation in which Israeli troops invaded Beit Rima to destroy the home of one of the suspects in the killing of Israel's tourism minister, Rehavam Zeevi, in mid-October. Now, his fury at the Israelis almost spent, he turns on his own leadership: "We should stop this intifada. People on both sides have lost too much and the Palestinians especially have gained nothing, nothing but blood and martyrs."

Defeatist talk? Surely to call for an end to the "war of liberation" amounts to treason among the Palestinians, especially for a policeman? 'The 750 dead of the intifada will not be in vain, we will eventually get a Palestinian state," he says. "But now, there is no administration here, it has collapsed. Only the top people do well, out of corruption. Junior officers and the rest of us, we're trying to do our jobs but there's no rule of law for the big men."

He says he will resign if, as part of Israeli preconditions for renewed talks, he is ordered to arrest members of the PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine), Hamas (the Islamic Resistance), Islamic Jihad, the Tanzim militia and Mr Arafat's Fatah movement accused of "terrorism" against Israel.

"I could never take orders to arrest our own people who are fighting the Israelis. They are putting their lives in danger, while the leadership is taking money and driving luxury cars. I'd never arrest one of our own freedom fighters. I'd rather go to jail," insists the young policeman.

And what of the senior officers and officials in Mr Arafat's Palestinian Authority he accuses of corruption? "Burn them," he spits.

Abu Ali, 52, a lieutenant in the same police unit, is a man in despair. He sits on a broken plastic chair at the checkpoint on the edge of the village, next to a cabin riddled with Israeli bullets that killed one of his friends.

"I'm sitting here with a dead heart. I'm scared that any minute I could be killed. I've fought all my life," he says, showing scars from shrapnel wounds received serving the Palestine Liberation Organisation in Lebanon 19 years ago. "I've come home after more than 20 years in exile. I came home to live in peace, not to die here still fighting.

"I want a future that is safe for the next generation of Jews and Palestinians. If the Jews would give us a state, I'd be happy to live with them as neighbours, right next to my own home. Surely that is possible? I would even defend them against any other Arabs.

"When I go home my daughter Berar, who is only four, wraps a sheet around her doll, calls it a martyr, and weeps over it. What kind of a world are we Jews and Arabs making for our children when they play games about death?"

The Israeli immigrant

Carol Berger, 52, a business consultant, favours the establishment of a Palestinian state, but, she says: "The last 14 months has made all of us feel that this is not a territorial issue - it's a question of our existence." She can hardly sleep at night.

She emigrated from Richmond to Israel in 1995, and now lives in the comfortable seaside town of Rana'ana.

"We've already shown that we are prepared to compromise. But we're not prepared to commit national suicide," she says. "Palestinian children are taught to hate Jews from kindergarten. By all means give the Palestinians a state - but that's very hard to do when they broadcast from the mosques 'death to Jews'.

"They're attacking us every day. How can we be sure that a Palestinian state will not be a Trojan horse? Our backs are to the sea and the Palestinian leadership is doing nothing to prepare its people for peace - it's preparing for an endless war.

"I'm not pretending to know the answer, or that everything our army and government is doing is right, but we're just reacting to the basic truth that the Palestinians are trying to kill us. Stop the killing, and we'll talk."

The Israeli peaceniks

Israela Goldblum and her husband Amiram remain proud to be Zionist doves amid the gathering flocks of hawks, but Mrs Goldblum admits: "We never prepared ourselves, we never imagined this existential threat was real - and maybe it is." A former senior editor in Israeli radio and leading peace activist, she chats over a glass of red wine around a table where peace rallies and campaigns to get the illegal Jewish settlers out of their colonies in the occupied territories were plotted.

Mr Goldblum is head of a settlement monitoring project with lobby group Peace Now, and a leading professor of theoretical chemistry. He fought two wars for Israel, in 1967 and 1973. The couple's son and daughter served in one of Israel's most elite special forces units. They are confident in their patriotism, but feel isolated from the rest of their country.

Mrs Goldblum says: "I never thought I would say this, but I am relieved that my son is out of the country. It's the same for all of the Peace Now children. We could never have thought of leaving. But it's healthy for the children to have a back-up." Then she adds what, for the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, is an almost unthinkable heresy.

"You know, one is starting to wonder whether this was a naive enterprise. Perhaps we were wrong to think we could build a state for Jews here in the Middle East?"

Her husband disagrees. "Israel should exist and does exist. But we have a moral obligation to pull out of the occupied territories, immediately. The settler movement and the occupation is bad for the Palestinians and bad for us." Unlike most Israelis, he believes the intifada has had one "positive result".

He says: "The main achievement of the intifada has been to reduce the numbers of settlers by about 20 to 30 per cent. That's a major achievement. It means no Israelis will want to go and live there. The intifada has therefore shifted public opinion.

"This success will help in negotiations. It means the Palestinians will come to the table with some feeling of victory. Psychologically, they will feel more on parity with us. That will mean they feel more confident, and able to make rational decisions."

The Jewish West Bank settler

British-born Shula Ariel, 48, originally from Yorkshire, believes Israel must control all the Palestinian areas. She moved to Israel and converted to Judaism in 1967. A widow, she lives in the West Bank settlement of Teqoa, where two teenage Jewish boys were stoned to death in a cave earlier this year by Palestinians from a nearby village. A teenage girl was shot dead on the outskirts of the heavily-guarded compound in September.

She has five children, aged from 11 to 17. The two youngest live with her and run a gauntlet of stoning and shooting attacks on their route to school in Jerusalem every day.

She says: "It's not just Israel but the whole world that is in danger from the evil that has spread - evil will triumph when good men do nothing about it and that is what's happening. Islam is bent on world domination. The Arabs have been very consistent, they have always said they want to destroy Israel, we're in their way. The only solution is for us to be in charge of all of the Biblical land of Israel. That way people will know where they stand.

"If that means we'll have autonomous Arab areas, or even give Israeli citizenship to the Arabs living inside the country, that would be fine in theory. The problem is that they want to kill us and nothing has been done to prepare them for peace. Ninety per cent of Arabs want peace, but it's the 10 per cent who are ruining the future."

The Palestinian West Bank mother

Liana Adul, 27, fears a major war between Israel and the Arab world. A mother of three boys, Tariq, eight, Mohammed, six, and Yazzam, 18 months, she moved to Bethany, on the edge of the Mount of Olives, from Abu Dis after her youngest child's cot was struck by Israeli bullets during clashes with Palestinian rioters on the street outside her flat.

"The Israelis apologised, which was good. But we moved out in November last year because our house was in a hotspot," she says. "The worst thing about life now is the boredom. I haven't seen my family in Jericho [10 miles away] for a year because the Israelis have sealed it off and turned it into a prison. I'm scared of going to east Jerusalem because of the police, and getting to school takes two hours each way every day because of the Israeli checkpoints.

"I'm afraid that things will get much worse. There will be no solution because the Israelis never keep their part of any agreements. In the future there will be a big war between Israel and all the Arab world, and we will be right in the middle. That's not the sort of excitement I want out of life."

The Nazi hunter

Efraim Zuroff, 53, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Jerusalem, blames Yasser Arafat for the current impasse. Mr Zuroff lives in the settlement of Efrat and has spent his life hunting Nazis and studying modern Jewish history.

He says: "The Oslo peace process blew up in our faces, literally. The people in the political middle ground who were open to different types of thinking and were prepared to go with Oslo up to a point, who accepted the idea of a Palestinian state and an end to this wretched conflict, have been betrayed by the process and bamboozled by Arafat.

"He's succeeded in convincing most of us that he wants to kick us into the sea. For 50 years we've tried to make this a political conflict, because in the end that is soluble. Arafat in the last year has turned it into a religious conflict, to which there can be no solution. Given that, we're in for a long and bloody period before people return to their senses."

The Holocaust survivor

Yosef Melamed, 75, sees a bleak future. He fought the Nazis as a Lithuanian partisan and fled to Israel with the Zionist underground from the Russian occupation of the Baltic states. In 1947 he joined the Palmach, a Jewish militia, and fought to establish the Jewish state for the next two years before becoming a lawyer.

He says: "All Israelis want peace, and so does the other side. We have to stop the violence and return to negotiations, but I am afraid the terrorism will continue for years, and so we will be stuck with our problems. The Palestinians are entitled like anyone else to elect their leader, and they chose Arafat, so we're going to have to talk with him. The time has come for a bold solution, some original thinking, to try to settle this, or it will go on for years. As survivors, we've seen too much violence in our lives, we all want a ceasefire and we want it immediately. Enough is enough - but you need two to tango, and we don't have a dancing partner. The future and the present is dark, very dark."

The Palestinian elder

Wajib abu Mafi, 71, a local elder and former councillor, sees a little hope. He has five adult sons who followed him into an electrical business which has collapsed under the pressure of the economic blockade of their home town, Bethlehem. "I built up a good business and brought my children up to stay out of trouble, to be cautious and keep out of politics. Now they can hardly feed their families," he says.

"The Palestinians are like a grain of wheat trapped between two stones, if one or other moves, we still get crushed. We live in darkness. But there is light at the end of the tunnel. Sharon will not be in power for ever. When he came to power I thought he would take over the whole of the West Bank. But he didn't, because of foreign pressure. This must increase. But the intifada will not stop until we have independence.

"There have been a lot of 'ceasefires' but the Palestinian gunmen carry on fighting. That means they will refuse to stop until their mission is accomplished."

None of these interviews give much hope. But perhaps most depressing, as one contemplates the likely future of this land, are the views of these two young men.

The Israeli soldier

Yoni, 22, a paratrooper who has just finished his three-year national service, says: "The Arabs are stupid. They were offered the best deal they could have ever had, and they turned it down and started killing us. So that's it? They must go. They must be driven out of the land of Israel. They can go and live with their Arab friends, not here.

"I served in Nablus and Jenin [two West Bank towns that have seen heavy fighting, bomb attacks, and assassinations]. I know these people, the only thing they understand is force, so let's give them more of it."

The Palestinian militant

Mohamed abu Rizak, 21, from Gaza City, isn't interested in giving peace a chance either. "The Jews understand force, they fled Lebanon when Hezbollah killed them and they will leave our country when we have killed enough of them. We lost our homes to their armies, and now our armies will take them back and drive the Jews out. That," he says, "is destiny."