Khairieh Abu-Shusheh braved the checkpoints of East Jerusalem last week to make a pilgrimage to the village of Deir Yassin. Here 55 years ago, in one of the darkest episodes of the Jewish state’s creation, nearly 100 men, women and children were butchered by the Irgun and Stern militias. Several captives were taken and paraded in Jerusalem before being killed. The massacre on 9 April 1948, several weeks before the state of Israel had been declared, as well as news of other slaughters, triggered an exodus that ended in 80 per cent of the Arab population being forced from the new Jewish state.

As a tide of Palestinian protest — from Nazareth to Bethlehem and Gaza — was unleashed at the weekend against the war, a suicide bomber slipped into the coastal town of Netanya and detonated himself at the entrance to a café, hurting 58 diners and passers-by. According to Islamic Jihad, which claimed responsibility, the injuries inflicted by the explosives strapped to 19-year- old Rami Ranam were “a gift” to the Iraqi people. The bombing occurred on Land Day, an annual event observed across much of the Middle East to commemorate the fatal shootings of six Palestinian citizens of Israel by the security services in 1976, during demonstrations against government attempts to confiscate huge swaths of Arab- owned land in the Galilee.

Palestinians, reduced by a year of Israeli military invasion to a society of “handout seekers”, are rapidly finding that even the handouts are drying up. That is the verdict of aid agencies, including the World Bank and the United Nations refugee agency UNRWA, both of which recently published reports on the humanitarian catastrophe unfurling in the West Bank and Gaza. Sixty-year-old Mohamed Misleh hardly needed telling that. He had been nervously waiting all morning for UN supplies of rice, flour, sugar and oil in the dark corridors of the Charity Society’s offices in the West Bank town of Azzoun, along with three hundred other refugee families.

There is every sign that Washington is playing for time on the “road map” to a Palestinian state by 2005. Few now remember that the draft plan, presented in October, required both Israel and the Palestinians to implement the first phase of confidence-building measures leading to an end to the violence within two months — that is, by December 2002. Such obligations were soon brushed aside in favour of endless adjustments, negotiations and delays. First President Bush agreed to postpone the road map’s publication until after Israel’s elections, then the deadline was the formation of an Israeli government. Now it is dependent on the new Palestinian prime minister, Abu Mazen, announcing his cabinet, or maybe it will have to wait until “after” the war in Iraq, whatever that might mean.

Less than a fortnight ago Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon took his cabinet ministers on a well- publicised tour of the northern sections of the 360km separation fence, ostensibly being built around the West Bank to protect Israelis from Palestinian attack. Addressing them afterwards, Sharon adopted his standard posture: the electrified fence, he said, was purely a “security measure” and would not become a “political” border — code among the right and settlers for the government’s refusal to demarcate the borders of a future Palestinian state. That has been the constant refrain since Sharon was cornered into accepting the separation wall by his former Labour coalition partners last June. However, in contrast to his previous utterances, this time Sharon may not have meant what he said. The ministerial tour appears to have heralded a dramatic new phase in Sharon’s thinking.

With the clock ticking down the last minutes before a US-led war against Iraq, Israeli officials have put on hold promises made in court last month to deliver gas masks to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians living in so-called “Area C” — huge swaths of the West Bank and parts of Gaza that were never handed over to Yasser Arafat and his Palestinian Authority under the Oslo accords. They join the rest of the Palestinian population in being denied protection by Israel from possible chemical and biological attack if President Saddam Hussein decides to go out dramatically, all super-guns blazing.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon sent out deliberately confusing messages this week as he prepared for the return of US peace envoy General Anthony Zinni, a sign of America’s renewed, though possibly temporary, interest in the conflict. The familiar “hawk” Sharon drove the army deeper into Palestinian-controlled areas of the West Bank at the weekend, putting into action his earlier declared pledge to inflict heavy casualties. Dozens of Palestinians were killed in the bloodiest week of the Intifada as tanks and troops entered West Bank refugee camps and the air force again pounded the Gaza Strip.

In the struggle for what little is left of world attention when all eyes are on Iraq, one Palestinian’s suffering must compete with another’s, one tragedy overshadows the next. The pain of each is seen in isolation, a separate case crying out for more or less sympathy, with a stronger or weaker claim on our compassion. Some instances of such suffering are not even understood as Palestinian. Last week the media reported that the UN children’s agency UNICEF had criticised the Israeli army for demolishing a home in Bureij refugee camp in the Gaza Strip on 3 March that led to a building collapsing on a pregnant 37-year-old woman, Noha Sabri Sweidan. The mother of 10 bled to death under the ruins.

There are not many aspects of Israeli life untouched by the celebrated Amnon Rubinstein, a lawyer, turned professor, turned political party founder, turned government minister, turned journalist and writer. His recent retirement from politics unfortunately means more of Rubinstein’s regular columns in the daily Ha’aretz newspaper.

The small brown-domed Roman Catholic church in the village of Rama, located in the foothills of the central Galilee in northern Israel, is hidden among steep narrow winding streets. That may explain why an anti-tank missile fired three weeks ago missed the church, presumed to be its target, and hit instead a neighbouring building housing a group of Brazilian nuns. The thick stone walls halted the missile’s progress, leaving only damaged stone and shattered windows. Three nuns who were inside needed treatment for shock. “There was a huge explosion. Had the wall been made of concrete, the missile would have penetrated the building and all three of them might have been killed,” said a trainee priest, Ibrahim Zbeit. “It’s like a little Lebanon here at the moment.”

The streets of Ramallah, unlike those of most other West Bank cities, are usually free of Israeli soldiers. Despite appearances, however, the army has stamped its control on the West Bank’s capital as certainly as its tanks have left deep tread marks on all the city’s roads.

The streets of Ramallah, unlike those of most other West Bank cities, are usually free of Israeli soldiers. Despite appearances, however, the army has stamped its control on the West Bank’s capital as certainly as its tanks have left deep tread marks on the city’s main roads. Nowadays soldiers move in only occasionally from their entrenched positions around the city to patrol the streets, make arrests or further humiliate the Palestinian president, Yasser Arafat. Their power is so absolute they have little need to assert it. The besieged militants of Ramallah, at least those not dead or imprisoned, are apparently as cowed as Arafat, who has been holed up since December 2001 in the Muqata, surrounded by mountains of rubble which were once the buildings of his large compound of district offices.

As the dust settles in Israel, pundits and journalists have been digesting the meaning of the country’s election results: the huge swing to Likud, the unprecedented collapse of the left and the emergence of an embittered and anti-religious Ashkenazi sect in the shape of Shinui. The significance of these changes will only become apparent over the next months as Ariel Sharon struggles to form and hold together a coalition government made up of the new combustible elements at his disposal. But another seismic electoral shift has gone entirely unremarked: the severing of the last vestiges of political co-operation between Israeli Jews and Arabs.

After months of diplomatic inactivity, the phone lines between Jerusalem and Ramallah were again buzzing this week as meetings between Israeli and Palestinian officials were hastily arranged. The contacts began on Wednesday last week with a secret meeting between Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and the chairman of the Palestinian parliament, Ahmed Qureia (Abu-Alaa). The talks, which came to light two days later, were reportedly held under intense American pressure and with the US ambassador, Dan Kurtzer, present. Palestinian President Yasser Arafat said he had approved the meeting in advance.

It’s strange to watch a film surrounded by most of the cast, especially when the presentation is not at a glittery London or New York première. But in the case of Elia Suleiman’s surprise hit movie, “Divine Intervention,” in which a fair proportion of Nazareth’s 70,000 inhabitants feature, it was difficult to avoid cast members at a screening in the city last week. Like everyone else, they paid to get in. Many critics have mistakenly assumed that the movie, a surreal and comic attack on the Israeli occupation, is set in the Palestinian territories. That is why, although it charmed audiences at Cannes, winning the Jury Prize, it disturbed the Oscar committee, which banned it from the competition on the grounds that its country of origin, Palestine, is not a “legitimate nation.”

Israel’s President Moshe Katsav called each of the political parties into his office in turn on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday to ask who they wanted as the next prime minister. Apart from the demurring voices of Labour, Meretz and the Arab parties, Ariel Sharon won resounding support. If Israeli coalition-building were a simple mathematical exercise Sharon would have no problems in deciding his cabinet. With Likud armed with almost a third of the 120 Knesset seats he could fashion a government by mixing religious, settler and secular parties, thus securing the 61 MKs required to run the country. But Sharon looks almost as anxious after his rout of the left — Labour down to 19 seats and Meretz to six — as he did during the election campaign, when he and his party faced a series of corruption scandals.

A tangled mess of crumpled aluminium sheets and bent steel girders that a fortnight ago were the shops of Nazlat Issa’s market line the last stretch of the 100- metre stretch of road from the Israeli town of Baqa Al-Gharbiya to the military checkpoint guarding entry into the West Bank. Drivers, waiting to pass, sit idly in their cars next to the wreckage but already the strange sight is barely noticed. The demolished market is just another contour of the disfigured physical and human landscape Israel is fashioning out of the West Bank and Gaza. The demolition of Palestinian homes is now so commonplace that it barely raises eyebrows, let alone protest. But the razing of 62 shops, from grocery stores to a pharmacy and a furniture showroom, set new standards of destructiveness by the army. Even the Israeli media briefly took note.

Two days before polling, two Knesset candidates for the extreme right-wing Jewish Party Herut, which advocates the expulsion of Palestinians, tried to enter the northern Arab town of Umm Al-Fahm in what they termed an attempt to “examine up close illegal construction” — an inflammatory comment in the wake of the Sharon government’s populist decision to demolish several houses in Arab areas over the past few weeks. One of the candidates was Baruch Marzel, a former leader of the outlawed racist Kach movement. Before setting out on their visit, Marzel and Herut’s leader, Michael Kleiner, announced to the media that they would go armed. Large groups of local residents gathered in Umm Al-Fahm to block their entry to the town. But they needn’t have bothered.

It is a reflex question for Palestinians, always posed early in the Arab greeting ritual, to ask a stranger, even another Palestinian, “Where are you from?” before enquiring: “Where do you live?” Few Palestinians live where they feel they belong.