There seems to be no way out. A person doesn't dare, sometimes, to feel anything more than what the headlines proclaim, out of dread that he will call up emotions even more menacing and problematic. Dread that he will kindle disquieting questions about the justice of his actions so far, or his chances of living, even for a single day, a life of serenity, a life in which he will cause injustice to no one and will fear no other.

Most Israelis now believe that the peace process has dissolved and become a part of history. Even worse, most of them now believe that it was a mirage from the start. They have trouble understanding how they let themselves be led on by the left and by the government of Ehud Barak, which deluded them into believing that Israel really had a negotiating partner and that the Palestinians had really given up their dream of destroying Israel.

Israel has been plunged into a kind of apathy. Ostensibly, life goes on as usual. Everyday affairs are conducted with the characteristic Israeli mixture of vitality and edginess. But everything is taking place with a strange and disheartening kind of impassiveness. In slow motion. Israel is now slipping back into a dangerous psychological stance--that of the victim, of the persecuted Jew. Every threat--even from the Palestinians, who can never defeat Israel on the battlefield--is perceived as an absolute peril justifying the harshest response.

Unlike during other, similarly difficult periods in the past, Israelis today have no hope. Only hope can impel them to try to extricate themselves from this fatal ossification. "You can't make peace with the Arabs" is the sentence that this writer hears several times a day, every time he foolishly gets into a debate on the street, in a taxi or on a radio program. With a small difference, it is the same statement he hears in debates with Palestinians:

"You can't make peace with the Israelis." The prophecies are liable to fulfill themselves.

The war is taking place almost everywhere in Israel (as I write, I can hear the rumble of the Israeli incursion into Palestinian Beit Jala, six miles south of my home). Yet the average Israeli seems able to repress, even ignore, what is happening around him. Decades of wars and anxiety have trained him to do this very efficiently. When an Israeli citizen opens his eyes in the morning, he can assume, with a pretty good degree of certainty, that during the course of the day at least one Israeli will be hurt in an attack of some sort. He knows that his life could change in the bitterest possible way. But he won't think about it. Nor will he think about what Palestinians are feeling (it's all their fault anyway, the average Israeli believes--we offered them everything and they responded with lynching and terrorism). He won't go to crowded places. He'll refrain from hiking his favorite trails. He notes that downtowns look empty and bleak, that there are few tourists in the streets and sometimes more soldiers than civilians. In the evening, in front of the TV news, after the segment on the day's funerals in Tel Aviv and Gaza, a relieved voice in his brain whispers: "It wasn't me today."

Little by little, Israelis and Palestinians are moving away from peace. Just three months ago, in February 2001, at the talks in Taba, agreement was imminent. Today, that looks like a remission, brief and delusional, in the course of an incurable disease. Almost no one uses the word "peace." The Palestinians say they won't end their violence "until the occupation is completely over." Israel declares it will not even enter negotiations "until violence ends completely." Each side knows that its ultimatum--however morally correct--is unrealistic. Both know that, if they cling to these demands, they will be caught in a vicious circle of violence and will in the end bring destruction on themselves.

Since there is no hope, Israelis and Palestinians go back to doing what they know how to do --shed the blood of the other side. Each day more people join the ranks of the dead and wounded, of the haters and the despondent. Each day the appetite for revenge grows. The Palestinians say, before camera and microphone, that they no longer care if there is never an agreement: "The main thing is for the Israelis to suffer as we have suffered." Israelis demand that Sharon "rub out a few Palestinian villages" and believe, so it seems, that this will make the Palestinians surrender and agree to an Israeli compromise.

Senior Palestinian officials, who in private conversations with Israelis severely criticize Yasser Arafat and the blind murderousness of suicide bombers, close ranks with the most extreme elements in their society when they speak in public. The voice of Israel's left has gone mute --many have given up and decamped to the right, while others find no public resonance with what they say. Indeed, what influence can ideas and words have in the face of the brutal, all-pervasive reality?

Instead of pursuing a "peace of the courageous," both sides are busy keeping a bloody, you-killed-me-I'll-kill-you balance sheet. The principal objective is to avenge yesterday's murder while minimizing the enemy's retaliation tomorrow. Without noticing it, Palestinians and Israelis are reverting to the pattern of an ancient tribal war, eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth.

"They give birth astride of a grave," Samuel Beckett wrote in "Waiting for Godot," and in the Middle East that description is terribly concrete: all of us, Israelis and Palestinians, were born into this conflict. Our identity is formulated, to no small extent, in terms of hostility and fear, survival and death. Sometimes it seems as if Israelis and Palestinians have no clear identities without the conflict, without the "enemy" whose existence is necessary, perhaps vital, to their senses of self and community.

You get queasy these days listening to that special form of Schadenfreude that fills Israeli and Palestinian leaders when their angry prophecies come true. They especially like to see hope collapsing before their eyes. No less shocking is the enthusiasm with which so many Israelis and Palestinians adopt these despairing visions. When it comes down to it, people get used to the injustices history has done them.

If Israel refuses to conduct peace talks before terrorism is completely eliminated, as Sharon has declared, it will never have peace. On the contrary, it will guarantee that terror will continue. If the Palestinians refuse to halt their violence until the occupation ends, they will never have peace, nor will the occupation end.

Sharon and Arafat are both cynical leaders shaped by war and violence. Their actions mirror each other like a carefully choreographed ceremonial dance. In order to achieve compromise, both will have to renounce most of the fundamental concepts that have molded their world views and given them standing among their peoples. Their actions in recent months cause one to suspect that they are deliberately making negotiations conditional on demands that have no chance of being met today.

Only a miracle or a catastrophe will change the situation. If you don't believe in the first and fear the latter, you realize that the only practical hope for saving Israel and the Palestinians from mutual slaughter is heavy international pressure on both of them. I still believe that Israel has the obligation to make the larger concessions in negotiations, because it is stronger, and because it is the occupier. But in order to restart negotiations, both sides must end their uncompromising rhetoric and reduce their violent actions to the bare minimum. Another, smaller hope is the willingness of individuals, Israelis and Palestinians, to renew dialogue. This is not easy to do, and apparently outside help is also necessary here. But such contacts would be of huge and not just symbolic importance. They will remind both nations of what they miss but do not dare to long for. They will create today's only alternative to hatred and despair.