But this year Jerusalem Day has a special stereophonic feature: while our eyes are lifted dutifully to Mount Zion, our left ear hears fireworks exploding and our right listens to shooting in Beit Jalla and Gilo. Those two neighborhoods are only a kilometer away from my house, and right now, as I write and I know it sounds like a journalistic cliché I hear tank and machine-gun fire from their direction.

Yet the real depression I feel has nothing to do with the sensation of life under fire. Palestinians who live in Beit Jalla and Israelis who live in Gilo experience the situation more acutely than I do. One kilometer away from there, on this side of the Green Line, I'm still writing, still watering the plants on the porch and even joking on the phone with an Italian journalist. He's a positive sort of guy but a little hysterical, and he's calling to ask whether the time has not come, Mr. Shalev, to consider emigrating to another country?

No, sir, the time has not yet come, and I don't see it coming. It's true that I've stopped driving to the Galilee through the Jordan Valley. And I asked my kids not to go to shopping centers and markets that are targets for terrorist attacks. No, the depression I feel right now doesn't yet have anything to do with the fear that I or my family will be hit by a bullet or hurt by a land mine. It comes instead from a simple disgust I feel for my own leaders and for the Palestinian leadership.

Fifty-three years after the Nakba, the "catastrophe," as the Arabs call the establishment of the State of Israel, Yasir Arafat is still repeating the same old Palestinian mistakes. Fifty-three years after Israel's victory in the War of Independence, Ariel Sharon is once again showing us that Israel is not an independent state. Of course, it isn't trampled by a foreign ruler. It has a flag and army and national anthem. But Israel is an enslaved state, enslaved to itself: it is fettered by fossilized thought patterns; manacled by ancient, even primitive, concepts; burdened by the worst yoke of all the one it has imposed on its own neck.

In this respect, Israel is ripe for the appearance of a great liberating warrior, one who will free us not from the yoke of foreigners, but from ourselves. Someone like the sage Yochanan ben Zakkai who freed us in the first century from sacrificial worship in the Temple, and like Theodor Herzl, who freed us in the 19th century from passive waiting for the Messiah and deliverance. And just as those two men, each in his own time and place, freed us from the chains of conception and consciousness whose time had gone, so must the next liberator free us from the tyranny of the territories and of the settlers the trap we are in.

As for this curse called "the territories" or "the borders of the Promised Land" or "the tombs of our Patriarchs" depending on how you like to wear your straitjacket I shall simply state that ever since the splendid victory in the Six Day War, the State of Israel has been preoccupied with nothing but the territories with them, their metastases and their consequences. The entire possible budget for education, research, road building and desalination projects has been influenced by them. Every government coalition has been created for them. Every calorie both material and spiritual has been invested in them. Our appearance and our nature grow ugly in their image. Our strength is running out because of them. And worst of all is the prevailing notion that returning the territories is a gift we give to our enemies the failure to understand that giving them up is in the interest of Israel itself.

To all that, Mr. Sharon has no response or revelation other than the drab mantra: "I have a plan." He repeats it to us twice a day. There are those who believe him: they assume that his plan is to drag the region into an all-out war and to use that opportunity to expel the Palestinians to Jordan. And there are those, like me, who think Mr. Sharon has no plan. He always was and still is a limited man, a fossil bereft of vision or inspiration. And when I hear him say his "I have a plan," it is hard for me not to remember the words "I have a dream," which resonated so movingly to me in my youth.

When I hear the shooting, I don't get scared. I don't really want to know what Mr. Sharon's plan is.

What is frightening to me is that it seems he doesn't have a dream.