Over pasta Alfredo with mushrooms, I ask the question. "From talking to Palestinians and studying this issue, I think it's pretty clear that a solution is attainable," I say. "Yes, the problem originated in 1948. An injustice was done to Palestinians when the state of Israel came into existence. And there's a lot of fear because of that. But based on what was agreed at Taba, on the Saudi plan, on the Geneva plan, it's clear that the Palestinians are prepared to accept the West Bank and Gaza in exchange for peace. The refugees issue can be worked out --- they know Israel isn't going to take all of the Palestinians back. They already just about solved Jerusalem. In effect, they're prepared to say, 'We'll give you 1948 -- give us 1967.' So why isn't the Israeli public pressuring Sharon, who has no intention of giving the Palestinians the minimum they need, to make peace?"

Yehuda shakes his head. "Israelis are so terrified that they can't think clearly," he says. "In a tragic time you can't think reasonably or be courageous. When we interviewed the writer Alain de Botton, he said, 'If you're looking for new ideas, don't sit in your room. Get on a train or an airplane.' But Israelis don't move. They think there's nothing they can do. They don't even know how much the situation is affecting them."

"And people don't trust the Palestinians," Eilat adds. "They don't believe that they will really be satisfied with the land -- they will want to destroy Israel."

The sheer number of suicide attacks has dulled Israeli attitudes, Eilat says. "People used to call from Tel Aviv after a bombing to see if we were OK. Now they don't." Nor do TV and radio any longer stop all their programming for special programs for a whole evening after a bombing: "You can have a bus bombing at 8, and by 10 the Miss World pageant or whatever is on again," Yehuda says. In a tiny country like Israel, where everybody knows everybody, this is a monumental change.

But familiarity doesn't mean people are getting used to it, Eilat says: On the contrary, it feels like it is getting closer. The situation is intolerable, but people are afraid to change anything because they're afraid it'll get worse.

Walid Batrawi told me that after the Israelis killed Yassin, he couldn't bear to watch the news. It made it impossible to function, he said. Yehuda and Eilat said pretty much the same thing. "When we heard, in the morning, we went right back to bed and slept for three hours," she says.

"Israelis are not even watching the news much anymore," Yehuda says. "And there's a decrease in the readership of papers. There used to be 10 papers -- now there are three. A major soap opera started running right against the news, at 8:05 -- and it worked. So people are not knowledgeable, they're not informed, they're just distracting themselves. And that is not a way to think clearly about the situation. They are being driven crazy and they are shutting off their minds. And when buses are being blown up, they don't criticize their government."

Hanan Ashrawi said almost exactly the same thing: "When they are assassinating people, no one can criticize the leadership."

Later, back in my decrepit hotel room on the Mount of Olives (where Christ suffered the agony in the Garden) overlooking the great golden Dome of the Rock, rising up in the center of a piece of land so tiny and so contested you half-expect it to simply turn into antimatter and vanish into a black hole, I thought about the special madness of this conflict. The squalor and humiliation endured by all Palestinians every day -- and the constant possibility of sudden violence -- was light-years removed from the roulette-wheel paranoia hanging over the nice, familiar middle-class streets of Jerusalem. But for both sides, the situation was unbearable. Just putting my toe in it for two days -- the killing of Sheikh Yassin was a kind of sped-up course in fear and loathing -- made me feel like I was starting to lose it. These people live it. They can't fly away.

An impasse, a void of mistrust, separates these bitter enemies. Israelis feel that they can trust no one; understandably, they will never let anyone threaten their survival again. Tragically, the circumstances that made them survivors may also have prevented many of them from grasping what the creation of their state did to the Palestinians. And the terror attacks, of course, ended that possibility. Palestinians, for their part, have been so ground down by far worse poverty, oppression and endless misery than Israelis that they have been driven to extremes. A movement that has begun sending unwitting children to their death has lost its moral bearings and is in danger of never regaining them.

Their leaders are bankrupt. Sharon is a cunning, ancient warlord, who registers the atavistic, shell-shocked fears of his countrymen and maneuvers cleverly, stalling, stalling, stalling. Arafat, comfortable and smug, has turned into a hideous statue of a Heroic Resistance Fighter, incapable of breaking out of his guerrilla mode. These men are not capable of making peace.

But both the Palestinians and the Israelis I talked to agreed that there was one party who could break the deadlock: the United States. "It's like two people fighting," Yehuda said. "You need someone from the outside to step in and break it up." Every Palestinian I talked to agreed -- but most had become so despairing of a reasonable U.S. policy that they didn't even bother to bring it up. Clearly they'd grown weary of grasping at vain hopes. Mention of Bush brought a bitter grimace, sometimes the dark smile of a gunfighter. This man is detested.

With its unique leverage over Israel, the United States could immediately broker a peace deal if it so chose. But this would mean taking on Sharon, and no American politician is willing to do this. But what American leaders, and the support-whatever-Sharon-says crowd who have intimidated those leaders, need to understand is that they are not helping Israel; they are destroying it. And they are doing something else: They are making us hated across the Middle East and the entire Muslim world. This is a much bigger miscalculation, in the age of global terror, than even Bush's Iraq debacle.

The issues involved here are bigger than just the Palestinians and the Israelis. For the last two weeks I have been traveling around the Arab world, visiting Egypt, Lebanon and Jordan as well as Israel and the occupied territories. The Arab people are unbelievably kind and generous to a rare American visitor -- and they are simply bewildered by our stance on the Arab-Muslim world in general and Israel and the Palestinians in particular. "I know Americans are kind people," said Mohammad, who drove me down to the Roman ruins and Palestinian refugee camps in southern Lebanon. "But why your government do these things?" I heard this again and again, from Cairo to Beirut.

Every American policymaker, every American who cares about human rights, or justice, or Israelis, or Palestinians, or Jews, or Muslims, or the Holy Land (the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the most sacred site in Christianity, was empty when I visited), or just naked don't-blow-me-up self-interest, should come to the Calandia checkpoint. They should come to the rubble-strewn streets on the outskirts of Ramallah. They should stand at the No. 19 bus stop. This is not their problem: It is our problem. And then they should walk through the gates and into the Old City of Jerusalem, that divine gray maze that all three great faiths regarded as the center of the world and the terrestrial link with heaven, and see how hollow a man's prayers ring when he has not done what is needed.

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