While Bush strengthened Sharon's position, the moderate Palestinian leadership was badly wounded. Levy says that there are "Palestinian leaders that are eminently dealable-with," but that Sharon has "cut them off at the knees."

He points to Abu Mazen, the moderate Palestinian prime minister who resigned last September after a power struggle with Yasser Arafat. "Abu Mazen came along and said, OK, I'll play the game, and he got shattered," says Levy. "Imagine if Sharon had said to him, 'For the first three months, this is what I expect of you. Then, in month four, I'm going to announce that as a result of our meetings, I'm going to evacuate Gaza.'" The liberal, negotiation approach would have been strengthened enormously among Palestinians, Levy says.

Now, those Palestinians who were willing to make concessions to Israel are under attack. "They're going to say, 'You're the ones who paved the way for this letter!'" Levy says. "Americans and Israelis have taken your concessions, pocketed them and given us nothing."

Indeed, no sooner had Levy said that than the Committee for the Defense of the Rights of Palestine's Refugees, a group representing refugee camps in Gaza and the West Bank, released a statement attacking the authors of the Geneva Accord. "Bush would never have taken this step, had he not known that the Palestinian arena is filled with initiatives and ideas to repeal the right of return," the statement said. According to Haaretz, one of the authors of the statement demanded that Palestinians "boycott persons involved in the peace initiatives, until they retract their remarks."

Reached in Gaza, Jamal Zakut, co-author of Geneva and deputy to Abed Rabbo, was both furious and despairing. "I think that by disengagement and unilateralism, Sharon is empowering radicalism in Palestine," said Zakut. "He's deepening the idea that there is no hope of a real peace process, there is no hope of negotiation. What happened yesterday was very clear. It was the replacing of the road map with the Sharon map. It was an American failure."

Speaking in Ramallah, Hani Al-Masri, the Palestinian Authority's minister of information, was more fatalistic. The road map, he said, "was born dead. Yesterday they just put it into the fire."

Meanwhile, there is no political solution in sight for those Palestinians whose land is being annexed by the security wall. In Masha village, the wall cuts Hani Amer's house off from both his land and his village, looping around to completely surround the small home where he and his wife live with their six children. On one side are newly erected concrete slabs reaching around 30 feet into the air. On another is the gate to a military road erected to service the wall, on the third is the double row of fencing protecting a neighboring settlement, and on the fourth is a locked gate with a sign reading, "Mortal Danger -- Military Zone. Any Person Who Passes or Damages the Fence Endangers His Life."

The Israeli army gave the family a key to the gate that surrounds them, but they're not allowed to have visitors. "We are like prisoners," says Monira Amer, Hani's wife. "The view of the wall is disgusting."

From the roof, though, there's a prettier view, of a settlement that's only a stone's throw away (and many stones have been thrown, by both sides). There, there are manicured lawns, lush flowering plants (the lion's share of water is reserved for Israeli settlements) and large American-style two-story homes. It's another world. Monira cries when she sees the settlement's children playing in its orderly streets. One of her teenage sons crouches sullenly on a corner of the roof, not saying anything. To the north, a bulldozer works on the Palestinian side of the fence. According to Fareed Taamallah, construction is beginning there on another settlement. It's only a matter of time, says Monira, before the Israelis come for her family's farmland, too.

"They will come again," she says, while Taamallah translates. "It will not be enough. They will not stop." She may be right -- now that Bush has endorsed Israel's claim to much of the West Bank, there's no reason for Sharon not to keep building.

Groups like Hamas aren't strong in the villages, says Taamallah; they flourish instead in the crowded refugee camps. Still, he thinks the ground is growing fertile. Amer's angry son might make a receptive recruit, he says.

And for those who still reject violence, but also reject an endless occupation? The only strategy left for the Palestinians, says Taamallah, is to work for a one-state solution, with Palestinians and Israelis living as equal citizens in a democratic country. Already, the two populations are intertwined, with Israeli settlers living just a few dozen meters from the surrounding farming villages. When Palestinians begin demanding a place in the country that's expanding to envelop them, he says, how can the world not support them? It will mean the end of Israel as a Jewish state, but that's hardly Taamallah's concern.

"Day after day, a one-state solution becomes the best solution," he says. "We are in Bedia, in the heart of the West Bank, and there is a settlement 10 meters from here." Separation, he says, is becoming impossible. It's an idea that Taamallah says is catching on among Palestine's educated classes.

Levy isn't surprised by this kind of talk. "A one-state solution has lots of benefits for the Palestinians," he says. "There's no concession on refugees or on the bigger land issue, and they're going to be a majority in a few years."

The two-state solution, he points out, was only formally adopted by the Palestinian leadership in 1988. Before that, the PLO charter called for a secular democratic state in all of Palestine -- meaning Israel and the territories.

"Pragmatism and realpolitik led them to abandon that," says Levy. But now that such pragmatism has proven useless, the old idea is back in vogue.

"I hope they understand just how much hostility there will be for it in Israel," says Levy. "What a long, long struggle it will be, with no guarantees at the end of the day for a working model. But if two states means Bantustanization for the Palestinians, of course they don't want to buy into it."

Sharon, of course, doesn't care what the Palestinians do or don't buy into. Indeed, when asked by Israeli journalists just how successful he really was in Washington, his aides proudly pointed to the Palestinians' furious reaction.

"They were dealt a lethal blow," he crowed to one Israeli newspaper.

For once, Sharon and the Palestinians are in complete agreement.

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