"What do you think about the peace talks?"

"I don't care," Ahmar told me, curling his grin around the end of a nargileh pipe. "I don't pay any attention."

Egyptian music videos sang out from a large plasma-screen TV on the wall opposite our table loud enough to block out the calls to prayer from the mosque downtown. Another screen below it was playing a Richard Gere movie set to mute. This was the sort of upscale Palestinian cafe where you could order New York cheesecake and Amstel Light. It was easy to forget we were in Ramallah.

Ahmar's friend Hamid had not forgotten. He told me how the streets had once sparkled with the bullet casings embedded in the asphalt by Israeli tank treads. Paved with gold. He seemed like he might laugh.

He tapped an unlit cigarette against the table and popped bar nuts into his mouth.

"They tell us to forget, to go on with our lives. It's like they fucked our mother and our sister, and then told us to forget about it, do our own thing."

"This subject gives me a headache," Ahmar said from his reclined position. "Change it."

I had been in Ramallah three days and this was the first I'd heard a Palestinian mention the elephant in the room. Hamid continued at my encouragement.

"Many of my friends have left. Now they live in Egypt, America, Germany, Switzerland. I don't want to go though."

"Home is where the heart is," I offered lamely. I thought I'd have to explain the idiom, but Hamid understood me immediately.

"Yes, what you love: your girlfriend, your land."

"How can there be peace? The conflict can't continue forever, can it?"

For this question Hamid had no answer, nor did Ahmar, nor the farming family living on land being steadily encroached upon by settlers, nor the Muslim peace worker living on the Mount of Olives in Israel---none of the Arabs I talked to wanted to venture a hope, as if hope were something they didn't dare express for fear of exposing it to failure.

But those thoughts must exist, and they're too big to hold inside. Sometimes they're held so tightly that they slip out in their ugliest form, like rotten grapes crushed underfoot. They're seen in the swastikas spray-painted on walls in Ramallah, the rocks thrown at IDF soldiers in Ni'ilin.

Children, who have not learned to control their confused emotions, unleash them wantonly. They fight anything in their path. As I walked through the market in Hebron little boys kicked me and shouted, "Hello!" in the most menacing voice they could muster. I do not know if they thought I was Israeli; probably not. In eight days in Palestine and Israel I've witnessed five brawls, all of them Arab youths fighting each other.

On a hot and listless day in Ramallah I visited Yasser Arafat's tomb, in the old headquarters of the PLO. A concrete obelisk marked its spot, the tallest thing for miles around, challenging the sky like a minaret. Except that where minarets are beacons for the faithful, the tomb was a monument for the hopeless. A stark white stone courtyard, wide enough for hundreds but that morning accepting only me, led to the small room containing his coffin.

Two guards in dress uniform stood silently over the marble entombment, watching my approach with interest. A single wreath adorned the coffin which was inlaid with flowing Arabic calligraphy. A rectangular pool of crystal-clear placid water edged two sides of the room, its surface smooth and inscrutable as the sentries. I nodded my head slowly, carefully, whispering a greeting which was not returned. The wind had stopped blowing and also the birds and insects, I'm sure, were momentarily holding their breath.

In such situations it's important to act slowly and with great severity, and so I stood for a moment and pretended to read the Arabic in front of me, conscious of the soldiers' steely gaze which I didn't dare meet. Then an about-face and I was out. In the corner of the courtyard I saw toilets, but when I walked over a guard stopped me.

"No toilets?"
"Yeah."