The Palestinian Conversation
For 16 months, the downward spiral has been otherwise unrelenting. Since the failure of the Camp David negotiations in the summer of 2000, there has been one provocation after another. Ariel Sharon made his heavily guarded visit to the plaza outside Al Aksa Mosque to demonstrate Jewish sovereignty over the Temple Mount, the Palestinian street exploded, the Israelis quelled volatile demonstrations with deadly fire, the Palestinians moved from stones to guns to bombs, the Israelis began assassinating suspected militants and the momentum of attacks and counterattacks took on a bloody life of its own.

It has been a devastating period for everyone, and the Palestinians know what it has cost them. The Aksa intifada, as it has come to be known, has resulted in about 800 Palestinian deaths, thousands of injuries, a crippled economy and an infrastructure devastated by bombardment and bulldozer. Suicide bombings have weakened international support for the Palestinian nationalist cause. Arafat, once a frequent flier to the Clinton White House, is stuck in Ramallah with Israeli tanks hemming his compound. Most Palestinians are under a kind of lock-down inside their towns, ''220 discontinuous little ghettos,'' Edward W. Said, the Palestinian-American intellectual, has called them. The checkpoints have become more backlogged and humiliating than ever: as if time were going backward, many Palestinians have returned to riding donkeys on dirt roads to circumvent them. And Arafat's crackdown on militant Islamic groups -- Hamas and Islamic Jihad -- has provoked turbulent divisions inside Palestinian society itself.

Yet for a moment there was this lull. Granted, it felt more like a standoff as the Palestinians waited to see whether Israel would either reciprocate by loosening restrictions on their movement or nudge Palestinian fighters back into action with another assassination. But even the standoff gave people the time and the mental space to think with cooler heads about their situation, and I felt as if I was tapping into a vibrant communal conversation that revealed both deep disagreements within Palestinian society and a startling, defiant optimism about the future -- if not the near future.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/03/magazine/03PALESTINE.html?pagewanted=all