The Interregnum

he day they buried Yasir Arafat in the Ramallah fort that had become his prison, the most remarkable sight was not the thousands who brushed aside Palestinian security to swarm over the walls and bid him an impassioned farewell, some with semiautomatic gunfire. It was not Uri Avnery, the dogged Israeli dove, comparing Arafat to Moses for leading his people from bondage to die within sight of his promised land; it was not the delegation of Moonies from Rockville, Md., who sat primly amid the mob. One grows accustomed to such things. This was Palestine after all, and Palestine is really a state of mind, or a state of being, but not, in any event, a state. Its rules are its own rules, those of a place that is not wholly real, that is dreamlike and a little scary -- an Oz at once remembered and mythic with a small number, yet more than its share, of flying monkeys.

What was most remarkable that day was that the crowd simply vanished. The Palestinians buried their Old Man, their epic hero, and they went home to eat, to break the fast of the Muslim holiday of Ramadan. They went home to get on with their lives. It was not as if they drifted away. It was as if they teleported. They left behind an honor guard by the grave, a few spent mourners sprawled on a dirtied red carpet and a startlingly tranquil dusk.

This struck me as a very hopeful sign. On subsequent visits to Palestine, I was impressed by the absence of passion about Arafat's death, by its bearable lightness, even though its cause was never disclosed and Palestinians took it for granted that Israel had poisoned him. The posters of Arafat tore, faded, then vanished. Visitors came to the grave, but by the handful. Their mood tended to be reflective. A few days after Arafat's burial, I visited the guards outside his Gaza City headquarters, which like the Ramallah compound had been bombed repeatedly by Israel. They said they would protect this ruin by the Mediterranean forever, as a memorial. Then one blustery day in February, the governing Palestinian Authority obliterated it, leaving a trim sand lot and a clean sweep to the sea.

People were sad about Arafat's death. Even those who were thwarted by him felt bereft -- fatherless, as one Palestine Liberation Organization official who disdained Arafat put it, with surprise at his own reaction. But it was not as if they felt suddenly leaderless. They were used to Arafat's absence; they missed him while he was still alive.

''I don't really speak about real, effective accomplishments,'' Haider Abdel Shafi said in Gaza City after a long pause, when I asked him to name Arafat's achievements. At 86, he is a grand old man of the movement and a longtime critic of Arafat. ''Arafat left us in a real way to drift along,'' he added.

Now for Palestinians, he said, ''the challenge is on the level of to be or not to be.''

asir Arafat was wrong about a lot of things. He was wrong to believe, as two of his closest associates told me he did, that Israel would never elect Ariel Sharon to be prime minister, that after rejecting Ehud Barak's offer at Camp David in the summer of 2000 the Palestinian leader could exploit the second intifada, which began that fall, to continue negotiating concessions from a re-elected Barak. He was wrong to believe after the Sept. 11 attacks that the Bush administration would tilt to him and away from Israel, to court the Muslim world. He was wrong to believe the following spring that Sharon would never risk international criticism by launching a giant offensive into the West Bank, and he ignored the pleas of aides who begged him to pre-empt Sharon by cracking down on militants. The invasion came, and the governing Palestinian Authority, created by the Oslo accords, lost control of the major Palestinian cities. Israel began forbidding even the Palestinian Police to function, saying they included terrorists.

One night in Arafat's office in Ramallah, after Israel had trapped him there, I asked if he still expected to see a Palestinian state in his lifetime. ''No doubt,'' he replied without hesitation. ''No doubt.'' Well, he was wrong about a lot of things.

But he was right about at least one big thing. Arafat's core insight, derived in the 1960's from Frantz Fanon, was to reject the ascendant pan-Arabism of Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser and to posit instead a Palestinian exceptionalism. He believed that a distinct Palestinian nationalism would take shape through armed struggle with Israel. After Israel humiliated Nasser and the Arab armies in the Six-Day War in 1967, Arafat and his vision emerged as the heroic alternative. The Palestinians are divided by class, religion and geography, yet, drawn together by opposition to Israel, they have attained a national coherence that other recovering wards of British colonialism -- like the Iraqis -- lack.

As the struggle for nationhood took shape, a yearning grew not just for any state but for a democratic one. In their diaspora, Palestinians worked or studied under dictatorships and democracies and appreciated the difference. Those living under Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza after the Six-Day War came to resent authority. Liberated in a way by their very statelessness -- lacking a glass house -- Palestinians developed what the political scientist Khalil Shikaki has called a ''culture of criticism,'' freely ridiculing Arab autocrats and declaring they could do better. Hardest for some Palestinians to admit is the influence of Israel, of the parliamentary debates and acerbic press they followed on television and in the newspapers. To be Palestinian is to be intimately, painfully acquainted with paradox. It is to know that, in part, you owe your national character and your democratic dream to the very people who occupied your land and compromised your rights.

This national coherence and democratic aspiration combine to explain why, on Arafat's death, the Palestinian public pivoted from Arafat to Mahmoud Abbas and why it did it so smoothly. More than four years into their latest violent conflict with Israel, Palestinians drew together behind Arafat's longtime No. 2, Abbas, who turns 70 this month, as one of the few national figures remaining -- one with the credentials to span the divided populations of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and the diaspora. In an election Jan. 9, he won more than 60 percent of the vote. That he did so well was evidence to Palestinians of their national unity; that he did not do better was evidence to them of the strength of their democratic institutions. Hassan Khreisheh, an opposition member of the Palestinian Parliament, tied these themes together when he proudly declared at the swearing-in of Abbas, ''Our people have put an end to the 99.999 percent that Arab leaders have become accustomed to.'' Palestinians were now exceptional, he was saying, because they had democracy.

But these strands in the Palestinian identity do not usually pull in the same direction. With national liberation as his goal, Arafat was able to slough off such niceties of nation-building as creating an independent court system, just as low-level militants are still able to avoid licensing their cars. Who could dun men who are risking their lives for the cause? For many Palestinians, building a state before they have one puts the cart before the horse. Khaled Al Batish, a leader of Islamic Jihad, told me that he supported democratic reforms but ''these democratic steps won't last if the occupation remains. The occupation will confuse matters, and the focus will be on resistance.'' Even the most reform-minded Palestinians bridle at the fact that President George W. Bush has made democratic change a condition for negotiations. ''I always preach the need to look in the mirror -- responsibility, accountability, all of that,'' Salam Fayyad, the Palestinian minister of finance and the official closest to the Bush administration, said with some heat. ''But you should not mistake the depth of my feeling about how unfair it is to put conditions on our freedom.'' We were speaking in his Ramallah office, which looks out on an Israeli settlement.

For Abbas, nation-building is the path to national liberation. It is the armed struggle that must give way. Over the counsel of some advisers, who feared he was touching the third rail of Palestinian politics, Abbas called for a halt to violence during his campaign this winter. ''I told them everything openly -- that I'm against the armed intifada, I'm against the rockets,'' Abbas told me one night in February in Gaza City. ''It was in the interest of our people. So I told them the truth, and for that I believe -- I don't know -- they elected me.''

Much has been made of the fact that Abbas wears a suit rather than a uniform and headdress, as Arafat did. His style is not that of a charismatic leader but of a negotiator, and both Palestinians and Israelis suspect him of being soft. He has a negotiator's surface mildness, not a politician's riveting passion -- possibly a severe handicap for the leader of a liberation movement. He prefers not to dwell on old grievances (''It's better not to talk about history or religion,'' he told me once with a wry smile at the improbability of this sentiment's being realized), and in the interview he tried to avoid assigning blame for this intifada. Ultimately, he said Israel started it, but that ''both sides'' were responsible for its duration. He refused to call the uprising a mistake, saying that what's done is done. It was, he said, time to talk. Yet his mildness should not be mistaken for uncertainty, as Arafat's bluster was sometimes mistaken for decision. While Abbas is conciliatory in trying to achieve his principles, he is certain about the principles themselves. He did not much want his new job and told me he planned to keep it for only a year or two, maybe three. He comes across as entirely confident and in command, even a little supercilious. When he wants to smoke -- and he often does -- his practice is to tilt a cigarette tip into the air and wait for an aide to snap to with a lighter.

Since he was in his 20's, Abbas worked in Arafat's shadow, quarreling with him, sometimes breaking with him, but ultimately serving beside him. ''He was a real, real leader,'' Abbas said. He acknowledged that he often disagreed with Arafat -- even that they did not speak for what proved the last year of Arafat's life, until just before he died in a Paris hospital. ''At the last I went to him,'' Abbas told me. ''I talked to him, and I followed him to Paris. He is my brother, but the brothers also have their own differences.'' Abbas, and the world, can now test if those differences matter. Arafat could never completely break with armed conflict; his fortress became not only his prison but also the Palestinians'. Abbas wants Palestine to make sense abroad. By ending what he calls the armed intifada and creating an orderly Palestinian state-in-waiting, he seeks to rally the world to the Palestinian cause and, above all, to recruit an American president who equates democracy with freedom and freedom with peace. To do this, Abbas will have to persuade Palestinians to be patient and to embrace, for now, yet another paradox in their national life -- democracy without freedom. It is the only way that he sees to eventually exchange the dream of Palestine, and the nightmare of Palestine, for a state of Palestine.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict -- a narcissistic face-off that pays little notice to the world around it -- counsels cynicism as the safest guide. Yet the seemingly endless, and in fact episodic, violence disguises the fact that over the last 20 years, the two peoples have moved toward recognizing each other's rights to statehood. Still, Abbas's strategy is one for the long term. Arafat's departure may have removed an impediment to calm and to state-building. But it seems less likely to have removed an obstacle to their higher forms, peace and sovereignty. It may simply lay bare how far apart even leaders who wear suits remain.

Abbas's approach is different, but his stated goals are like Arafat's. He said that he considered Arafat ''a model for the pragmatic and moderate people,'' and he should be taken at his word. Abbas also rejected the deal that Barak offered at Camp David. Like other Palestinians who support a two-state solution, Abbas argues that the Palestinian leadership made its territorial concession many years ago, agreeing to settle for the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. That amounts to a mere 22 percent of historic Palestine, Abbas likes to point out. A refugee himself, Abbas is no less insistent than Arafat that Israel recognize a ''right of return'' for refugees of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war and their descendants, though he has explored ways to limit any resulting immigration into Israel. But the intifada has made the Israelis far less likely to offer as much as Barak did. While Abbas struggles to build a state, Sharon is forging ahead with plans that may well define it. As he tries to pull Israelis out of Gaza and four settlements on the northern West Bank, Sharon is building Israel's barrier elsewhere on the West Bank and tightening its hold on the big settlements there. He is chipping away at Abbas's 22 percent.

Abbas knows all this. When I asked him if he expected to see a Palestinian state in his lifetime, he replied: ''I hope. I hope we will see it.'' Most Palestinians I spoke to think that he will not. An optimist in Palestine these days is someone who believes that calm will prevail for a few years, before the next intifada begins.

To the outside world, Abbas may look like the one-eyed man in the land of the blind. He is trying to persuade Palestinians of things that seem obvious: that firing crude rockets into Israeli fields harms Palestinians more than Israelis, by summoning overwhelming Israeli retaliation; that dispatching the young to blow themselves up among Israelis is also a form of national suicide. Yet seen from inside Palestine, the violence has developed a logic of its own. Militants in Gaza and on the West Bank believe that it is they who see the world as it is.

Rashid Abu Shbak proudly flashed his right thumb when I walked into his office in Gaza City two days after Abbas was elected. His nail was stained purplish black. Like all Palestinians who had voted, he looked as if he had banged his thumb with a hammer. In theory, Abu Shbak bears great responsibility for making this latest attempt at calm succeed. He is the chief of the Palestinian Preventive Security force in the Gaza Strip, the notional front-line force in any strategy to stop militants. Gaza is emerging as the proving ground for a Palestinian state because of Sharon's plan to remove the 8,500 Israeli settlers who live there and the many thousands more troops who guard them.

''After four and a half years of intifada, four and a half years of chaos -- of absence of law and order -- the mission is very tough for Abu Mazen,'' Abu Shbak said, referring to Abbas by his nickname. (It means ''Father of Mazen''; Mazen, Abbas's eldest son, died three years ago.) He added, ''I hope in the coming days there will be changes.''

Abu Shbak was talking like a man inheriting a big mess. Yet like many of Abbas's men, he had been in the same post for years. I had a memory of him pounding his desk almost two years ago and declaring of rockets that militants launched into Israel, ''We are convinced that the firing of Qassams must be stopped!'' At the time, maybe I should have paid more attention to the passive voice. But I had spent enough time in Palestine to know why a security chief could call for action and supply none. Inevitably, a devastating Israeli raid to stop the rockets would provide a reason, or pretext, not to act. Sure enough, the Israelis came, and just as surely, the rocket fire intensified.

Skip forward again to January. Our conversation was getting weirder. ''The security apparatus should abide by the law,'' Abu Shbak declared indignantly. I could only agree; for more than two years, the security services had been like private militias. But Abu Shbak was not referring to the rule of law in general. He dropped a half-inch-thick stack of paper on his desk: a bill spelling out just what the Preventive Security was supposed to do. ''In the last 10 years,'' Abu Shbak explained, ''there was no law.''

The door opened, and two men entered. One was Samir Mashharawi, a rising leader of 39, a politician-slash-security-man with wide-spaced eyes, a dimpled chin and an aura of cool, assured intelligence. Like many Palestinian men of his age, he cut his teeth in the first intifada, learned Hebrew in Israeli prisons and came to chafe under the leadership of Arafat and members of his generation who returned from decades in exile with little understanding of Israelis or even life under occupation.

It was Mashharawi who, one evening in Gaza City, gave me the most elegant description I have heard of Palestinian-Israeli bargaining. Palestinian officials were then negotiating, unsuccessfully, not for their own state but for the Israelis to pull their troops back to their positions before the uprising. Mashharawi recalled how, during one of his terms in prison, he and other inmates demanded chairs and tables. So the Israelis took their mattresses. The Palestinians demanded the mattresses back. ''We forgot that we asked for the chairs and tables,'' he continued. ''After a month, they returned the mattresses. And we felt very happy because we achieved something.'' I said this reminded me of the Jewish story in which a rabbi advises a man to bring a goat into his home; when, at the rabbi's instructions, he eventually takes the goat out, the man's wife no longer finds her house too small. Mashharawi nodded. ''Israeli diplomacy,'' he said, ''is based on this idea.''

I did not know the man accompanying Mashharawi. He wore work boots, black jeans and a baggy khaki coat. He had the weary, aged look of the hard-core militant. The hard boys of the militant groups tend to swagger and pose, as if a photographer at any moment might snap their portraits for martyr posters. Their leaders, at least those who have lived into their 30's, have seen too much for that.

''Ah,'' Abu Shbak exclaimed, brightening at the sight of the second man. ''By chance you meet the leader of the Abu Al Reesh Brigades!''

The Abu Al Reesh Brigades is a militant offshoot of Fatah, Arafat's mainstream, secular-leaning faction, which dominates the Palestinian Authority and to which Abbas, Abu Shbak and Mashharawi belong. Abu Al Reesh is part of the loose confederation of Fatah freedom fighters, terrorists and gangsters that also includes the Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades. This man, Abu Amani, 35, was among the Gaza militants most wanted by Israel. Militants say that the Israelis call him the Fox, though militants tend to say things like that, and it is not always clear how they would know.

It struck me as unusual, even by Gazan standards, that the Fox would pay a call on the head of Preventive Security.

''He was my teacher in Israeli jail,'' Abu Amani explained, nodding at the benignly beaming Abu Shbak. ''It's my duty to visit him.'' For two years, Abu Amani said, he had not been able to visit Abu Shbak in Gaza City because he could not cross the intervening Israeli checkpoints. But the Israelis had loosened restrictions to permit voting. ''I took advantage of the elections,'' he said.

The road map, the negotiating template drawn up by the United States, the United Nations, the European Union and Russia, calls on the Palestinian Authority to immediately begin ''sustained, targeted and effective operations aimed at confronting all those engaged in terror and dismantlement of terrorist capabilities and infrastructure.'' But Abbas is trying to co-opt militants, not confront them. As Mashharawi told me later, he was meeting with militants to broker Abbas's cease-fire. The relationship between Abu Shbak and Abu Amani helps to explain why the new Palestinian leader is using this approach. They are not just old friends. They are comrades in the same struggle -- a struggle not only for statehood but also for political control of Palestine right now.

In its early days, the uprising against Israel functioned partly as Palestinian diplomacy by other means. But it became Palestinian politics by other means. From the West Bank and Gaza, Palestinian factions began competing to conduct sensational attacks as much to score political points against one another as to kill and terrify Israelis. Within Fatah -- a word that translates as ''conquest'' -- militants like Abu Amani are seen as having preserved the faction from a challenge by the Islamic Resistance Movement, known by its acronym, Hamas, which is also an Arabic word that means ''zeal.'' The day after meeting Abu Amani, I sat in a Gaza City coffee shop with three Fatah militants. The fighters said that they would normally never go to such a public place, but that since I was an American, they felt safe from Israeli attack. One of them, Abu Haroun, 27, was a member of Abu Al Reesh. He said that he supported Abbas, but that when it came to resistance, ''We have our own vision.''

''What sustained Fatah were the military activities that Al Aksa and Abu Al Reesh did in the West Bank and Gaza Strip,'' he said. ''This revived Fatah. Abu Mazen must understand it.''

When I asked if he would accept a job with the security services, which is how Abbas hopes to co-opt the militants, he looked blank. Most of his comrades already worked for the security services, he said. ''We're Fatah,'' he said. ''It's their duty to get us jobs.'' He had seen many friends die, he said, and he was not going to settle for getting his mattress back. He had a list of demands, including an Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 lines, and little expectation the Israelis would meet it. ''Nobody should blame Abu Mazen later if they find out he is taking the same path as Arafat,'' he said. Abbas has shown no sign of promoting any alternative resistance, like civil disobedience. When negotiations stall, these men see only one road.

The father of two girls, Abu Haroun said he did not relish fighting, but that he had little choice. ''Resistance is not a hobby,'' he added. That is a mantra I have often heard from such men. It means, I think, that this is not a game, that violence is not entered into lightly or abandoned easily.

The fighters were willing to quiet things down, but they would keep their weapons handy. ''And the day we feel they aren't doing what they promised,'' Abu Haroun said, ''we will use them again.'' It was not clear if by ''they'' he meant the Israelis, the Palestinian leadership or both. Moments later, he left, saying that next time we should meet elsewhere; the cappuccino machine here was just too loud. Unlike the men of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, these Fatah militants say they want a two-state solution. That is why, for Fatah, there is a strategic component to this violent interfactional politicking. It is perhaps the most twisted rule of Palestine, but it makes sense to those who advocate it. Marwan Barghouti, the fiery West Bank leader of the uprising and probably the most skillful Fatah politician after Arafat, explained it to me one day in the spring of 2002. ''It's very helpful for the peace,'' he said that day of the violence.

I had asked Barghouti, then in hiding, about recent high-profile Fatah killings, including the first suicide bombing by a woman. He insisted that he supported attacking only settlers and soldiers in occupied territory, resistance that Palestinians believe to be legal under international law. But he said proudly that all the attacks had rebuilt Fatah's popularity. As a result, Barghouti said, Fatah was again strong enough to make an agreement stick. Because it had killed so many Israelis, it could make peace. ''Do you think a very weak organization can protect a historical agreement?'' he asked. Yet in salvaging a Palestinian constituency, Fatah, and Arafat, sacrificed their Israeli one. With Al Aksa suicide bombers exploding in Tel Aviv, Israelis no longer saw any difference between the factions. Fatah seemed as intent as Hamas on destroying Israel. Israel arrested Barghouti shortly after I saw him, and he was convicted in an Israeli court last year of murder charges, which he denied.

There is a final reason that violence is likely to remain at hand for the Palestinian national movement: Palestinians have good cause to believe that it is working. Although the outside world sees the intifada as purely a disaster for the Palestinians, within Palestine, the violence seems to have succeeded, at a high cost. It has resulted in something, at least in prospect, that all the negotiating by men like Abbas never achieved: the actual evacuation of Israeli settlements.

In mid-February, I returned to Gaza to see if the Abbas administration and the prospect of Israeli withdrawal were changing life on the ground. There were signs of progress. Abbas had ordered the demolition of buildings erected without permits along the beach during the intifada. Most striking, along the trashed roads of the Jabaliya refugee camp, uniformed police officers were stopping cars and demanding to see proof of insurance. For Gazans, this was like having the lights turned on after years in the dark.

Small as they were, these steps signaled change, and not just in Gaza. They also demonstrated a surprising political savvy by Abbas. In 2003, he served for four months in the newly created post of prime minister. With no constituency of his own, he was outmaneuvered by Arafat and by Sharon, who did not think the prime minister had a chance. He quit, confirming his reputation as a sulker. He was now starting to dispel that reputation. With Arafat gone, Abbas, at heart a closed-door diplomat, was beginning to act like a politician. During his campaign he kissed babies and gave speeches in isolated places long ignored by the Palestinian leadership, like Khan Yunis in southern Gaza and Jenin in the northern West Bank. He donned an Al Aksa Martyrs cap at one stop, and he opposed violence less as morally wrong than as undercutting Palestinian interests. He was careful to praise ''martyrs,'' a term that refers to all Palestinians who died in the conflict. Criticizing them is the true third rail of Palestinian politics. Sometimes Abbas sounded like his old comrade. The distinction was that no Palestinian doubted where he stood on ending the intifada. ''All my political life was under the table, was secret,'' Abbas told me. ''Now I was obliged to go outside to talk to the people. It is the first time in my life.'' He began to laugh. ''I don't know how it happened!''

He had a very long way to go. ''We are starting below zero, not from zero,'' Abbas said. ''From every corner, we have to start from the very beginning. It is not impossible. It is difficult, very difficult. But not impossible.'' The Israelis had halted their armored raids, and they had stopped hunting accused militants from the skies. But in Gaza, as on the West Bank, people were feeling few other changes. An Israeli withdrawal seemed a long way off.

On the day Abbas met with Sharon at the Egyptian resort of Sharm el Sheikh to announce their cease-fire, I visited Khan Yunis. It abuts Israel's Gush Qatif settlement bloc, which is surrounded by a wall more than 40 feet high of concrete and steel, braced by guard towers. Israel has responded to the mortar and rocket fire into Gush Qatif with repeated raids into Khan Yunis, churning the landscape into a heaving sea of broken concrete and twisted rebar. Down a dirt track about a hundred yards from the wall stands a three-story cinder-block tenement. Beside it lie the remains of neighboring houses. Its own walls are so pocked with bullet holes, scores of them, that the building resembles a cheese grater. On the second floor lived Ghada Brais, 27, with her four children. The only toy I saw was a toddler's walker. You could fit apples through some of the bullet holes in the walls. She kept her apartment spotless.

Brais's husband, Yousef, 28, left for Canada two years ago to find work. He called and sent money, but she had no identity papers and so could not join him. She was trapped. She did not speak in slogans. Instead she talked about constant shooting at night and about trying to act as if she were not scared. She spoke about her children's bed-wetting. She was particularly concerned about her eldest, a 9-year-old boy named Barah. ''I think the intifada interfered with his studies,'' she said. ''He always wants to be in the streets. I go crazy when his grades get really bad.'' She tried to keep him indoors, but he insisted on going out to play and had taken to running along the settlement's wall; one bullet had grazed his leg, she said. ''I can't control him,'' she said. She said she hoped the Israelis would follow through and remove the settlements. But she did not expect her children to recover quickly. ''I think it will always remain in their minds,'' she said.

It lacks the headline-grabbing drama of attacks or reprisals, but the steady expansion of Israeli settlements has been an engine of this uprising. To Palestinians, it proved that Israel would never permit a Palestinian state. Abbas is betting that if he can stop the fighting, he can shift international attention from suicide bombers to settlements, which are growing on the West Bank.

In Gaza City, I met another woman from Khan Yunis, Rana El Farra. Wearing winter coats, we spoke in the family's apartment, its windows open despite the day's chill. Open windows are less likely to shatter from sudden shifts in air pressure; the apartment is across the street from a Palestinian security headquarters, a frequent Israeli bombing target.

On one table stood two dozen containers of cobalt-blue mouthwash. El Farra asks Gazans to gargle it, then return it to her to provide DNA samples, which she isolates in a gel. A molecular biologist, El Farra is archiving Gaza's DNA in hopes of curing diseases like the diabetes that contributed to her beloved father's death, as well as of comparing the oral histories of Gaza's clans with their DNA footprints. ''I prepare the samples here, and then DHL them to the States,'' she said in her idiomatic English. She sends them to Utah for sequencing at Brigham Young University, where she got her master's. She loved Utah, feeling at home with its conservative values, its big families. ''Provo is just like Khan Yunis,'' she explained. ''Only it's cleaner.'' A lively woman with a musical laugh, the married mother of a 3-year-old girl, El Farra teaches cell biology at Al Azhar University. She adores ''Friends'' -- she identifies with Monica -- and she recently finished Hillary Rodham Clinton's memoir.

El Farra and people like her are the real political face of Hamas. About three years ago, a year into this uprising, El Farra became more religious. She began covering her hair. ''Islam is the best pole you can hold onto when things get really tough,'' she said. She saw no contradiction between her science and her religion, finding God's handiwork in the intricate, complete systems of cells.

But she did find contradictions in her politics, and trying to follow her thinking was like racing through a series of switchbacks up a steep mountain trail. She is hopeful that Abbas will improve life for Palestinians, but she did not vote for him because she is fed up with his faction. ''Fatah didn't do anything in the last 10 years,'' she said. She said she will probably support Hamas if it fields candidates in legislative elections scheduled for July because its leaders were not corrupt and they were serious about improving government services. But she supported Hamas only for internal reform, not conducting relations with Israel. At that level, she wanted a Fatah politician to represent her, because Fatah supports negotiations. But she did not expect negotiations to succeed.

''We just need a break,'' she said. ''I know the war between the Israelis and the Palestinians will be there until God stops the whole system. But we just need a break of five years.'' She explained, ''We got used to this system, of taking this break for some time, probably 10 years, and then, when things reach a point where no one can deal with them anymore, then war will be for some time.''

El Farra agreed with Abbas that it was wrong to carry out armed attacks -- at least for now. ''I don't think it's the right time for suicide bombings,'' she said. But she argued that violence was ultimately necessary because she thought Israel responded to nothing else. ''When they say no to peace, we have to be able to answer back,'' she said. She thought the two sides would never settle their differences -- because Israeli Jews would never yield the man-made plateau in Jerusalem that they call the Temple Mount and because Muslims would never relinquish their claim to the same plot, which they call the Noble Sanctuary. No matter how tired the Palestinians became, she said, they would not abandon this goal, because future ''generations will probably curse us.''

''It's very contradictory, the feelings that we have and our reality,'' she said at last. ''The reality is pushing very hard.'' She slapped one hand into the other. ''Our feelings and beliefs are pushing hard, too. You know what I mean? It's very contradictory. And I see this with all the people, and I see it with myself too. See, you want to have peace; you want to live; you want to have children; you want to be able to live a normal life. But at the same time you cannot just give up on everything in return for this.'' She paused, then added more quietly, ''For me, I think we all need psychotherapy here, at least in Gaza.''

From this welter of political impulses, Abbas was trying to wrest a political deal with Hamas. He was trying to persuade Hamas to sell high -- to join the Palestinian political system at a moment when Hamas was very popular. His strategy was to contain it, just as the Israeli system contains parties that reject any Palestinian state. Islamic Jihad would follow Hamas, Abbas's advisers said. Hunted by Israel, under pressure from the United States and Europe and attuned to the mood in the street, Hamas politicians in Gaza and the West Bank wanted to calm things down, according to numerous Palestinian officials.

While I was in Gaza, I encountered a Hamas leader named Nizar Rayan. Rayan earned a master's degree in Jordan with a thesis on martyrdom. (His doctoral thesis was on the future of Islam.) A mountain of a man with four wives -- ''I love women,'' he once told me -- he is one of Hamas's most charismatic leaders, pulling young men into the movement. He has been in hiding from Israel for 18 months. He was very proud of his second son, killed at 16 in a suicidal shooting attack on a settlement. ''To get back our land,'' he said another time, ''it seems to me we have to lose half of this generation.'' He called Israeli Jews ''Europe's trash.'' But gone were the days when he would bring his laptop to an interview so he could call up scriptural justifications for suicide bombings. In February, he was happy to have his picture taken, but he did not want to say much beyond ''Hello, nice to see you.'' Hamas was having only its more polished spokesmen and sophists speak with the media. It was treading very carefully.

In municipal elections in Gaza in January, candidates from Hamas trounced Fatah candidates in several areas. In its disciplined way, Hamas ran engineers and academics -- people like El Farra; Fatah had put forth people with no such credentials. Abbas said Hamas had committed to field legislative candidates; Hamas had previously refused to run for the Palestinian Parliament because it was a creature of the Oslo agreement. Abbas told me that he would be happy to appoint ministers from Hamas. ''If they want to participate, why not?'' he asked. ''It's good for us.'' Hamas was almost certain not to contest the national leadership. ''If they rule, what are their choices?'' asked Ziad Abu Amr, a legislator and political scientist who is Abbas's chief liaison to Hamas. ''Do they go and negotiate with Israel or do they declare all-out war? Can they afford this? I don't think so.'' Abu Amr thought Hamas could win as many as half the parliamentary seats. Even if Hamas wins a small minority of seats, it will supply an effective opposition, promoting debate and legitimizing what is otherwise government by Fatah. It might also, at last, wake Fatah up to its political decay.

It was obvious in Gaza that Fatah's weakness was still Abbas's biggest internal problem. Regardless of the ferocity of its militants, Fatah was facing a reckoning for its failure at nation-building. Abbas needed the truce with Israel to build his national institutions, but he needed the institutions to keep the truce. Palestinians were referring to the halt in violence not as a cease-fire but merely as a ''tahdiyah'' -- a ''lull.'' Palestinian officials were concerned that leaders of Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Damascus would not back the political deal. And they were particularly worried about the Lebanese guerrilla group Hezbollah, which Israeli intelligence officers also said was financing and directing some Al Aksa cells in the West Bank. Allies of Abbas were pressing Palestinian security chiefs to cut off this money. In late February, an Islamic Jihad suicide bomber killed five Israelis and wounded dozens at a Tel Aviv nightclub. Israel blamed Syria and warned that if Abbas did not act against Islamic Jihad and other groups, it would.

Over time, Abbas was betting that a massive jobs program, together with an Israeli withdrawal, would strengthen his hand. But for now, his chief political ally, a temporary one, was the exhaustion of his people. He could not even be certain his orders were being carried out. Abu Amr told me that he had asked Abbas why he had stopped demolishing illegal buildings. He said Abbas was surprised the work had halted and had immediately reissued his order. ''He still has to institutionalize his authority,'' Abu Amr said. Abbas was depending on some Fatah officials with reputations for corruption. The campaign over, he had also stopped making public speeches. Many reformist politicians feared he was not moving fast enough. He was locked in a debilitating standoff with the prime minister, Ahmed Qurei, another longtime negotiator who, several Palestinian politicians said, felt he should have been Arafat's successor. Qurei resisted appointing new faces to the government until he faced a parliamentary revolt. No wonder Gazans were mocking Fatah by calling it by a feminine form, ''Fat'hiah'' -- a name that brought to mind a doddering peasant woman.

One day while I was in Gaza, gunmen from two large families burst into a Gaza City prison and shot dead two accused murderers. They dragged a third Palestinian prisoner to a refugee camp, where they beat him and burned him with cigarettes before killing him. That day, Hamas militants fired off some rockets, prompting two other groups -- not wanting to cede the political stage -- to do the same; each group followed its salvo with a press statement. Then something surprising happened: Abbas fired several security officials for not stopping the mayhem. They were men he could afford to fire -- either responsible enough not to fight back or lacking any constituency -- but the move nevertheless spoke of a new accountability. My own most hopeful experience in Gaza also came that day. I was visiting Mashharawi in his heavily guarded office. He was still working the phones and meeting with militants, reminding them of their ''national duty,'' keeping the lid on. On one wall hung a framed poster that was a gift from the Abu Al Reesh Brigades. It showed a man lying amid rubble and bore the words, ''You purify my soul, you martyr.'' A visitor appeared -- none other than Abu Amani, the Fox. He seemed transformed. He had exchanged his heavy coat and boots for a black jacket and street shoes, and he looked about 10 years younger. He was smiling. It turned out he had remained in Gaza City, rather than return to Khan Yunis, to enjoy his new freedom. ''When you saw me last time, you could tell I was exhausted,'' he said, grinning. ''Now, we can move more freely, sleep more.'' Maybe resistance was not a hobby. But at least some militants, given a real choice and national leadership, were eager to give calm a chance.

ith the Israelis easing travel restrictions, word in mid-February was that one could drive from the growing fortification of the Israeli barrier around Jerusalem to Jenin without hitting a checkpoint. After leaving Gaza, I gave it a try. It was not a frictionless passage -- Israeli soldiers were stopping Palestinian cars by the side of the road, and I passed through one checkpoint -- yet the road was more open, the Israeli military presence less obvious, than I had seen it. Besides, on the West Bank, spring was coming. The almond trees were blooming white, and the first poppies with their startling red were spangling green fields that would soon bake to dust. Spring is always an ambiguous moment in Palestine: a time of hope, yet also the time of year that makes the land seem most worth the contest.

I had come to Jenin to visit an acquaintance, Mahmoud Hawashin. Hawashin is not a militant leader or a politician, though he functions as a liaison between them. He is not a religious thinker or a deeply educated man, though in an environment that does not always favor it, he thinks for himself. He is broad-shouldered, with a close-shaved scalp and something of the appearance of Laurence Fishburne, together with that actor's air of steeliness and potential menace. He is 34, though he seems years older. He leads a considered life. He trimmed his ambitions to fit his unyielding environment rather than conserve them as dreams. It is a kind of courage found, if not celebrated, in Palestine like everywhere else. He grew up in Jenin's refugee camp, a forge of extremism, and still lives there. At 15, during the first intifada, he was jailed by Israel for a year and a half. He dreamed of becoming an electrical engineer, but could not afford the tuition. He now works as an electrician on the side while doing one of the toughest jobs in Jenin: he is in charge of collecting utility fees. Jenin residents took to not paying their bills during the uprising and even to attacking the collectors. Hawashin once told me, with bitterness, that he knew he had gotten his managerial city job -- he is one of few residents of the camp to have one -- because officials believed his credentials as a fighter and ties in the camp would ease collections. Like other residents of the camps, he felt discriminated against. ''If I go to the U.S., in five years I can get residency,'' he said once. ''We are 50 years living here in Jenin, and we have never been considered residents.''

''My dream as a refugee is not to return back to my original village,'' he said. ''It's to buy a piece of land here and register it under my own name.'' He wanted a house with a garden -- ''a normal house, where I can keep my memories to myself.'' He had bought the land, but he could not yet afford to build.

Most militants are from the camps, and when Israel forbade the Palestinian Police to operate, the militants began taking control of cities like Jenin, in some cases avenging themselves on elites. Jenin is now effectively run by an Al Aksa leader, Zacharia Zubeida. Part of the challenge for Abbas is to make sure that West Bank enclaves like Jenin do not feel forgotten as he focuses on Gaza. For Abbas to consolidate control, he must somehow sideline the local warlords. Yet in a sign of the militants' power, the day I saw Hawashin he was arranging a meeting for the mayor with Zubeida; he said the mayor was hoping Zubeida would intervene on his behalf with Abbas to secure money for the city. Hawashin respected Zubeida, but it alarmed him that his own children looked up to the militant. ''I want them to have a childhood,'' he said. ''I don't want them to spend a day in jail.''

Once, while Arafat was alive, Hawashin astonished me by saying that his people needed a ''Palestinian Sharon.'' He did not admire Sharon's policies, but he did respect his dedication to his nation's interests. ''Abu Mazen could be that person,'' Hawashin said when I caught up with him in his office last month. While city workers processed bills around him, he sat at the head of a long table. The walls, like most walls in Jenin, were plastered with images of the dead, but they also bore photographs of Hawashin's children and more prosaic pictures of workers repairing electric lines.

Hawashin admired Abbas's courage in criticizing the armed intifada. Hawashin had long argued that Palestinians let themselves be led by emotion rather than reason, that the violence of the uprising -- of all the fights with Israel -- had only left the Palestinians further behind. Now he was hearing a Palestinian leader say similar things. ''There's a shared quality you can find in both Abu Mazen and Sharon, which is clarity and frankness,'' he said. ''Sharon is clear with his own people and in telling the world what he wants.'' The parallel may run deeper. Abbas is trying a Palestinian version of Sharon's own unilateralism. In pushing for a pullout from Gaza, Sharon is trying to break the zero-sum logic of the conflict, to persuade his people that a move that appears to benefit the Palestinians is actually in Israel's interest. For his part, Abbas is trying to end Palestinian violence and promote democracy to serve the Palestinian interest, not Israel's. These are not concessions to each other. They are concessions to reality. But realists can disagree as strongly as myth-makers, and for better reasons.

Hawashin argued that most Palestinians wanted internal reforms long before Israel or the Bush administration demanded them. Many Palestinians believe Arafat encouraged the intifada to give an outlet to discontent with his own rule. Hawashin gestured with a broad hand at the portrait of Arafat above his head. ''Unfortunately, our symbol -- and we consider him a model -- his real mistake was not to establish institutions in Fatah or the Palestinian Authority.'' In Jenin, he said, Palestinians did not yet feel any change, but they were anxious for it. ''Everyone knows the reality,'' he said. ''Israel brought us to a point where we started looking just for bread.'' He said that he would settle for ''the minimum of my dreams,'' but he thought that minimum was well above Israel's maximum concession.

What is known rather grimly as a ''final status'' deal does appear a long way off. There is a possible intermediate step, and Abbas fears it. He worries that the Israelis and Americans will seize on a Gaza withdrawal to push for a possibility mentioned in the road map, the creation of ''an independent Palestinian state with provisional borders.'' No one knows exactly what this would be. But it would give the appearance of a great step forward, an achievement for Bush on the order of Oslo. Abbas says he would reject it as a trap, a version of what Sharon calls a ''long-term interim agreement'' that would defer resolution of the toughest issues. Abbas thinks it could create a state that hopscotched from Gaza through enclaves on the West Bank, while downgrading the conflict to just another border dispute and releasing international pressure on Israel for further concessions. From a historical perspective, it is an astounding possibility: that Ariel Sharon could wind up insisting on a Palestinian state over the objections of a Palestinian leader. If Bush backs it, it may be an offer Abbas cannot refuse.

Sharon's aides say that he believes a long-term interim arrangement will allow the adversaries to cool off and learn to live together. As time goes by, they say, the precise borders will matter less. Yet the historical pattern is the opposite. It is when Palestinians are feeling rested and prosperous that their political demands come once more to the fore. Nation-building makes people impatient for national liberation. Like other Palestinians, Hawashin is already anticipating the fire next time. ''There will be another intifada, of course,'' he told me. The Palestinians will once again be ruled by their hearts, not their heads, he said, and in their hearts they will never surrender.

''I don't consider myself a defeated person,'' Hawashin said. ''I consider myself a weak person.''

I left Jenin by crossing through the barrier at the town's edge. Built here of electrified fencing, it stretched into the distance on either hand, flanked by a dirt road and stacked coils of concertina wire. The old checkpoint, an ad hoc array of concrete blocks and armored vehicles, was gone. In its place was a giant yellow steel gate, a separate passageway to examine pedestrians and a building of glass and steel. The soldier smiled as he took my passport. It looked, as the major checkpoints increasingly do, like an international border crossing. As I drove past it, between the rich brown furrows of Israel's Jezreel Valley, a paraglider circled overhead against the blue sky. From up there, it must all look so peaceful and sensible: Israelis on one side, Palestinians on the other, a bright, sharp line in between. I wondered what he would think if an errant breeze carried him into Palestine.

James Bennet, a staff writer for the magazine, was chief of the New York Times bureau in Jerusalem from September 2001 through last summer.
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