The middle of the road is scorched black where soldiers and enraged demonstrators clashed yesterday. As we approach the checkpoint a little group of kids, 10 or 12 years old, are shouting and gesticulating and taunting and throwing rocks at some Israeli troops 50 yards away, on higher ground, silhouetted in the fading sun behind rolls of barbed wire. One of the Israeli soldiers suddenly moves forward aggressively and the kids fall back.

Walid Batrawi, the Palestinian journalist who has been my guide to Ramallah and set up interviews, sizes up the situation for a few seconds, making sure it’s safe for me to go. He tells me it’s OK, asks me to call him when I get back safely to my hotel. I get out of his car and start walking with the rest of the crowd toward the checkpoint, trying to look as inconspicuous as possible. I haven’t yet heard that Hamas has recanted its threat to start targeting Americans. Besides, I don’t know enough not to be scared. Or maybe if I knew more I’d be more scared. Who the hell knows. Keep your head down, keep walking, and thank God for being half Japanese.

It’s warm in the dusk and the air is filled with diesel fumes. I can’t stop looking at the silhouetted soldiers against the sunset — guys with machine guns in the deepening dusk. An endless stream of people, carrying plastic bags or empty-handed, are going in both directions. They are Palestinians. This is their commute. If the traffic gets backed up, if the checks are heavy, it can take hours. The ground is dirty, covered with broken paving stones, random barriers, plastic junk.

An Israeli military truck clatters by and I look up and for a second my eyes lock with those of a young soldier — the kind of sensitive, skinny Jewish nerd with glasses I grew up with. What’s a nice Jewish boy like you doing in a place like this? We ought to be playing hoops, you burning my ass with your slick fake to the hole and your automatic 17-foot J, or me turning you on to Nietzsche. History isn’t supposed to come out like this. You deserve better, and so do these people you rule.

We cross over to the left side and enter a kind of covered ramp at the end of which stand Israeli soldiers. People pull out their identity cards and are waved through. As an American I arouse a few seconds of curiosity, then I too am waved through.

I am left standing for 20 minutes there, waiting for my taxi, as a hideous traffic jam of trucks and cars piles up and people scurry past in the fading light. Two guys are pushing an enormous piece of furniture from one side to the other. The soldiers watch it all. It’s just another day at the checkpoint.

I saw a lot of things in Ramallah and heard a lot of stories. I went to the Muqata, Arafat’s ruined compound, where the Israeli tanks smashed through walls two years ago and blasted everything except the few rooms he was in. Arafat, as mindful of visual propaganda as the Israelis, has intentionally left most of the devastation intact. So at one corner of his compound the walls are falling off, plaster and rebar sticking out crazily, jagged shell holes and bullet holes in the walls. Right behind the courtyard from which you enter his lair is a whole wall of smashed cars, run over by tanks, twisted into bizarre shapes. Even the doorway is a “Waiting for Godot” stage set, crazy tarps draped over sandbags. It’s the world’s most effective industrial-nihilist-romantic-revolutionary art installation, except it’s too obvious. (Tear off the red badge of courage, Yasser, and do something for your people or get out. I don’t know what they’re telling you, but they’re telling me they don’t believe in you or your Palestinian Authority anymore.)

I saw the place where the Israelis gratuitously piled up an entire mountain of dirt across a road that was the only Ramallah access for dozens of Palestinian villages to the north, so that everyone — kids and old ladies and sick people — had to climb over or around it. (It was gratuitous because it served no security function, as the Israelis themselves tacitly admitted when they later removed it.)

I explored Bir Zeit University, where fresh-faced kids who look just like their U.S. and Israeli counterparts were doing homework together and giggling and learning to do TV broadcasts and radio and edit stories and who greeted an American visitor politely, while a few other equally fresh-faced young people were gathered outside underneath the green Hamas banner, listening to a passionate broadcast.

I met with Palestinian lawmaker Hanan Ashrawi, whose house is across the street from the Muqata. After a precise political analysis of the situation, this elegant and refined woman — I believe she studied English literature — gestured out across her well-appointed office in her nice modern building and said, “We are in a state of collective pain and trauma constantly. Sitting here it’s very deceptive. I’m traumatized. We all are. We need to step back, to have some normalcy, some semblance of real planning and serious thought. I have to steal the time to be able to think, to analyze, to write. Otherwise you’re always in a mode of crisis management, in a mode of trying to overcome your own anger, your own sense of injustice, your own grievance, your own victimization. It’s exhausting, it’s debilitating. And yet I’m not the one whose house is demolished or children have been killed. My house has had to be renovated four times. We had our windows and doors blown in. We had the stones from the Muqata flying in. They destroyed the garden. And you have to keep rebuilding the garden, making your investment in life, as opposed to the death that you see. We keep planting trees on the sidewalk, and they keep uprooting them, and we keep replanting them. It’s a battle, but you have to show that you have a commitment to life.”

The next day, Ashrawi joined 60 other prominent Palestinian intellectuals in calling on the public not to retaliate for the killing of Sheikh Yassin with more violence. “Resistance does not have to be violent resistance,” she said.

I saw the wall — and yes, for much of its length it is indeed a wall, not a “fence” or a “security barrier” as Israeli euphemism would have it — running through the middle of Palestinian land, many miles from the 1967 “Green Line,” Israel’s internationally accepted border, where it would have to run to have any moral or legal legitimacy.

And, of course, I heard about people losing their homes, and people losing their children, and people being killed.

Many of these things are of course of far greater significance than a simple checkpoint. But it is the checkpoint that I will remember, because it’s the only one I lived, if only for half an hour. It will remain, for me, a small vision of hell, like an obscure background in a Hieronymus Bosch painting. Those silhouetted figures with guns, that smell of diesel fuel, the debris, the blank look of poor people fumbling for their papers, making their way home. One of the outer circles of hell, to be sure. But I felt in my bones it was not right. And as an American, I will carry that memory as a badge of shame. Because I pay for it, I support it. That soldier in the twilight is me.

Thursday, 1 p.m. I am driving through the modern, Jewish part of Jerusalem, with Eilat Negev and Yehuda Koren, two Israeli authors and journalists. They point out where the 1967 borders of Jerusalem were, where the city expanded on what was Jordanian territory. They take me to their neighborhood of Gilo, where Palestinian sniper fire from across the valley forced the authorities to build a bulletproof wall. “We used to jog here,” Yehuda says. “Now we don’t anymore.” From the hilltop you can see the nearby town of Bethlehem. “We used to drive there, go shopping — they had really good markets,” he says. “That was six or seven years ago. We can’t anymore. We wouldn’t dare go there.”

They describe hearing the sirens from their house, knowing if there are more than a few that something terrible has happened. It quickly becomes clear: The terror attacks have taken over their lives completely.

As we head back toward downtown, Eilat points to a nondescript bus stop on the right. “About a year and a half ago they blew up that bus — more than 20 people were killed. Mostly young students who go to the university. The No. 32 bus.” A few seconds later she points to the other side of the road. “There were two bombings over there,” she said. “Both parents of two small children were killed.”

Yehuda pulls up behind a stopped bus ahead. “If I have to drive next to a bus, I’m very nervous,” he says. “I try not to show it, but I try to get away as soon as possible.” They are giving me a tour of the city, not a Death Tour of atrocities. They are not propagandists. But this is their city, this is the street they drive down to work, and of course they have to mention that at that cafe six months ago, a Palestinian kid blew up himself and a dozen other people, that that spot there was where a kid was saved because he was standing next to his uncle. One woman who was only lightly wounded in an attack, a well-known writer, has been unable to get out of bed for two months and cannot take care of her children.

The great Israeli journalist Amira Hass, the only Israeli reporter who lives in Ramallah or indeed anywhere in the occupied territories, said Palestinians wanted Israelis to suffer as they are suffering. They are succeeding.

We go by the Moment Cafe, a young people’s hangout. It was blown up recently. An armed guard stands outside. Armed guards stand everywhere.

Eilat and Yehuda say that making the simplest decisions, like where to eat, or whether to go out at all, involves agonizing calculations. I know a little what they feel from my few days of ignorance, parachuting in full paranoid regalia into Israel two days after the biggest escalation in the conflict in years, pouring a few drinks down before wandering around the Old City at night. But it isn’t the same, of course. “It isn’t about how good the food is, or is there parking,” he says. “It’s all about whether you think a bomber will go there. So you try to think –’Should I go late?’ But you can never be sure.”

We drive through Mea Shearim, a big ultra-orthodox neighborhood. They point out that there’s a heavy Brooklyn connection here and explain to me that secular Israelis used to come on organized tours here to soak up their past in surreal, ghostly fashion.

We go on past the prime minister’s office, which appropriately looks very military. You almost expect to see a gun barrel pointing out the window. We have not yet talked about politics, but Eilat whispers, “We have never voted for him.” They point out a little tent city where desperately poor single mothers have been protesting the harsh economic policies of Benyamin Netanyahu, the former extreme-right prime minister who is waiting in the wings should Sharon fall. Netanyahu is supported by the Oriental, or Sephardic, Jews, Yehuda says. “It’s all family — you don’t go against your father.” Neither Sharon and Netanyahu can ever be displaced, he says, because of their overwhelming popularity with Oriental Jews, who are in general less educated and more politically right-wing than the Ashkenazim. Plus, Yehuda points out, the Russian Jews who were imported in great numbers a few years ago hate communism and are a natural constituency for Netanyahu’s Bush-style crony capitalism. “This country is becoming like a Third World place — more and more people are either very rich or poor,” Eilat says.

We visit Yad Vashem, which commemorates the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust. The Children’s Memorial, which opens with a few heartbreaking faces of the more than 1.5 million children killed by the Nazis, then moves into a reflecting tunnel in which candles in opaque mirrors create the illusion of an infinite universe of lost stars, is almost unbearable.

Outside Eilat and Yeshuda point out the enormous amount of construction going on and note the irony that the only thing that’s being built in Israel is more commemoration of suffering.

We eat lunch in a gorgeous outdoor restaurant overlooking a verdant valley. “It’s too far out to be bombed,” Yehuda says wryly, although Eilat notes that some Palestinian workers have clearly tipped off bombers to the location of certain obscure places, because one illegal club was bombed. They talk about how whenever they enter a restaurant, they think hard about where to sit, whether it’s better to be near the entrance or deeper inside. “A very smart woman lawyer told us she figured out that you should sit by the kitchen door, even though that’s a bad table, because you can get out the back way,” he says.

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.

Many governments struggling with dissent appear to be using a double-barreled strategy to fight back against the so-called Facebook revolutions: classic repression and by promoting their own views using the very same platforms.

“The thought police already have a presence online in these countries,” said Mohamed Abdel Dayem, the Middle East and North Africa program coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists. “And they have a very heavy presence on Twitter, Facebook and other social media networks. They go out there and intimidate people. And they accuse people of being heathens. And call for their heads.”

Jeffrey Ghannam, a media lawyer and analyst in Washington, thinks the propaganda strategy will win out over subjugation.

“It’s my sense that Arab governments will focus less on control, filtering and blocking — though those efforts will not completely disappear — and begin to assert their own views in the Arab cyberspace,” he said.

“Consider the cases of so-called Bahraini twitter trolls and the Syrian cyber attacks that go after critics of these respective Arab regimes. The official Arab government view is increasingly in the mix,” he said. “Another example is the way the SCAF (Egypt’s Supreme Council of Armed Forces) uses Facebook and Twitter. It may not be beautifully done, and it does draw tens of thousands of critical remarks online that are viewable, but the SCAF is contributing its views. These are all significant developments and point to increasing government engagement in the Arab cyberspace.”

Some of the official efforts smack of classic public relations techniques.

In Bahrain, the government launched an online campaign called “We Are All Hamad,” asking supporters to post pictures of Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa, Bahrain’s ruler, on their Facebook and Twitter pages.

In Tunisia, government officials, including President Moncef Marzouki (@Moncef_Marzouki) have joined Twitter. The royal family in Jordan, as well as the mayor of Amman, Jordan’s capital, also use Facebook and Twitter to speak directly to constituents.

These regimes, however, have a long history of using heavy-handed tactics and are apparently not about to give up on old habits. Many, in fact, have learned that social media can help identify potential targets of their crackdown.

This nascent trend, however, has not led authorities in these countries and elsewhere to give up old habits. Many have continued to opt for the more traditional and heavy-handed response.

Last month, for instance, Moroccan authorities arrested 18-year-old college student Walid Bahomane on charges of “defaming Morocco’s sacred values” by posting unflattering pictures and videos on Facebook that poked fun at King Mohammed VI. Authorities also convicted another student, Abdelsamad Haydour, 24, earlier in the month for criticizing the ruler in a video posted on YouTube.

These developments have taken place in a country largely praised for its response to citizen discontent over the past year. In November, Morocco held peaceful parliamentary elections as part of a governmental reform process initiated by the king that also included a new constitution.

In Saudi Arabia, 23-year-old journalist Hamza Kashgari faces charges of blasphemy, an offence that carries the death sentence, for tweeting an imaginary conversation he was having with the Prophet Muhammad. The uproar over Kashgari’s comments prompted the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, Abdul-Azeez ibn Abdullaah Aal ash-Shaikh, to issue a fatwa against Twitter, which he told “real Muslims” to avoid as a “platform for trading accusations and for promoting lies,” according to an article in The National.

And in Jordan, a masked assailant on Feb. 20 stabbed university student Enass Musallam after he published a blog post that criticized a member of the Jordanian royal family.

Authorities in the region are now also turning to old laws — such as emergency laws, anti-terrorism laws and press laws — to justify the arrest, fines and incarceration of individuals for online expression.

“When the internet and social media blogs were just starting to become popular, press laws were only applied to the mainstream media. But that’s no longer the case as these media platforms continue to converge,” said Courtney Radsch, program manager for the Global Freedom of Expression Campaign at Freedom House in New York.

Earlier this month, for instance, authorities in the United Arab Emirates arrested pro-democracy activist Saleh al-Dhufairi for tweets criticizing the UAE’s decision to deport Syrian expatriates who demonstrated outside their consulate in Dubai without a permit.

“Saleh al-Dhufairi has been arrested on accusation of spreading ideas by speech, writing and any other means that provoke strife, hurt national unity, and social peace,” a spokesman for Dubai police said in a statement.

Al-Dhufairi’s arrest is a scare tactic by a government that is itself scared of any significant dissent, CPJ’s Abdel Dayem.

“Events are occurring that are of monumental political weight and have very far reaching implications. So what happens in Tunisia matters in the Gulf and what happens in Syria matters in the Gulf,” Abdel Dayem said. “These are obviously separate political entities and separate states but there is a Pan-Arab media consumed across borders, so journalists, bloggers, regular citizens and everyone else is exploring these new found venues for expression.”

“They are testing government tolerance for criticism, not just in Libya, Egypt and Yemen where there was an actual change in the political arrangement, but also in countries where there hasn’t been change.”

And these governments in turn are testing their responses, said popular UAE commentator Sultan Al Qassemi, who has more than 100,000 followers on Twitter.

“What we are seeing today is part of the teething process of accepting social media as an avenue of communication and criticism of society and government in the Gulf,” Qassemi said. “As the adoption of social media tools grows in the Gulf there will naturally be a larger output of opinions, some less agreeable to the authorities than others.”

Citizen journalists, bloggers and average citizens who run afoul of the law for expressing their opinions online must also contend with inadequate legal representation.

“This is a new realm for many lawyers in these countries. It requires training and requires a level of experience with the technology and that’s lacking in many countries if not all,” Radsch said. “Certainly, in the U.S. where you’ve had a longer history with internet-based content you have some more sophistication there.

But in many of these countries, blogging really just got going in 2004 and 2005.”

“With the advent of TV, you saw fewer cases against broadcasters at the beginning because it was still new and they were figuring things out, but you’re going to continue to see this battle between governments and citizens play out,” she said.

This time, however, the very nature of the internet and social networking might be enough to break the cycle.

“One thing is different,” Radsch said. “There are a lot more stakeholders and users of social media. The mainstream media is owned by a few and provides jobs for a few more but the vested interest across the broad swath of the public using social media could mean far more stakeholders could fight for the right to keep this space open.”

In the past few weeks, U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey and National Security Advisor Tom Donilon have all held high level meetings in Jerusalem. Barak is scheduled to meet with Panetta and with Vice President Joe Biden. Peres will meet with President Barack Obama, as will Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who will fly to Washington for a much anticipated meeting on March 5.

The subject at hand is nuclear Iran — not the movie version, and not even the proxy war version, which has seen the assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists, the attempted assassinations of Israeli diplomats, and genial computer viruses attack Iranian nuclear installations, making centrifuges spiral out of control, as in Hollywood’s imagination.

On the eve of the Israelis’ Washington visits, there is a divergence of opinion between the United States and Israel regarding the utility of the recently hardened sanctions on Iran, and a growing apprehension on both sides about what the other may be prepared to accept from the Islamic Republic’s leadership.

Eytan Gilboa, an expert on U.S.-Israel bilateral relations who holds posts at Bar Ilan University and at the University of Southern California, said the situation is stark and in some ways unprecedented.

“The Obama administration has little trust in Netanyahu and vice versa. The new sanctions that have been imposed have produced economic hardship in Tehran, but this does not mean they are working. To work, they have to change the Iranian government’s policy toward nuclear development, and this has not yet happened.”

“The UN Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has just announced that Iran has substantially increased enrichment, which seems to contradict American statements that have appeared in all the media suggesting that Iran has not yet made the decision whether to develop nuclear weapons.”

Two points of dispute stand out in creating what Sen. John McCain, also on a visit to Israel last week, called the “daylight” between the two countries regarding Iran’s nuclear plan.

The first is the question of what constitutes unacceptable progress toward the manufacture of an armed nuclear device, or, in Barak’s words, Iran’s entry into a “zone of immunity.” The other is the extent of uranium enrichment at a nuclear site near the holy city of Qum, which was highlighted by the IAEA report.

The United States and Israel agree that the secret underground structure is better protected from a possible military strike than other known Iranian facilities. But from that point of agreement, different conclusions are drawn.

Israeli analysts believe Iran is moving fast toward a nuclear military option, and taking advantage of the pressure of sanctions and the time granted by European offers to negotiate in order to assemble all the parts necessary to build a bomb. The United States, which is in the midst of an election year, meanwhile, thinks sanctions may yet bring Iran — “if it is behaving as a rational actor,” in Gilboa’s words — to negotiate.

“The process is preparing everything for the building of bombs, with the aim of creating all the parts and then needing only a very short period of time to assemble a weapon. So it is just playing with words if we say that we don’t know whether they have made a decision. If you produce all the parts, it is obvious that means you intend to produce a bomb,” Gilboa said.

“I think that what Obama wants from Netanyahu next week is a commitment not to strike Iran at least until the American election, to give heavier sanctions a chance and not to surprise the United States.”

Gilboa does not believe Israel would attack Iranian nuclear installations without notifying the Americans beforehand.

Still, he points out, “The current situation is unprecedented. The U.S. has never before asked Israel to refrain from military action, and Israel has never before asked the U.S. for permission. This is all new ground.”

The 1981 Israel Air Force attack on Osirak, Saddam Hussein’s French-built nuclear reactor is now ancient history. In that campaign however, only eight jets were involved.

The New York Times estimated that at least 100 Israeli fighter planes would be needed today for a crippling attack on Iran. At the time of the Osirak strike, the United States angrily condemned Israel. But in 2005, former President Bill Clinton said, “Everybody talks about what the Israelis did at Osirak in 1981, which I think, in retrospect, was a really good thing.”

The current disagreement between Israel and the United States seem not to be on the substance of Iran’s nuclear program, or even on the possibility of a necessary, last-resort, military strike, but on the timetable and method of response to the threat.

Many Israeli analysts believe the Obama administration and Europe are not convinced that the full effect of sanctions has yet been felt. Israelis are concerned that by the time they are felt, possibly by next summer, when Europe’s oil embargo on Iran is scheduled to go into effect, it might be too late.

“What Obama would like is to put the crippling sanctions to the test. He thinks that the sanctions being used this time, alongside the oil embargo, will actually have an impact,” said Tel Aviv University professor Uzi Rabi, the director of the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies.

“He is in effect saying to Israel, don’t surprise us. We want to be updated from A to Z. The second thing, I think Israel is being asked is to play down the shadow war and really just let sanctions work. If the sanctions are going to be fully implemented it could inflict a lethal blow on the Iranian regime, and since what we are talking about is the survival of the regime itself, this could be very effective.”

As to Israel, Rabi says, “It would like to make sure everybody knows that from its point of view, a nuclear Iran is unbearable. This combination of ayatollahs and power is something that poses an existential threat to Israel, and it is something Israel is really afraid of. What Israel thinks is the right thing to do is to make sure the military option is not only on the table, but actually feasible.”

Not many in Israel think that Iran, even with a nuclear weapon in hand, would attack Tel Aviv.

“Based on rational thinking, which is not one of the strongest characteristics of the Middle East, if Iran acquires nuclear weapons, it would be tantamount to suicide were they to use them. Iran would be wiped out by Israel’s second strike capability and by American nukes,” Gilboa said.

“I think they want them in order to acquire hegemony in the Middle East. By becoming a nuclear power they can threaten anybody. The power of threat is much more than the power of destruction.”

Gilboa predicts that next week Netanyahu will ask Obama how he plans to ensure Iran’s non-nuclear status in the event sanctions fail to cripple the nuclear program, and that Obama “will evade the answers.”

Rabi says “Israel is afraid to be left alone. I don’t think Iran would attack Israel. But their actions provide a source of inspiration for lunatic radical movements like Hamas and Hezbollah, and the fact that they are attacking Israelis in Baku, Delhi and Tbilisi, though ineffective for now, show that this is a state that could act in accordance with the modus operandi of a terrorist group. This has very negative implications for the stability of the Middle East.”

Not all Israeli experts see in the commotion of transatlantic visits and consultations evidence of tension between the United States and Israel. Shlomo Shpiro, vice chair of the Department of Politics at Bar Ilan University, believes those claims to be overstated.

“I think there anxiety among some in the U.S. administration who fear that a powerful Israeli military action against Iran could have an impact on the election in November. I don’t think there is tension. A whole range of senior American officials have been visiting Israel almost on a weekly basis.”

“I think the threat assessment is very similar in Washington and in Jerusalem,” he adds. “I think Obama is very concerned about the possibility of Iran getting nuclear weapons. Both are very worried, and both countries agree the process is moving quickly. The disagreement is only about how to prevent or delay it.”

Any Israeli military option, Shpiro says, would be a “last resort.”

“But if it comes to a last resort, I think Israel’s leadership will not hesitate. It all depends on the progress of Iran’s nuclear program and on information that the U.S. and Israel obtain about that program.”

For now, the war of nerves will play on, with Israel pressuring the U.S. and Europe to fully implement severe sanctions as soon as possible, and demanding assurances, perhaps impossible to give, about what the West will do if sanctions do not deter Iran.

The psychological warfare, many say, may lead Iran to believe it can “safely assume it can continue with its plan to build nuclear weapons without much interference,” Gilboa said. “There is a possibility the Iranians are laughing at everybody. For example, why announce sanctions and then say you’ll impose them only in six months?”

“The Iranians are the only ones producing consistent statements, and this is our problem. Too many of the statements coming from the West are confusing and could be interpreted in any number of ways.”

Hezbollah has enjoyed enormous popularity across the entire region, perceived by many as the champions of the Arab world, successfully standing up to the bully in the playground, Israel. There was a time when the portrait of Hassan Nasrallah hung on the walls of homes and cafes from Baghdad to Casablanca. Yet, following a relatively cool reception of Nasrallah’s speech on the 16^th of February , one got the distinct impression that the Lebanese resistance leader may not enjoy the same popularity he once did with the Arab masses.

A simple explanation might be Hezbollah’s unequivocal support for Bashar el-Assad’s regime in Syria.  In a speech broadcast by al-Manar on May 25^th 2011, Nasrallah declared his group’s strong support for the Assad regime. He hailed Syria for its support of the Resistance movement in Lebanon and Palestine. Many have been unable to comprehend why the former champions of the resistance would side with the regime against the people, especially considering Hezbollah’s unreserved support for the uprisings in Egypt, Tunisia and Bahrain. This has eroded the party’s popularity not only among Sunnis in Syria, who dominate the opposition, but also in the Arab world at large as regional tensions intensify between Shi’ite Iran and the predominantly Sunni Arab states.

Ironically, the very cause which won Hezbollah respect from thousands across the region, also, lost them the support of their own people. Throughout the 1990s, the Lebanese, regardless of sect, were united by Hezbollah’s resistance to the Israeli occupation of South Lebanon and again in 2006 when Israel threatened reinvasion. However, critics point to Hezbollah’s reluctance to disarm as the main source of national instability. Lebanese political leader Samir Geagea asserting that “The ones who are involving Lebanon [in crises] are those wielding power outside the Lebanese state” and demanding that Hezbollah put down its arms and integrate itself with the official Lebanese army and government.

In a similar vein, Hezbollah has alienated many followers by becoming embroiled in a petty tit-for-tat exchange with the March 14 coalition over the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, investigating the 2005 assassination of former Prime Minister Rafiq el-Hariri.  Many, regardless of their politics, had respected Nasrallah for his commitment to his cause and ability to avoid entanglement in party politics.

Though not Hezbollah’s fault, as such, the persisting devastation of the socio-economic condition and infrastructure of southern Lebanon has also served as a harsh reminder, to the organisation’s critics, of the consequences of war with Israel

In the Asia Times, Sami Moubayed, points out Hassan Nasrallah’s total withdrawal from public life in Lebanon in recent years; choosing to address his supporters on live television rather than the massive public rallies for which he has been famed. His disappearance has been due to security fears. However, this has made it difficult for followers to connect with him. It is, also, now harder to draw in new supporters from across the Arab and Islamic worlds.

Despite their somewhat dented popularity, Hezbollah is still massively important on a strategic level, with regard to predicting the outcome of unrest in Syria.

In a speech broadcast by al-Manar on the 25^th August 2011, Nasrallah named Syria as a very important ally in the region “The Syrian support has been crucial. A great part of the Iranian support comes through Syria. If it had not been for the will of Syria, even the Iranian support would have been blocked”.  So, it is reasonable to assume that the fall of the Assad regime would serve a tremendous blow to Hezbollah, but also, act as catalyst to a power struggle within the country. A regime in Syria based on the Sunni Muslim majority would most likely be more friendly to Hezbollah’s local rivals in the March 14 coalition. Such a regime would also have good relations with regional powers that have severe disagreements with the Hezbollah movement over sectarian and political issues.

Prof. Joseph Bahout at Sciences Po in Paris notes that, in such a situation, Hezbollah would be faced with two alternatives, if faced with waning support from Syria “will Hizballah gradually become more flexible in terms of Lebanonization and civilianization? Or, on the contrary, will it increasingly pursue a radical position and bitterly defend its share of the Lebanese system while echoing Tehran’s dictum that Assad’s rule in Syria is a red line?” Judging by Hezbollah’s stern rhetoric over the past few months, the leadership has already decided on the latter and will continue to stand by the Assad regime.

Perhaps, most dangerously, Hezbollah also play an extremely important strategic role in what has been suggested as an imminent conflict between Israel and Iran. Would Israel be capable of conducting an aerial battle with Iran at the same time as defending itself against Hezbollah, closer to home?

Ha’aretz commentator Yoel Marcus thinks not, saying that a strike on Iran would be out of Israel’s league and points to cautions issued by former Mossad chief Meir Dagan against attacking Iran, amidst concerns that such a move would drag Israel into a regional war, which would involve Hezbollah, Hamas and possibly Syria.

Tensions have been escalating between Israel and Iran for some time, recently, heightened following attacks on Israeli embassies in India, Thailand and Georgia. An official for the Israeli counter terrorism bureau, quoted in Ha’aretz warned Israelis of further attacks and noted that Nasrallah’s threats of revenge for the 2008 assassination of Hezbollah commander Imad Mughaniyeh were being taken into account.  Nasrallah categorically denied any involvement in the explosions in his speech on February 16^th.

But what would such a conflict mean for the Arab world at large? It seems unlikely that Egyptians, Jordanians or, the Palestinians, all not so embroiled in the sectarian debate, would support Israel in any conflict against Muslims whether they be in Lebanon or, in Iran. However, countries in the GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) might have more to gain from a weakened Iran.

The GCC have been concerned about Iran’s capabilities, behavior and intentions for a long time, but it takes on an additional importance in light of the Arab Spring. This has certainly been the case in Egypt and Bahrain, in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, possibly in Yemen, and now in Syria.

GCC countries have repeatedly accused Tehran of attempting to destabilise their internal security, and attempting to instigate sectarian strife. Iran has rejected these accusations, and pointed to the GCC’s appalling treatment of Shi’ite citizens. Particularly, concerning the brutal suppression of the largely Shi’ite uprising in Bahrain against the Sunni al-Khalifa monarchy, a struggle which was obviously covered up by Gulf sponsored media such as al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya.

Tensions have also been rising over Iran’s ability to developing nuclear weapons, something that is already of great concern to the GCC. Without a nuclear advantage, the Gulf far outguns Iran in terms of military capability, although, Iran is not reluctant to use its geopolitical position and has threatened to close off the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20% of the world’s oil passes, if pressured.

When placed in the context of a larger regional conflict between Israel and Iran, Hezbollah plays an absolutely crucial part as an ally of Iran, especially in the absence of Syria. Yet, when the financial might of the GCC is also turned against Iran, Hezbollah, which is ultimately a financially dependent arm of Iran, becomes inconsequential.

It is possible that Hezbollah may look to find solutions to its waning popularity, and a possible run in with the GCC, by pre-emptively launching a strike against Israel. In his speech on Feburary 16^th, Nasrallah ambiguously claimed that “We have arms and they are increasing [in number]. We have well-known weapons and there are others which are hidden and unknown. We are hiding them because we need to protect our country and prepare surprises for the Israelis.” Whilst this may be an empty threat, a Hezbollah spokesman has said that the organisation would be willing to go to war with Israel, should Syria be attacked. It seems likely that the same logic would apply if an attack were to be staged against Iran.

Prof. Juan Cole has said that, in the case of a conflict with Iran, Hezbollah would almost certainly launch a rocket attack, which would threaten up to a quarter of the Israeli population. The casualties might be even worse if Hezbollah is able to target toxic gas storage in Haifa or nuclear reactors in Dimona and Nahal Sorek. Already Israel has been taking steps to shut down these facilities, in the event of an attack.

This seems to be a departure from Nasrallah’s statement in 2006, shortly after the 34 day war between Hezbollah and Israel, when he told Lebanon’s NTV that had he would not have ordered the capture of two Israeli soldiers, had he known that this would lead to such devastation. However, six years on, the situation between Iran and Israel has escalated, and for Hezbollah this has become a battle for existence. In an earlier speech, February 7^th, Nasrallah admitted that the organisation has been completely dependent on Iran for “moral, political and financial support” since 1982.

Hezbollah has found itself in the unenviable position of choosing between its Iranian financial backer and its Arab popular support base. Ironically, Hezbollah’s only hope may be an Israelis attack on Iran, thus gaining it some support, once more, as the champion of resistance against the Zionist aggressor. But should the pressure on Iran be laid on by the Gulf states, Hezbollah will be left with no alternative but to cut its ties with Iran or, face complete irrelevance within the Arab world.

On the surface, the criteria that Obama outlined in his Libya speech are present in Syria: impending and ongoing massacres; a multilateral coalition led by America’s traditional allies; and an opportunity to side with the people in a crucial state in the Arab spring. For this reason, many liberal writers have called on the U.S. to intervene. Paul Berman has signed onto a conservative-led letter to the president asking him to intervene in Syria. The New Republic has an entire symposium with intellectuals (mostly) asking Obama to side militarily with the Syrian resistance. “Lead again from behind!” Leon Wieseltier exhorts. Especially powerful is a heartfelt plea for American help from a Syrian activist in Washington:

Pressure is building in Congress. Republican Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham, who both serve on the Armed Services Committee, have argued for arming the Syrian rebels. Obama’s former State Department policy planning head Anne-Marie Slaughter was among the first to call for intervention. In late January, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said it’s only “a question of time” before President Bashar al Assad falls. In December, the State Department pointman said Syria’s leader was a “dead man walking.” More recently, White House press secretary said on Tuesday that “additional measures” such as rebel-arming may need to be taken if the international community keeps dithering.

There are two significant reasons the administration has not pushed for military intervention, however. First, the international consensus that existed on Libya is not present in Syria. Russia and China vetoed a Western- and Arab-sponsored U.N. Security Council resolution condemning the Syrian government. Imagining that they would agree to a military intervention is simply fanciful.

What hasn’t been much discussed is why China and Russia vetoed the resolution. And here we circle back to Libya. The resolution authorizing military action in Libya was limited to protecting civilians in Benghazi and other areas. NATO and its allies quickly went beyond the scope of this mandate, using airpower to assist the rebels in defeating Col. Gadhafi and his forces. Such actions may have been morally justified, but they didn’t go unnoticed by the Chinese and Russians, who are extremely sensitive to infringements on state sovereignty (lest they be targeted one day). Tellingly, foes of the proposed Syria resolution explained their decision in terms of national sovereignty. Russia’s foreign minister said that “the Security Council by definition does not engage in domestic affairs of member states.” Russia’s U.N. envoy faulted the resolution for aiming at “regime change,” even though the wording of the text notably did not call for it and the Arab states explicitly rejected Western military intervention.

The second reason Libya isn’t acting as a template for Syria is one of logistics. As Middle East expert Marc Lynch has explained, “Military intervention in Syria has little prospect of success, a high risk of disastrous failure, and a near-certainty of escalation which should make the experience of Iraq weigh extremely heavily on anyone contemplating such an intervention.” The Syrian opposition, impressive and courageous as they have been, is divided, weak and controls no territory. Air power of the sort the West can provide would not be effective in preventing civilian deaths, and the fighting is taking place in densely populated cities. For these reasons and more, a Libya-style no-fly zone simply won’t fly.

Eventually, the Syrian government’s efforts to suppress the rebellion may be so bloody that the Obama administration feels compelled to intervene. But so far, the conditions that were present in Libya are not present in Syria. It may be a double standard, and one that liberal hawks are not comfortable with, but it is one with good reason.