It is several months since my last visit to Jerusalem and nothing had changed for the better. My driver says he has spent most of the intervening time in his office waiting for the telephone to ring. Outside the hotel in the morning, Arab men gather to chat and hang about. An old man beseeches me to have a shoeshine. The other men may be taxi-drivers or just passing the time of day. They remind me depressingly of the way it used to be in Ireland before the Celtic Tiger arrived.
When the guns sound, the tourists stay at home. The Via Dolorosa, hallowed as the place where Christ carried his cross, should be buzzing with activity but it is as quiet as the grave. Men sit in their souvenir shops staring into the middle distance. Russian icons, heads of Alexander the Great, sculptures of ancient Egyptian kings (I see one for $12,000) are gathering dust because no one is coming.
Ariel Sharon, Prime Minister-elect of Israel, has an apartment here in the Muslim quarter of the old city and an Israeli flag is defiantly draped on an outside wall. The Arabs go about their business, nobody looks up, but you can bet they hate it.
It was in this general area that all the trouble started. Ehud Barak was making like he would concede partial sovereignty over the holy places of Jerusalem to the Palestinians. Not the most sensitive or tuned-in of politicians he touched a nerve in important sectors of the Jewish community: the religious right; the political right; and the vast numbers who belong to both categories.
As in his military days, Sharon identified his objective, assembled his forces (in this case a large security detail) and advanced towards the target. This time, it was the Temple Mount, holy to Muslims as the location of the al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, where Mohammed ascended into heaven, but venerated also by Jews as the site of the First and Second Temples and where Abraham was prepared to sacrifice his son, Isaac. "It's the right of any Jew in Israel to visit the Temple Mount," was Sharon's motto. That is exactly what he did last September.
It sent out the right signal to all the right quarters: Barak is giving this away, here am I asserting our right to the place. It also helped Sharon in a party context, because people were starting to talk about bringing back former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu as leader of the conservative Likud. "Arik", as Sharon is known to his friends, had put one over on his rival, "Bibi".
The Palestinians were furious. The incursion marked the beginning of the revolt that became known as the "al-Aqsa intifada". Conspiracy theorists say the uprising was coming anyway and Sharon's Temple Mount demarche was only an excuse. Either way, many people died or were injured in the immediate aftermath of the visit and there has been no let-up since. People who consider themselves rational feel that Sharon should have suffered politically for lighting the touch-paper of the conflict and that it is profoundly unfair that the loser should be Barak, the would-be peacemaker, while the provocateur, Sharon, has come out with the top job. What is going on in the Middle East, the rationalists further inquire. Have the Israeli people taken leave of their senses, putting in the ultimate hardliner as head of government? Do they want another war?
But it's not that simple, it never is. Checking out of a hotel in Tel Aviv this week, I prop some luggage against the counter and go back to get another bag. When I return, the receptionist looks close to heart failure: she was afraid it might be a bomb. "In Israel, you know . . ." she explains. A sign in Hebrew and English in the lobby says: "Carrying a weapon on hotel property is prohibited by law".
There have been a lot of bombs in Israel in recent years: explosions in the market, in restaurants, on the street. Fervent and desperate young Arab men come in, explosives strapped to their thin frames and vengeance on their mind. The rest is tragedy.
Israelis don't feel safe and they felt less safe under Barak. Practising his English on me, a Russian immigrant tells me of his discomfort. His family left the old Soviet Union because they were not happy there. Now he is in Israel, feeling insecure and under threat. He has to do reserve duty in the army every year and speaks wistfully of his friends who got as far as New York and Washington, DC. Back home, communism is only a memory.
Back on the Via Dolorosa, I stop off at the site of the condemnation and flagellation of Jesus. Here Pilate washed his hands and decided, in modern parlance, it was "not his problem". He was the perfect role-model for the outside world looking on today. An Arab trader invites me into his tiny store. I want to talk about the situation but realise, amid the trinkets and bric-a-brac, that my wallet will inevitably be lighter by the time we are finished.
"What do you think of the election result?" I venture. He shrugs: "Sharon is no different from Barak. For us, Israel is Israel. They are not in their land: it is our land. The Israelis: we don't want them." He adds that the Israelis came in by force and would go out the same way because it was the only thing they understood: "They will never stay, we have this in writing in the Koran that they will not stay. They will be big and they will grow, but after that they will be finished".
An apocalyptic vision indeed and a curious echo of a comment by an Israeli academic earlier in the week, who said that the "Palestinian entity" had not yet accepted the existence of a Jewish state in the Middle East. Discovering I am from Ireland, the souvenir-seller repeats the common Palestinian mantra that our two peoples are in the same situation.
Quickly we are into bargaining. He wants to sell me a shiny goblet that I do not need, at an exorbitant price. Reluctant to just walk out, I beat him down to two-thirds the price and leave, unsure what I will do with my new purchase. At the Egyptian resort of Taba, just before the election, Barak's people were negotiating with Palestinian representatives for a last-minute deal. His strategy was unclear but it sounded like he wanted to unveil a package, just before election day which would sway the vote. The Barak administration was portraying it as a rare window of opportunity.
In the end, there were no magic formulae. The negotiations were interrupted because of a violent incident back home and never reached a satisfactory conclusion. Barak put a brave face on it and fought to the end but nothing could save him. As the results came in this week, an international human rights worker who was also watching remarked: "He really screwed up". It is now conventional wisdom that Barak was an inept politician. Israelis say he went too far, too fast, in pursuit of peace. Outsiders believe he cracked down too hard on the Palestinian youths throwing stones, generating widespread anger and making it impossible for their leaders to cut a deal.
But the human rights activist made another pertinent observation: Barak's toughness with the Palestinian protesters was deemed just about tolerable by international opinion because he was, at the same time, trying to make peace. If Sharon, who is not known as a peacemaker and has a reputation as a very hard man indeed, tries to implement tough measures against the Palestinians, it will likely produce a much greater backlash. He is the ideal demon-figure for the international liberal-left.
Against that, there is little evidence that "the Bulldozer" cares a dried fig for international public opinion. If past behaviour is a reliable guide, he will look after his own people first, let the chips fall where they may. Mao Zedong said a guerrilla must move among the people like a fish in the water: don't be surprised if "Arik" seeks to drain the water.
Depressing? Don't look to the Middle East these days for reason to be cheerful. The only hope, because nobody else has the same power or influence, is that the US will exert a restraining hand on both sides. They could tell Sharon to be on his best behaviour: which, for much of the election campaign, he was. They could also plead with the Palestinians to hold back and see if anything can be salvaged from an admittedly unpromising situation.
THERE are wild cards on both sides. Funerals of militants on the Gaza Strip are accompanied by other young men dressed in martyr's white and sporting explosives around their waist. It is a chilling sight. Meanwhile, one of Sharon's more extreme supporters in the Israeli parliament has reportedly boasted of Israel's ability to burn Beirut and bomb Tehran. But, as though seeking to damp down expectations, the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, has instructed his ambassadors to stop using the term "peace process" about the Middle East. It has been replaced in the diplomatic lexicon by "peace negotiations" or "movements towards peace". In his last days in office, President Clinton tried to save the process and Barak along with it. He even went on Israeli television to give implicit support to the incumbent. Clinton added he was also planning to learn Hebrew - "and Irish".
A sharp assessment of the new Israeli leader was made by the Belfast-born and Dublin-reared late President of Israel, Chaim Herzog, who wrote of Sharon's military career: "Few, if any, of his superior officers over the years had a good word to say for him as far as human relations and integrity were concerned, although none would deny his innate ability as a field soldier. Probably because of this, he never achieved his great ambition, to be chief of staff of the armed forces".
But this week, Sharon achieved another great ambition. One of his senior advisers has been reiterating all week that the new leader will imitate the British Government's Northern Ireland policy in refusing to talk to the Palestinians until the intifada stops. He was clearly unaware that there were contacts, even while the violence was going on. The contacts took place because realistic people on both sides were looking for a way out of a dangerous situation. Perhaps similar contacts are taking place between people of goodwill in the Palestinian and Israeli camps. Let's hope they are, and that they prove successful because, to quote Chaim Herzog again, writing about the 1995 assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin: "The fires of destruction are burning at the edge of the camp. If we do not, together, hasten to extinguish them, they will destroy our entire house".