"IT is forbidden for us to give up hope." Thus Shimon Peres, the Israeli Prime Minister spoke to his grief stricken, frightened people on the day that a fourth suicide bombing brought the death toll in 10 days to more than 50.
It was the holiday of Purim, the feast which celebrates God's special protection of the Jews. The centre of Tel Aviv was crowded with schoolchildren in fancy dress costumes. An Israeli friend said: "It was like setting off a bomb in Grafton Street on a Saturday afternoon."
The lines of stress and exhaustion etched on the 72 year old Prime Minister's face told their own story. Shimon Peres was the driving force' behind the Oslo Accords, but as well as this he had persuaded many of his fellow countrymen to share his dream of an integrated Israel where Palestinian and Jew could live together.
Now it seems that dream must be a casualty of the violence as Mr Peres, desperate to save some part of his strategy, announces plans for an $80 million "separation barrier" between Israel and the West Bank.
And yet, amid the understandable demands for swift and terrible vengeance against Hamas, the attacks on Yasser Arafat for failing to do more, the posters scrawled with messages urging "Peres, Go Home", what has been truly impressive has been the number of voices, particularly Israeli voices, calling for calm and continued support for the peace process.
The head of the Israeli intelligence service makes the point that it is impossible to defeat suicide bombers by military means. A senior cabinet minister reminds his fellow countrymen and women that the overwhelming majority of Palestinians want to live in peace, that in voting for Yasser Arafat a few weeks ago they were demonstrating their support for this.
In Gaza, thousands of Palestinians turn out to peace rallies and speak, many for the first time, of their sympathy for those Israelis who have lost loved ones.
Challenged by such testaments of moral courage, the only appropriate reactions are gratitude and humility. Gratitude that those who are charged with taking our peace process forward do not have to face dilemmas of the terrible gravity that currently confront both Shimon Peres and Yasser Arafat.
There are times when the endless reports of proximity talks, aborted meetings and near misses seem stumbling, fractious, even farcical. At least it is possible to hope that they may yet move forward slowly towards a settled peace.
As for humility, there are lessons to be learnt from watching the anguish of both communities in Israel. Gerry Adams may write, as he has done this week that the IRA is capable of another 25 years of war. Nobody doubts it, just as nobody doubts that such a renewal of the conflict would fall hardest on those for whose good Sinn Fein and the IRA claim to be acting - Northern Catholics living in the ghetto areas of cities like Belfast and Derry.
But the Sinn Fein president also knows very well - and to his credit has said so repeatedly that at the end of that 25 years, if and when another generation has fought to the point of exhaustion, it will still be necessary to face into the difficult, frustrating task of negotiating a peace.
That is what Shimon Peres and Yasser Arafat, against a background of almost insupportable suffering, continue to tell their people. The context is more hopeful in Ireland, but the nature of the problem is the same.
Last week, in a timely address to the Irish Association in Dublin, Briedge Gadd posed this question: "Will we do better if we get another chance?" Mrs Gadd, the head of the Northern Ireland Probation Service, has already shown the quality of her own courage when she resigned from the Life Service Review Board over its decision last year to grant an early release to Private Lee Clegg.
Her action was particularly important in the context of the peace process because it demonstrated to many in the republican community that there were people in the public service with a fearless commitment to the administration of justice, and to justice being seen to be done.
Mrs Gadd talked about a number of issues on which she feels we must do better if, God willing, we are given an opportunity to rebuild the peace. None of them has to do with the constitutional arguments, nor the wrangle over decommissioning, which will preoccupy political leaders when the date for all party talks arrives. Yet each has the potential to help build the kind of confidence in the peace process that has been lacking.
The first issue is that of the prisoners. Mrs Gadd confirmed what we have also been told by other experts, that the paramilitary prisoners on both sides, and particularly those serving life sentences, have been crucial in building and supporting the drive towards peace.
She is proud of the educational facilities which have been made available to them in prisons in the North and have helped many of them to mature into responsible people, able to play a constructive role in their own communities. She cites Billy Hutchinson, the Progressive Unionist Party spokesman, as a shining example of this, and who would argue with this judgment?
POLICING is another problem which touches quite directly on people's lives and their perception of change, where an opportunity has been missed during the 18 months of peace. We know that David Cook, the chairman of the Northern Ireland Police Authority, has been trying since before the ceasefire to open up a genuine public debate on the role and future of the RUC and that he has been helped in this by Chris Ryder, the journalist who has written a book about the force.
Both men believe there are a substantial number of policemen in Northern Ireland who would have wished this debate to be taken into those areas, republican and loyalist, where the RUC is regarded with deep mistrust.
Yet, whenever a conference or meeting involving community activists has been organised, the RUC has refused to take part. The result has been to confirm the view of many people, by no means all of them supporters of paramilitary groups, that those in authority are indifferent to their concerns.
But, of all the issues to which Mrs Gadd referred, perhaps the most important was employment, and the failure during the 18 months of the ceasefire to create jobs in those areas which have suffered most from the violence.
We know that terrorism has its roots in the sense of injustice that springs from having no stake in society. Reduced to its crudest terms, that means not having a job, nor the dignity that goes with being able to support oneself and one's family.
We have been reminded of this universal truth by the scenes of miserable poverty and squalor in the West Bank refugee camps, which have been the most fertile recruiting ground for Ham as and even more extreme groups. Ballymurphy is not El Fawwar, but people in both places need to be convinced that peace can transform their lives.