Conventional wisdom holds that the developing "demographic threat" and the emergence of Geneva will force Sharon to act, but nothing dictates what kind of action he will take. When Olmert floated his "unilateral separation" trial balloon, the settler right turned on him with fury and the left was elated. But a closer look suggests little more than a clever attempt to co-opt the renascent momentum for peace for an extension of the war with the Palestinians by other means. In his much-hyped speech on the matter in mid-December, Sharon presented little more than a clever term--"disengagement"--for what his generals call redeployment. The plan is to move the Green Line eastward, rapidly complete the wall, tighten control over East Jerusalem and the Jordan Valley, and then, as Aluf Benn wrote in Ha'aretz, to "close the territories in the West Bank and throw away the key," with no concern for the welfare of the Palestinians who remain behind the wall, or the viability and contiguity of the state they're trapped in. Such proposals are clearly no better than the dreadful status quo, but the cards are all in the hands of Sharon, who still faces no real opposition in the Knesset.

In other words, it is, as always, not yet time to get our hopes up. "People have started to realize, much too late, the end of the path onwhich we've been led," Grossman says. "But there are two questions: How long will it be before the majority grasps this fact, and how many more lives will be lost before then?"

The intellectual ferment in Israel has not escaped notice on the other side of the Green Line, but for the time being, there is rather less cause for hope there. In fact, the flood of breathless publicity that followed the Geneva announcement seems likely to repeat a critical failing of the Oslo era, in which excitement about international diplomacy obscures the deterioration of local conditions. "It's true that the discourse has changed," says Neve Gordon, an activist who has done extensive humanitarian work in the West Bank. "But on the ground, it's getting worse and worse."

In few places is this deterioration more stark than Qalqilya, the West Bank's fourth-largest city. Sitting atop a massive aquifer, plentiful acres of fertile land make it the "breadbasket of Palestine." But this stroke of geographical providence has been met lately with one more unkind. Qalqilya, which has the bad fortune to sit at the very western edge of the West Bank, has been encircled by Israel's security wall, which has confined the city to a narrow peninsula of land in an effort to keep settlements to the north and south "in" and Qalqilya "out."

Now penned in on all four sides, Qalqilya is accessible only via a single guarded checkpoint nearly a mile to its east. Khaled Shanti, the head of the local branch of the Palestinian Farmers Union, took me on a tour of what little agricultural land remains inside the enclosure. As you head out from the built-up city center, the land unravels into a maze of narrow dirt roads that thread between the plots. You can drive right up to the large barbed-wire embankments, the outer limit of the 100-meter-wide "fence," and what you find there are square parcels of farmland slashed into slender triangles by the barrier. You can see the other side, tantalizingly close, where abandoned greenhouses sit among dried-out citrus groves turned yellow from neglect. Israeli trucks glide past on a nearby highway.

A tall, soft-spoken man in his 60s, Shanti's face radiates sorrow as we walk alongside the concertina wire, and he reels off the damage in numbers: 525 acres of farmland taken by the footprint of the wall, 930 acres stranded on the other side (which, despite its claims to the contrary, the army prevents farmers from tending). All told, 85 percent of Qalqilya's cultivated land has been lost, affecting more than 550 farmers. At least 4,000 residents have already given up and left the city for good, and further flight seems inevitable, since the wall is not going to crumble anytime soon. "But what can we do?" Shanti sighs, and I realize slowly and sadly this is not a rhetorical question. "Do you have any ideas? We have tried everything, and we do not know what to do now."

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