The yellow flares and white smoke from the West Bank and Gaza are less diverting than pregnant chads. We have seen and heard everything before, over and over, decade after decade. It is tempting to go on regarding the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians as a contest between sides who have equal and irreconcilable grievances. I do not believe that's true any more. South Africa was also an intractable problem, but there was a right and a wrong. The Middle East is moving in the same direction. Increasingly, this is a battle for liberation. The Israelis have turned into oppressors.

Yasser Arafat is not Nelson Mandela; Ehud Barak is not an Afrikaaner. The two men and their chief advisers know - have known for years now - what a peace deal could look like, almost down to the last detail. But they are also politicians. Barak is dependent on a pure-PR electoral system - which hands the balance of power to headbangers - and on Israeli public opinion, ever bigoted and self-righteous, and currently leaning towards voting Binyamin Netanyahu back into office again. What can you say?

There is another electoral dimension too. No one bothered about the Palestinian vote in West Palm Beach. No contender for the US presidency dare start telling hard truths to the Israelis anywhere close to an election.

Arafat has his own problems. Democracy in Palestine may be more inchoate than in Israel, but he is not - as both the Israeli public and the generals like to make out - a dictator, or even a master strategist. Until the breakdown of talks last summer, he was becoming increasingly unpopular for being too cosy with the Israelis. And right until this round of violence started, he was under pressure from extremist groups not to do a deal. Not yet eyeless, I saw it myself on the streets of Gaza. Palestinian hatred of their occupiers does not need to be orchestrated; it is renewed every time people come into contact with Israeli soldiery or bureaucracy.

Israel likes to claim it is acting in self-defence. It is indeed possible that there is more collaboration between the stone-throwing kids being shown by the cameras and the gunmen behind them than the Palestinians care to let on. But what is being defended?

Israeli troops are on street corners, rather than policing a straightforward border, because of the settlements in Palestinian areas. These palpably fall within the intent of illegality intended by the Geneva Convention in 1949 (Convention IV, Article 49): "The occupying power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies." They are even more palpably an arrogant and immoral attempt at gaining lebensraum, which should be abhorrent to Jews above all people.

There is a fond belief that the settlements were an aberration of the Netanyahu government, repudiated by Barak's more enlightened regime. But latest unofficial figures (not officially denied), show that the budget for settlements has hardly been cut by the present government, and construction has started on almost 3,000 new settler homes in the 18 months since Barak replaced Netanyahu. That is on top of the day-to-day indignities. Of course, Palestinians are angry.

The Israelis are desperate to prevent a UN observer force diluting their military power. At the same time, they are acutely aware that one random act of grand-scale murder could unleash a full-scale war. If that happens, what do the Israelis think they would be fighting for? Freedom? The freedom to do what?

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2000

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