The conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians is disturbing for numerous reasons - the most worrisome of which is the fact that the old Arab determination to annihilate the state of Israel seems to have regained currency among Palestinians. That might be counted as Arafat's perverse success, yet it is surely a measure, also, of Sharon's failure - and of the failure of the Bush policy of ''dead or alive,'' which licensed Sharon's fatal escalation.

But now, with the Israeli Defense Force and the suicidal killers of the Palestinian militias locked in a conflict from which neither can withdraw, one sees an instance of the most terrifying scenario that can be imagined. This is the way the very earth could move to self-destruction - two forces in conflict that, even as it unfolds, is understood by both as leading inevitably to mutual doom, yet neither party can stop.

The complete irrationality of violence has never been more clearly on display than in the Middle East this year, yet the grip of violence on the minds of Israeli and Palestinian leaders both could not be stronger. In America, meanwhile, we tell ourselves that our robust ''war on terrorism'' has gone well, yet the Israeli experience suggests how efficiently amoral terrorists are recruited out of the ruined pieces of nature that fall from ''overwhelming force.'' Israel's dilemma is a foretaste of America's: This great nation shall so wear out to naught.

Where is the hope? Today, at the Dag Hammerskjold Plaza at the United Nations in New York, more than 1,000 coffins will be laid out in rows. They will be covered with flags - blue-and-white flags of the State of Israel and red-green-black-and-white flags of the Palestinian Authority.

The coffins represent each of the persons killed in the 18 months of warfare, a display that refuses to treat the casualty numbers as an abstraction. Each of the dead was a person with a name, a history, a hope; each with a family. Each was someone's child. And each will be represented on the plaza today.

Remarkably enough, it is parents of Israeli and Palestinian dead who have arranged today's display of coffins - a reaction of grief and heartbreak that has led not to a cry for revenge but to a plea for peace.

''The Families' Forum'' is the name of a cross-conflict group consisting of about 200 Israelis (''The Parents' Circle'') and 150 Palestinians (''The Movement for Change'') who have the overriding experience in common of having lost a child to the violence. And by seeing the violence through the lens of that loss, they see it differently. Suddenly, birth and youth and generational hope enter the picture to balance the dread mortality of the old. By insisting on the fact that the lives of children are overwhelmingly what is at stake in this war, the Families' Forum is demanding an alternative to the despair of violence.

Not only that. By reminding us that these dead began as beloved children and are still mourned as such, the Families' Forum puts the fate of children squarely before the decision makers - not only as a responsibility but as an opportunity.

''Every new child who comes into the world carries within himself or herself the promise of a bright future,'' Boston's Dr. Jane Schaller, President of the International Pediatric Association, told a major gathering in Israel last month. ''No child is born with discrimination in his or her mind, hatred in his or her heart, or rocks in his or her hands. These are acquired conditions.''

They are not innate. They are not necessary. They are not inevitable. The future can be different from the past.

In the midst of an unending war, what does it take to see that? In the case of the Families' Forum, it took the shattering of personal hope to create the possibility of political hope. These Israelis and Palestinians, working together, have erected billboards across the battle zones of Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza, saying simply, ''Better the pains of peace than the agonies of war - Yitzhak Rabin.''

Having lost children of their own, these parents see better than anyone how war brings the great world to naught. All those coffins. Yet still they call for another way.

''When people who have made the ultimate sacrifice can commit themselves, out of profound loss and grief, to reconciliation and peace,'' one of their American supporters told me, ''those of us who care about the region have no right to lose hope.''

James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe.

© Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company

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