I found Abu Yusuf in the midst of his olive groves, hard at work before the sun grew too strong.

If the farmers do not farm, the bulldozers move in

Already others had given up and were sitting under their trees before heading back to the village with the fruits of their morning's labour.

Abu Yusuf's olives fell like drops of rain on a sheet laid out under the tree.

The harvest had only just begun but Abu Yusuf was working fast. Like so many others from the nearby village of Burin, the old man depends entirely on olives for his livelihood and that livelihood is under threat.

For also working fast on this unseasonably hot morning was a small army of bulldozers and trucks, gouging a road deep through the olive groves of Burin, sending clouds of yellow dust up over the trees.

Here, too, there was a sense of urgency, a need to press ahead before something happend to stop them. The road, when finished, will link the nearby Jewish settlement of Yitzhar more directly with other isolated Jewish communities scattered about the brown hill of the West Bank.

It will also provide a rapid link with Israel itself, just a few miles to the west.

It is here, between the Palestinian cities of Ramallah and Nablus, that everyone expects chunks of territory to be handed over to Palestinian control.

And when that happens - when the Israeli army is suddenly less visible - the settlers who live here, in defiance of international law, want to be sure they can move about quickly and safely.

At the same time, the Israeli government is racing to minimise the dangers posed by a Palestinian state, a state which all but the most implacable hardliners now recognise will soon be a reality.

And so, in a frenzy of dust and rock, roads like this are being laid throughout the West Bank, carving the land into smaller and smaller parcels, challenging the very viability of the future state.

Abu Yusuf is picking while he can. The bulldozers have already taken some of his trees.

Conflict with the settlers makes access to others a risky, even dangerous, business. We feel like prisoners in our own land, he told me.

Across the new road, where settlers have sometimes threatened to shoot villagers who approach their own trees, Husniyeh Zban was also hard at work.

"It's us or them," she told me, with a mixture of defiance and resignation. If they attack us, we have the right to defend ourselves.

On top of the mountain, with a commanding view over Burin and the surrounding area, Michal Ben-Avraham said she knew nothing of the villagers' complaints.

She took me to the graves of two Yitzhar settlers murdered by Palestinian gunmen as they patrolled the settlement last August. We don't want to attack anyone, she told me. We don't want to take anyone's land.

She spoke with evident sincerity, but far below us, we could see the new road, slicing through the olive groves of Burin.

And so, as that lumbering creature known as the Middle East peace process awoke from its long slumber and headed, wearily, for Maryland, Israelis and Palestinians got on with the business of picking and digging, each side staking its claim to a land torn into pieces by 30 years of colonisation.

Claims bolstered by one side by Biblical certainty and absolute power, on the other by an unbroken presence on the land stretching back for generations.

As Yasser Arafat and Binyamin Netanyahu talked about percentages and security the reality of life on the ground played itself out at Burin and countless other points of conflict throughout the West Bank.

Day after day, the news from the Wye River Plantation spoke of safe passages, extradition and nature reserves, the mechanics of a deal designed to break more than a year and a half of stultifying deadlock.

But for settlers and villagers, it's all about the trees and roads, rocks and bullets. And it's hard to see how another summit can change all this.

The Oslo peace process - that grand, flawed attempt to alter the course of history - is dead, in spirit if not in letter. In its place, another kind of process, more grudging and churlish, devoid of trust and optimism, designed merely to avert, looming disaster.

For all the semblance of a breakthrough in Maryland, this is crisis management, not a brave new world.

In 1974, Yasser Arafat stood up at the United Nations in New York and announced that he had an olive branch in one hand, a gun in the other.