Mistrust reigns despite peace moves

By Orla Guerin BBC Middle East correspondent

Under a blazing sun the police commander stood fingering his dark shirt, like a nervous bridegroom trying out his suit.

He and his men had been out of uniform for almost a year.

It is hoped that the return of Palestinian policeman will be a step towards peace

Now Israel was letting Bethlehem's police get back to work on their own streets - one more step along US President George W Bush's roadmap for peace.

I watched as a young recruit hauled himself up the concrete face of a two-storey barracks - using his bare hands and some homemade knee-pads.

It was his task to raise the Palestinian flag on the roof. From his colleagues in the dusty courtyard below, thin applause.

A producer friend looked away - bored. "I've already filmed this ceremony three times in the past few years," she said.

Half an hour later I stood on Manger Square, watching the police pose for photographs like tourists on a package trip.

I asked Bethlehem's long-suffering Mayor Hanna Nasser if he thought the roadmap could work.

"Yes," he replied, then added quickly: "But we must have international troops to keep Israelis and Palestinians apart."

Gone

It's a short distance from the square to the house where George Saadeh now lives.

The slight softly-spoken principal of Bethlehem's Greek Orthodox school no longer lives in his own home.

His wife Najwa cannot bear to return there because it holds the clothes and books and memories of their daughter Christine.

I don't believe that something will change because of the roadmap Pnina Eisenmann

So now the Saadehs live with relatives.

We meet in a well-tended living room filled with the viscous silence of grief.

On the pale walls - family photos and religious pictures in ornate frames.

Here a devoted father tells me about his 12-year-old child shot dead last March.

Israeli troops opened fire on the family car in broad daylight while hunting for militants.

George still speaks of Christine in the present tense.

"She likes to help people," he says.

"She likes swimming and music and going out on her bicycle. She never does anything wrong."

In her photographs Christine has warm dark eyes, wavy hair and an engaging smile.

We're as good as dead already - we're on Israel's wanted list Zakaria Zubadi

"She was teaching little children how to pray," her father says.

George believes that somehow Christine knew her death was near.

"On the day she was killed," he says, "she went back into her classroom after school. She told her classmates she wanted to say goodbye because she might not see them again."

George says Christine dreamed of peace, of visiting Jerusalem, and of getting to know Israelis.

She started learning Hebrew. "I believe she is praying for peace now, " he says, "so that other children will not have to go through what she did."

George says firmly that he wants the truce to work and has no hatred for Israelis.

Forgiveness like that is a rarity here - on either side.

Ready to fight

Across the West Bank in the town of Jenin, I track down Palestinian renegades ready to wreck the fragile ceasefire.

Zakaria Zubadi - his skin blackened by powder burns from handling explosives - sits in a back alley with two well-armed bodyguards.

He and his men in the Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades want every last Israeli out of the West Bank and Gaza.

Under the roadmap Palestinian police should now be reining them in.

But Mr Zubadi is not afraid of the Palestinian security chief, Mohammed Dahlan.

"Will he try to arrest you?" I ask.

"I don't think so," is his cool reply. "He knows me well. We were together in an Israeli jail."

Mr Zubadi and his men allow us to film their faces.

"We're as good as dead already," he says. We're on Israel's wanted list."

Taking places

A few hours away in a Jewish settlement on the edge of Jerusalem, Pnina Eisenmann is rushing around her comfortable home - wearing the distracted look of a new mother.

Her baby daughter, less than a month old, sleeps soundly in her pram.

I believe she is praying for peace now so that other children will not have to go through what she did George Christine's father

"I hope she will bring light to the house, and to my heart," she says.

The tiny infant must take the place of two.

Pnina was doubly bereaved last year - her mother Noa and her daughter Gal killed in a suicide bombing which she was lucky to survive.

Her new baby is named Noga in their memory - the letters No from Noa and Ga from Gal.

"Unfortunately," she says, "I don't believe that something will change because of the roadmap.

"It's hard for me to believe in peace between Arabs and Jews".

She looks down at Noga.

"I think her eyes are like Gal's," she says.

When she died she was five years and three months old.

"When you lose someone at that age you lose a person, not a child."

Immune to hope

Live long enough in the Middle East and you start to feel that optimism is like a dose of the flu.

It becomes an illness you treat, knowing it will pass.

Since the roadmap was launched a little hope has begun to spread, but many like Pnina are immune.

They do not believe Washington will be able to graft a solution onto all the mutual hatred and mistrust.