Having passed with flying colours, Tuval returns to the main gunshop attached to the shooting gallery, where the owner renews the licence for the Beretta, and sells him a fresh box of bullets.

WINCHESTER – FULL METAL JACKET says the writing on the box. In the display case beneath the counter is an assortment of other guns, saw-toothed “special forces” knives, knuckledusters and telescopic batons for sale.

Next to us an elderly woman, who a few seconds earlier was going though her own locked-and-loaded routine like a veteran SAS man, is now perusing a selection of “discreet gun pouches” which the manufacturer insists are the “Best home your weapon will ever find”.

“Be sure to wash your hands, you don’t want to get lead poisoning,” Tuval tells me as I pick up one of the tiny copper coloured bullets from the table to take a closer look.

A journalist and researcher by profession, Alon Tuval is no more a fanatic, than Hassan Akramawi is a terrorist.

Akramawi is a shopkeeper on what used to be the main Jersualem to Jericho Road. When I meet him he is suffering from flu, worried about who will pick up his kids from school, and the effects on his grocery shop of what is simply referred to as “the wall”.

“My business is dead because this wall has cut the street, cut people off from each other and their own families,” he says, his voice shaking with emotion. Perhaps it’s the effects of the flu, but there is a real sense that this is a man hovering on the edge of breakdown.

Outside Akramawi’s shop the wall runs right across the road. Forty feet high, it slices through the community, severing Jerusalem from the West Bank village of Abu Dis.

“If you want security for your house you build the wall in your own garden not in your neighbour’s,” he complains, increasingly fired up and distraught.

The wall’s ugly grey cement is pockmarked where rocks have been thrown at it in anger. In bright red painted letters someone has daubed “From Warsaw Ghetto to Abu Dis Ghetto”. Someone else points out that it was “Paid for by the USA,” while another asks, “Is this the work of a man of peace?”

A few children negotiating a checkpoint that crosses from one side of the wall to another on their way home from school, stop by Akramawi’s shop for some sweets. “This is all I sell now for a shekel or two to the kids. I even take the light bulbs out because I have to save some money, life is too difficult to live any more.”

Tuval and Akramawi, one Israeli, and one Palestinian, live only a few miles apart on either side of Jerusalem’s “green line”. Their lives like countless others, are etched with fear and uncertainty by an age-old conflict, the latest round of which is known today as the al-Aqsa intifada.

It was four years ago this week, before he became Israeli Prime Minister, that Ariel Sharon went for his now infamous walk on what Jews call Temple Mount. In a play on words using Sharon’s nickname, a Palestinian colleague I knew at the time likened the gesture to that of “the bulldozer, in a china shop”.

Sacred to Jews, the site of Temple Mount is known by Arabs as al-Haram al-Sharif: the third holiest site in Islam, it also hosts the al-Aqsa mosque.

Sharon’s act could not have been more calculated to ignite violence. Within hours of his visit, hundreds of incensed Palestinians throwing rocks and petrol bombs confronted Israeli troops, and many Palestinians were subsequently gunned down. The al-Aqsa intifada was born.

But as the intifada enters its fifth year, many on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian divide are growing ever more concerned as to where it is leading them. According to recent Israeli Defence Force (IDF) estim ates, the coming year will be a critical period for the Palestinian people and the conflict.

“This year will be the year that will shape the Palestinian struggle. The Palestinian leadership will have to decide whether to aim towards a peace agreement with Israel or to continue with the armed resistance,” says one senior IDF officer.

But what of the Palestinians themselves? As Israel’s security wall daily encroaches into their territory and lives, do they also sense that a make or break showdown is fast approaching?

In the past, particularly in the years 1987 to 1993, following the first intifada or “war of the stones,” as it was known, anniversaries of the uprising were often opportunities for Palestinians to endorse resistance to the occupation through street demonstrations or an escalation of attacks on Israeli targets.

But this year the mood is different. While much of the fight against occupation by ordinary Palestinians remains heroic, these are unheroic times. Suicide bombings like that by a woman in the busy French Hill suburb of Jerusalem last week has lost the intifada some of its outside worldwide sympathy.

Meanwhile, a leadership crisis has led some to predict that what really preoccupies Palestinians these days is an “intra-fada” – an uprising not against Israel but against elements of Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority (PA), long perceived to be corrupt and politically out of touch.

Then there is the wall. It’s hard to overemphasise the sheer injustice of this concrete scar that gouges its way across olive tree orchards, family homes, grazing areas, places of work, schools and anything else that, frankly, the state of Israel decides to confiscate. Its sheer physical presence bears down when you are near it. Walking beside it, on either side, you can see Palestinians trying to live their lives under its weight. Like the South African regime during apartheid, the Israelis are well on the way with their policy of containment to creating the equivalent of the infamous Bantustans, where most black South Africans were forced to live.

“This used to be a beautiful place, now I live in the shadow, no sun, no light, even the air seems bad,” one local Abu Dis farmer tells me, struggling to make himself heard against the deafening sound of bulldozers working on the next stretch of wall nearby.

The degradation and humiliation of Palestinians is made all the worse by the employment of some of their men by private Israeli security firms to guard other Arab labourers who work on the wall’s construction.

“I know they blame us for this,” says one guard when asked what he thinks of the Palestinian villagers who stand nearby watching as a bulldozer digs up their back garden to lay cables used for high-powered security lights and electrified fencing.

Elsewhere, other Palestinian labourers can be seen daily running the gauntlet of army patrols to cross gaps in the wall before being picked up by Israeli employers to work in a variety of “dirty jobs” inside Israel itself. A useful source of cheap labour, few of these Israeli employers seem concerned by the security risk involved, or that one of their workers just might be a suicide bomber.

In these desperate economic times, most Palestinians have no choice but to take what they can that offers them a living. Even sometimes at the risk of being called a “collaborator”.

Why, most ordinary Palestinians ask, has the outside world been so quiet in its condemnation of the security wall despite the International Court’s ruling that its construction is illegal? Why is it called a “security” wall at all, when instead of just separating Israel from the West Bank it separates Arab from Arab?

Indeed, how can a people whose history is full of terrible ghettos, now themselves be building one?

As these questions continue to be ignored, above Abu Dis village stands what was once The Cliff Hotel. As a struggling freelance correspondent covering the first intifada in the 1980s, this was my home on and off for many years.

At The Cliff I met fellow journalists and aid workers, celebrated Christmas, held an engagement party, and made friends from among the Palestinian community and around the world. Some of the memories are among the fondest of my life.

It is difficult to explain the feelings I had when last week, I found that the security wall had cut right through its grounds, and the building itself was now an Israeli army base and checkpoint.

According to one local man who asked to be called Abu Hamid, a few days ago following the suicide bomb attack in Jerusalem many Palestinians carrying green West Bank ID cars and returning from the capital, were arrested and detained at The Cliff.

One man is said to have been badly beaten by soldiers, who urinated in his mouth before pushing him from a second storey roof. While I was unable to corroborate this story, such human rights abuses are not uncommon in