IT was all wearily familiar: a stalled peace process just like our own. For Drumcree read the settlement construction at Har Homa.
In Jerusalem, too, the momentum and hope of the early days of the peace process have been squandered by a retreat into polemic and distrust. If you don't move forward, you move back and the gun returns to the streets. And the vicious downward cycle of condemnation and recrimination feeds on itself.
These days it's rare enough to get Palestinian and Israeli politicians on to the same platform, but the fact that the Dutch EU Presidency could do so for a press seminar on the "final status" of the Palestinian state did not signal any rapprochement.
David Bar Ilan, the even more hawkish spokesman of the hawkish Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, bluntly said he did not regard the Palestinians as "partners for peace" given their reaction to Har Homa.
They were "using peace talks as an instrument of war", he claimed, and argued that the Palestinian Authority reminded him of "rather dark moments in the history of our region and world". He does not need to say Nazi, everyone knows what he means.
His claim that the Israelis are not creating new settlements, only expanding old ones, is fiercely disputed by Marwan Barghouti, the leader of Arafat's Fatah group in the Palestinian parliament, who claims that Israeli bulldozers are "creating new facts on the ground" in 39 separate sites in flagrant breach of the spirit of the interim agreement that followed the Oslo accord.
Yet, despite the deadlock, and gulf of distrust between the main parties, some Israelis manifest an almost perverse sense of optimism.
That is particularly true of two of the architects of the secret Oslo talks, Ron Pundik, an academic and adviser to the former Labour deputy foreign minister, Yossi Beilin, and the former head of the foreign ministry, Uri Savir.
Savir believes that the framework of the process itself is the key. What they have done once they can do again. "What we had achieved was the ability to create something new. That we should not agree now does not matter."
Both men believe that the seeds of a settlement still lie in an unofficial outline of a deal mapped out by Beilin and Arafat's main negotiator, Abu Mazen, only three days before Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated.
The interim agreement set a timetable for the gradual extension of Palestinian self-rule to be followed by talks on the final status of the Palestinian "state" its borders, and, critically, the fate of Jerusalem.
The Beilin/Abu Mazen plan proposed a return to the pre-1967 borders with some mutually agreed land swaps to recognise the reality of new settlements. A confederation of Palestine with Jordan would provide some of the security reassurances the Israelis sought, and Jerusalem, the capital of both states, would be jointly managed.
Crucially, the Palestinians in return for security guarantees would get their independent state, the unspoken promise of Oslo, which, Savir points out, is backed in opinion polls as a solution by one in two Israelis. Seventy per cent believe it will happen. The fear in Jerusalem is that although Netanyahu will probably eventually propose the creation of a state, his plan is likely to involve only at most 60 per cent of the land seized by the Israelis in 1967. And such a proposal is likely to reignite the Palestinian intifada, if violence has not already returned to the streets on a massive scale courtesy of the settlements policy.
The tragedy is that the government appears to have no clear strategy to put potentially fruitful talks back on the rails.
The problem is compounded by an apparent partial disengagement by the US from the process. Faced with three unpalatable options - to twist Arafat's arm to accept Israeli building, to lean heavily on Netanyahu, or to wait and see - President Clinton clearly has opted for the latter.
Not that the Palestinians have a short-term strategy, either. Arafat appears to believe that all he has to do is stick to his demand that the Israelis live up to the promises of their Labour predecessors. At the very least, winning the propaganda war must also mean creating a form of rule that defies the stereotypes of Arabs that Israeli hardliners thrive on.
Yet over the last few days, a Palestinian human rights group has once again complained of systematic torture and beatings by the Palestine Authority forces. The authority has shown itself deeply hostile to the free circulation of ideas, even banning Edward Said's writings against the Oslo process.
Such impressions are compounded by a report from the authority's own audit office which reported that some 40 per cent of the authority's budget, or 5323 million, was improperly accounted for.
The report is understood to be causing concern in the EU, which is the authority's largest supplier of aid, although a spokesman for the Commission said it operated a tight system of double signatures on all expenditure and was confident EU money was not misappropriated.