Friday evening: dusk has fallen over the Holy Land and a three-quarter moon is rising through a cloudless sky. Israel and Palestine are preparing quietly for their very different Friday nights: the start of the Jewish Sabbath; the end of the Muslim equivalent.
We are driving into the West Bank city of Ramallah. Suddenly there are noises that have made the Holy Land famous in our own time - what sounds like rocket fire, glass breaking and rocks being heaved on to the road. Drivers on the dual carriageway, their instincts honed by years of practice during the Intifada, screech to a halt, manoeuvre frantically and accelerate away in the opposite direction.
The shouting gets closer and the rock-throwing continues. Eventually, a group of Arab youths become visible, running down the hill towards the giant Marlboro ad by the city limits. It takes a moment to realise that this can't be what it sounds like. There have been no Israeli soldiers in Ramallah for six years.
"What's going on?" I ask a young man standing on the pavement.
"Man," he says, "it's soooooo crazy. We get rid of the Israelis. Now we have all this shit."
"What's it about?" "Football," he says with contempt.
The locals, he explains, have just played the team from the Balata refugee camp near Nablus. There is always bad feeling between the supporters. (And this was nothing, I discovered later, to what happened when a West Bank team played one from the Gaza Strip.) He stops. "Do you want anything, you know, stuff?" he asks. "Or are you straight?"
Giant Marlboro ads, football hooligans, dope dealers. . . welcome to the incipient state of Palestine, a place that in many respects is neither more nor less holy than most of the 190-odd countries existing.
Of all the weeks in the quadrennial calendar, the one with the Olympic opening ceremony is the one where shows of nationhood have most global resonance. Tomorrow in Sydney a lone athlete will carry the Palestinian flag; marching behind him will be just one swimmer.
The two of them might have gone into the stadium emboldened by an official declaration of Palestine's independence. The day earmarked for this was Wednesday, September 13th. But the moment passed, under the pressure of world politics.
It would have been meaningless anyway. Notionally, the Palestine Liberation Organisation declared independence 12 years ago. And a declaration this week would have been equally ignored, not only by Israel, but also by world opinion, which is sympathetic to this Israeli government's efforts to do a deal.
But no one doubts now that independence is coming: somehow, sometime soon. The reality of impending Palestine is accepted by everyone except those on the wilder shores of Israeli politics - admittedly a fairly long stretch of coastline, but not one that any longer has the moral or physical strength to withstand the onrushing tide of historical inevitability.
There are no trivial times in the Middle East, but the months until Bill Clinton leaves office in January, are crucial. Palestinian sovereignty might, just might, come in triumph with handshakes on the White House lawn, followed by the full-hearted consent of the Israeli and Palestinian people. It might happen amid terrible bloodshed.
Things being as they are, it will almost certainly be a mess. The arguments about Jerusalem go on but it seems to me that something has changed crucially: Israel no longer has the moral certitude to allow it to suppress Palestine indefinitely.
When Arafat returned from New York last Saturday for the meeting with his central council that took the decision to delay, he was greeted by the massed band of his security forces, headed by his personal swordbearer and half-a-dozen pipers who struck up The Road to the Isles with charming irrelevance. It could have been anywhere in the developing world.
Every week there are other, quieter signs. Palestine now has its own Web suffix. Appropriately for a country which is the world's afterthought, it is "ps". At school some children have begun learning according to a specifically Palestinian curriculum.
A new international telephone code (970 instead of the Israeli 972) is said to be imminent. There are stamps, although the money value is in non-existent Palestinian fils.
In Gaza and the West Bank cities (excepting always Jerusalem, that most special of special cases), there is no longer any visible hint of a country under occupation. But this is in part an illusion. Arafat's jet flies in and out of Gaza airport by the grace and permission of Ehud Barak's government. And anyone else who wants to leave is allowed to do so only after checking in their self-respect with Israeli officialdom. Passengers from the airport have to be bused to the nearest Israeli border post to get an exit permit.
Dr Mahdi Abdul-Hadi, the head of Passia (the Palestine Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs), is regularly invited to speak at international conferences, sometimes with Jimmy Carter or even Bill Clinton.
"If I want to renew my travelling document, I have to go to the Israeli Ministry of the Interior and start queuing at four in the mornings, sometimes two or three times, and it will cost me $150 to $200. This kind of humiliation is ongoing."
The political scientist Ghassan Khatib can go to Jerusalem, because his office is there. He cannot, however, invite his wife or mother to the city for dinner. "Dinner can only be a reason if you have good relations with the right Israeli officers." He needs another permit to cross Israel to visit Gaza, where the residents now complain they are being denied the right to go to Jerusalem even for prayer.
The Palestine that might have called itself independent this week looks like a Rorschach test on the map, reminiscent of the old, mad South African statelet of Bophu that swana, created out of unrelated bite-sized chunks.
In fact it is even more complicated than that. The land is divided into A, B and C areas, depending on whether the Palestinians have control over both administration and security (A areas), administration but not security (B areas) or neither (C areas). Even on the most optimistic assessment - and the status of Jerusalem is irrelevant here - it will always be in two parts: the West Bank and Gaza, separated by the width of Israel.
Distances in these parts are surprisingly tiny. It's an hour's drive from Gaza to Jerusalem, if you don't have to endure obstructive border guards. Putative Palestine is a fraction larger than Oxfordshire. The history of non-contiguous countries is not an encouraging one: witness the fate of Pakistan. And there are already signs of the two wings developing different characteristics. But Palestine and Israel have many things in common, and one of these is the sense of overriding national destiny papering over a thousand underlying fissures.
This destiny, however, is created entirely by recent history. Less than 30 years ago, the Israeli prime minister, Golda Meir, could scornfully deny that the Palestinian people existed. Their sense of nationhood was barely visible before the 1920s and was fully fashioned only amid the adversity of the refugee camps and the Israeli occupation.
"They now have different historical experiences, beliefs and myths from any other Arabs," says Dr Menahem Klein, lecturer in politics at Israel's Bar-Ian University.
"Palestinians are not instinctively employees, not followers," says Mahdi Abdul-Hadi. "I think we are always demanding to be equal partners . . . We are talkative and argumentative."
"That reminds me of another country around here," I murmur. "Of course," he says. "We have cousins called Israelis." Ghassan Khatib agrees with this analysis. "There is a theory that oppressed people tend to admire their oppressors because they are stronger. I think Palestinians do admire features of Israeli society, and one of them is democracy."
But democracy has never flowered in the Arab world. Palestine is a cacophony of voices: the town of Nablus alone has nine TV stations. But journalists who shout too loud find that life can get difficult.
"Officially, censorship does not exist," says journalist Khaled Abu Aker. "But we have started to face the need for self-censorship in order not to have problems."
The country does not feel like a dictatorship. The big hope is municipal elections, and these have been postponed - regularly, indefinitely and mysteriously.
Palestine's tortuous route to independence means the country has endured the disillusionment that inevitably follows liberation without the cathartic joy of actually getting there. The Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza was once the fieriest of revolutionary hotbeds. On the street corners where once there were gun battles, patriotism has been succeeded by a sullen cynicism.
"It was better in the Israeli times," grumbles one shopkeeper. "Then if you went to prison you knew you were there for fighting the Israelis. Now you go to prison and you don't know why. And it's very hard to get out."
His voice is unusually bitter, but even the most optimistic peace scenarios cannot solve Palestine's essential problem: how to make a living. "I used to take 2,000 shekels a day," says Abu Ibrahim, a draper. "Now it's barely 200."
One of his few customers is Jasir um Mahmoud, a taxi-driver's wife and mother of 12. "At least we don't have the Israeli army running after our kids," she says, "but the economic situation is still very hard."
Life is tough the world over for mothers of 12, but that is not such an unusual figure in Gaza, which has the world's highest birth-rate. I saw thousands of girls emerge from one narrow primary school gate - identically dressed in striped cotton dresses with jeans underneath for modesty, and ribbons in their hair for femininity. It seemed not so much the end of a normal school day, more like the migration of the wildebeest.
It's hard to be hopeful for these girls' future in a country that has no visible means of support. There is no serious export industry, though there is a trade in carnations - which could make the place dangerously dependent on western marriage rates. Given that there is hardly any spare land and even less fresh water, agriculture is not an enticing option.
What Palestine does have is a well-educated and open-minded workforce. Arafat has talked of making the country "the Singapore of the Middle East." But if he is open for business, the customers are not yet piling in.
Palestine is still full of surprises. Ramallah has become a boom town because the West Bank administration is concentrated there; there is a casino in Jericho which attracts the more louche kind of Israeli; Bethlehem will always be a nice little earner.
There are some surprisingly rich people around. Gaza City is far from the unmitigated hell-hole of popular imagination, and the Mediterranean is as blue here as anywhere else. The latest fashion accessory for the rich Gazan is a Sri Lankan or Filipino housemaid. You just can't get the staff . . .
Yet the suspicion between the two sides lingers poisonously. The latest idea for Jerusalem is that it should be declared to be under divine administration. "And does God empty the rubbish?" one Israeli commented. It is suggested that Gaza and the West Bank should be linked with a bridge over the full width of the desert, so that no Palestinians have to touch Israeli soil. Ah, yes, but who's in charge of the columns?
At the PLO flag shop in Gaza (which sells inflatable Arafats, the sort sometimes waved at English football matches) you can buy lapel pins with the Israeli and Palestinian flags intertwined. They are popular with Israeli peaceniks over for conferences. "Do any Palestinians buy them?" I ask the owner. "Never," he says.
"We know the Palestinians are preparing for a struggle," says an Israeli army officer. "They are accumulating food and water. They are training their people. They have these youth camps for children aged seven to 13, teaching them to kidnap Israeli soldiers." Even optimists put the chances of Barak (who has no parliamentary majority) getting a deal past the Israeli public as no better than 50/50. But in the mirror-image country on the other side of the argument, the politics is just as difficult. Arafat's popularity shot up after July, when he got tough and refused to do a deal at Camp David.
The Israelis have many qualities but empathy is not one of them. You realise that just driving round Jerusalem: for Israeli motorists, other road-users' problems are never their problems. They are just nuisances to be bullied out of the way.
In the wider context, that's why it took Israelis so long to understand that the Palestinians were, like them, victims of history. But the glimmering of understanding they now have is perhaps the one thing that makes another full-scale war less likely.
Even now there won't be much charity around for the new infant: conceived amid hatred; born into poverty; with war, oppression, tyranny and terrorism deep in its genes. And yet the Israelis will give Palestine a curious birthday present - an example to emulate.
"Israel started with nothing," says Dr Mahdi Abdul-Hadi. "In 1947 you had to queue for one egg a week. We are in a much better situation than they were. We don't have much and we start from scratch. But this is the Middle East, the land of miracles. It will witness the rebirth of Palestine."