Kindred enemies: Israeli and Palestinian extremists have more in common than they think.

• Author: Amrani, Israel
• Position: Includes related article on the economics of the occupied territories

The Tomb of the Patriarchs was filled with worshipers on a Friday evening in December. The Herodian structure of huge reddish stones towered over the rocky landscape among the ruins of houses built before the age of concrete. South of the Tomb, nicknamed "The Cave" by Jewish settlers, lay the city of Hebron, its lights dimmed in the cold, dry winter night.

My companion, a settler from Kiriat Arba, was proud of the building erected by Herod's slave workers some 2,000 years ago as a house of prayer, supposedly over the tomb of Abraham and his family. He was proud of the last king of Judea, as if that demented monarch had carried the ballot for his party's slate in the last elections. This was a Jewish structure, made of Jewish stones, without American aid and Arab labor.

That night, the building was full of Jews and Moslems who worshiped the same God over the grave of their common father. The Jewish men wore prayer shawls over their white Sabbath shirts, partly covering their pistols and submachine guns. Children, dozens of them, played in the closed courtyard, oblivious to the hundreds of pigeons that flocked above, illuminated from below by military spotlights.

The common prayer, which a Western visitor might perceive as a vision of peace on Earth, was not common al all. There was no eye contact; it was, in fact, a mutual act of defiance. Like the symbolic handshake between Yasir Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin on the White House lawn, it could inspire hope, but it was another Middle Eastern mirage. In the coming weeks, Hebron would turn into the killing field of one hope after another.

I had come from Tel Aviv, a bustling city of many young people. How supernormal life is, you think, when you drive through Tel Aviv's urban sprawl, inching in traffic over ever-expanding highways, listening to the same lazy radio talk you might hear in New York or London. That holds true in Jerusalem, too, just forty-five minutes away.

Later, I sat in an old, ugly bus with shatter-proof plastic windows that had already yellowed. Its passengers - all Israelis, some armed - sat quietly as the bus crossed the Green Line in a rocky lunar landscape dotted with green-black-white-and-red Palestinian flags, to the City of the Patriarchs, another forty-five minutes away. The bus arrived after nightfall. It made its last stop in Kiriat Arba, a modern, well-planned Jewish suburb named after the biblical city of the Patriarchs. Kiriat Arba was established by the Labor government in the 1970s as the next best thing to building in Hebron itself. In its early years, Kiriat Arba attracted "ideological settlers" from the Gush Emunim movement. They were heavily subsidized by the government and the Jewish Agency, and the town had grown to some 5,500 residents, most of them attracted by the availability of low-cost housing. Many are recent Russian and Ethiopian immigrants.

After dark, Kiriat Arba is a gated city, its fences patrolled by settlers doing their reserve duty. A big Chevy van, equipped with shatter-proof windows and a metal mesh on the windshield, offered a ride. The driver, a slight, bearded man, held an Uzi on his lap and looked around constantly as he sped on the battered road to the city. Whenever an oncoming car approached, he flashed his lights. If the car had blue plates, meaning Arab, he turned on his high beams, blinding the driver. The settlers say they do it not to humiliate but as a precaution against drive-by shooting. It was a short ride, but it seemed to last an eternity.

Shmuel Mushnik, thirty-eight years old, a Michael Caine look-alike, remarked early in our conversation, "You probably notice that I don't love Arabs." It was part of our small talk, in which Mushnik discussed "the metaphor" of Jurassic Park. He'd loved dinosaurs since his childhood in Russia.

He is an environmentalist, a high-school teacher of Bible and geography, and a talented spare-time painter - one of 500 Jewish settlers who live at the center of Hebron. He was born in Moscow to a Zionist family that was denied exit visas for three years. In 1970, at age fifteen, he came to Israel. In 1976, after his military service as a transport driver, he settled in Kiriat Arba. Since 1984. he has lived with his mathematician wife and four children in a complex of restored Jewish homes a few hundred yards from the Arab market and the Jewish Quarter.

Mushnik's family shares the building - old Jewish property - with several dozen other Jewish families. In 1929, spurred by rumors that Jews were killing Arabs in Jerusalem, Arabs killed sixty-seven Jews in Hebron, putting an end to the Jewish settlement there. In his living room, "where we're sitting." said Mushnik, "the whole Jewish family of Gershon Ben Zion, a pharmacist, was murdered." The Jews living there now are considered the most committed among the Jewish settlers in the Israeli-occupied territories.

Mushnik lives there because he is not wanted. His life is heavily guarded by the Israeli military, often by soldiers who disapprove of his being there. In his view, life in Hebron is no more dangerous than life in Tel Aviv, which was bombed by Iraqi missiles just three years ago.

But he is clearly putting the lives of his children at risk, isn't he? Mushnik offers a story as an answer. His mother's friend had sent her son to study in Germany, believing that by doing so she was saving him from risking his life in the Israeli army. He was spared military service, but did shortly after in an auto accident.

"You can't escape God," Mushnik says, giving the moral of the story. "On a larger scale, someone has to settle in the Land of Israel. Someone...