This is Rafah: on the Egyptian side, it is a small town of 14,000, nestled just outside of Rafah in the Gaza strip, which is a sprawling and more or less permanent refugee settlement of 120,000. When does a refugee camp become a city? How many houses need to be built of stone or brick? And when does a city revert to being a camp? How many homes need to be knocked down by military bulldozers? How many trees? These are the idle thoughts that drift through the minds of those on either side of the border – who still have time or energy to think. For most, it’s just enough to survive.

The coaches disgorge their passengers into the large Egyptian customs hall. Women in all states of Middle Eastern dress – black chadors, veils, headscarves, jeans and t-shirts - push trolleys loaded high with bags and cases toward passport control.

The chaotic border

For a moment, it looks and sounds like any other chaotic border on the fringes of the Third World. The policemen’s walkietalkies crackle. Babies wail. Old ladies sit on benches in rows, waiting and watching. Mothers pour bottles of mineral water, warm from the sun, into protesting children’s mouths. At the front of the crowd, green passports with the words, “Palestinian Authority” embossed on the front, are inspected and stamped. And slowly, terribly slowly, the crowd shuffles forward.

“I have come to seek medical help in Egypt,” says Hanan Abu Warda, a Gaza resident sitting weakly against a wall, clutching her stomach. “I am sick from the shelling,” she says simply. “The Israelis shell us in the morning and in the night. After six in the evening, we are afraid to go out of our homes.”

Safah Soboh, an elderly lady accompanying her, nods in agreement. “But this border is almost worse,” she says. Each morning, the Israeli guards decide how many cars to let across.

Today it was eight. The Palestinians then pile as many people as they can into and onto the cars – 20 to 25 people – the old, very young, pregnant, sick and others into five-seat cars. They then drive into no-man’s land. From there, Egyptian coaches carry them a few hundred meters to this customs post.

People start to tell their stories in quiet, dignified tones, then break into tears or start shouting, almost without noticing. “The Jewish children have gardens to play in,” says Howaida Ziyada, another Palestinian from Gaza. “All I want is for our children to have gardens too,” she continues, her voice rising.

“But now we have nothing – even the school has been ruined! I just want to live in peace!”

The wall that separates

The Gaza strip is a pressure cooker – a rapidly growing population of 1.3 million Palestinians squeezed into a narrow strip of coastal land, hemmed in with a tall Israeli fence. About 8,000 heavily guarded Jewish settlers live among them, with their own network of roads, walls, fences and soldiers. Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority lost control of Gaza long ago.

HASSAN ISSA, a senior Egyptian diplomat in Cairo is working to restore law and order in Gaza.

Radical groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad rule the streets, taking occasional potshots with home-made rockets at the settlements and plotting suicide bomber runs deep into Israel. They earn massive reprisals for their whole community – buildings bulldozed in one Israeli incursion after another, missiles from Apache helicopters often killing bystanders in the crowded streets as well as their intended targets, senior militants. Small children throwing stones or simply peering through the curtains are shot dead.

Most importantly, militants run the welfare services. The leadership of Hamas may have been decimated by Israeli assassinations, but their popularity is at an all-time high – around 26 percent according to recent polls, neck-and-neck with Arafat’s Fatah party. But out of the seething morass of Gaza, Palestinians still try to lead normal lives, to travel to other Arab countries – to visit relatives, work, study or get medical care. Their fellow Arabs sympathize with them – up to a point, but not beyond. Pan-Arab or pan-Muslim solidarity comes and goes, especially in the newspaper columns, but certain constants remain: Israeli strength and US support for Israel.

A halted peace process

For now there is no peace process. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon says he has no Palestinian negotiating partner. To prove it, he has sealed Yasser Arafat in a handful of offices inside his bulldozed headquarters in Ramallah, on the occupied West Bank. Sharon refuses to talk to either him, his prime minister or any Western diplomat who visits him. And now Sharon has flipped one large card onto an otherwise empty table. He says he’s going to dismantle the Jewish settlements in Gaza.

“This is Sharon’s masterstroke,” says Hassan Issa, a senior Egyptian diplomat in Cairo who is the former head of the Israel desk at the Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. “His intention was to get the Palestinians to confront each other … and so solve the Israeli problem with Palestinian hands.”

This, to some extent, has already started. A bitter, intra-Palestinian power struggle is underway, parallel to the Israeli assassinations and incursions, over who will control Gaza if and when Israelis do withdraw.

Into this confusion and lawlessness, the Egyptian government has reluctantly stepped with an offer to train Palestinian security forces and send up to 200 military and intelligence advisers to Gaza.

“Our interest in this is purely Palestinian,” says Issa. “What we want is to restore law and order in Gaza. To get Palestinian factions to deal with each other. To condense all their security organizations into just three … and get this to be a first step: Israeli withdrawal from Gaza – towards another withdrawal, another Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank.”

The Egyptian argument

The sting of the Egyptian argument lies in the tail: Israel just wants an Egyptian security role in Gaza, to do what the Palestinians have refused to do – disarm the militias. In some Arabs’ eyes “to do Israel and America’s dirty work.” But Egypt says it will only get involved in the Israeli withdrawal as a lever to re-launch the wider peace process, the much trumpeted plan to create a Palestinian state “by 2005.”

In Gaza, Egypt has also set high targets: a full, non-partial Israeli withdrawal, with the sea-port, international airport and border controls returned to Palestinian hands. Those stubby Star of David flags at Rafah, Cairo argues, will have to come down too. Since President Anwar Sadat’s historic visit to Jerusalem in 1977, Egyptian-Israeli dialogue has never entirely broken down. And now, despite Arab fury over the plight of the Palestinians, symbolized most dramatically by the separation fence or wall, now “snaking through the West Bank” in President Bush’s memorable phrase, Egyptian-Israeli contacts are at their most intense.

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s intelligence chief, Omar Suleiman, is holding almost weekly talks in Cairo with Palestinian leaders, including top representatives of Fatah and Hamas. In September, the Egyptian plan was to get the Palestinians to agree on a common strategy in Gaza and sink their damaging internal rivalries. Suleiman also holds frequent meetings with the Israelis and travels to Ramallah for talks with Yasser Arafat and his circle.

“We have excellent relations with all the organizations,” says Issa. “That’s why they all come here, and they trust us, and they trust our intervention to get them together.”

Differing perceptions

How does Egypt regard the militant groups, considering their current infamy? “Hamas and Jihad, regardless of how the US and Israel label them … are the most organized Palestinian organizations. Because they are based on creed, on religion. In my opinion they are not radicals.”

And he, like some Western analysts, believes Israel too will have to negotiate with them in the end.

A TIMELY WITHDRAWAL by Israel from Gaza is uncertain, as Ariel Sharon faces resistance from his own party and from militant settler organizations unwilling to budge from what they - and Palestinians - regard as holy land.

The timetable of any Israeli withdrawal from Gaza looks extremely uncertain. Ariel Sharon must first overcome tough resistance from his own Likud party and from militant settler organizations determined not to lose a centimeter of what they, no less than the Palestinians, regard as holy land. But if Sharon succeeds, he knows he will win a more free hand in the West Bank – regardless of who wins the US elections next month, to consolidate larger Jewish settlements there like Ariel, Gush Etzion and Maale Adumin.

Iraq issue looms overhead

Overshadowing, or perhaps under-shadowing the stand-off between the Israelis and Palestinians, is the situation in Iraq. Most Arab governments and commentators were united in their condemnation of the US-led invasion, and many predicted the problems which have followed. The revelations of US torture at the Abu Ghraib prison have fueled that hostility.

But not far beneath the surface is the troubled question of democracy and accountability in the whole, authoritarian Middle East. “Iraq has been making some steady but erratic moves towards normalization,” says Saad Eddin Ibrahim, a sociologist and human rights activist in Cairo.

“And in that respect it is closer to achieving democracy, despite all the ups and downs and all the bloodshed and all the violence than Egypt is.”

In Israel itself, a vocal minority has already begun to fear the failure of the two-state solution – the day the Palestinians seriously consider living in the same state as the Israelis – run on the democratic lines of which the Israelis are so proud. Much higher birth rates among the Palestinians suggest they will soon outnumber Jews, between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. And that would mean an end to the dream of a Jewish state.

All this is quite hard to imagine, unless you have a lot of time on your hands in the dust and haze of Rafah.