We drove out of Ramallah, past an avenue of Israeli army checkpoints - little birds' nests of Uzis and razor wire — and out into the West Bank countryside: low, dry, rolling slopes; silvery olive groves; villages of old stone houses sheltering under the lee of the steeper hills. Only a mile before Biddya did the scene change. Turning the bend of a dry wadi, we saw Settlement Ariel ahead of us: a modern Western town with shopping arcades, sports centres and supermarkets. No Palestinian, either Christian or Muslim, ever needed to bother applying to live in Ariel: its houses were available only to Jewish settlers. When local Palestinian labourers at the settlement were forced to wear large badges read- ing 'Foreign Worker', some liberal Israeli commentators went as far as drawing comparisons with the race laws of Nazi Germany. The badges were later removed.

 'That was my grandfather's land,' said Usamah as we passed beneath the settlement. 'It has belonged to this village since the time of the Canaanites. But the Israelis took it 1977. We've never received any compensation.'

 Ariel, Usamah explained, was now home to eight thousand Israelis, but was projected ultimately to house a hundred thousand — a gloomy prospect for Biddya, which, sited precariously beneath the town, looked certain to have all its remaining land requisi- tioned for new housing estates from which Palestinians would be banned. This year, said Usamah, a further series of olive groves separating the village from the settlement had been seized and bulldozed to provide room for a thousand new houses being built for Soviet Jews fleeing a resurgent Russian racism. Yet again it was the Palestinians who were being made to pay the price for European anti-Semitism. 'A Russian can come to my land tomorrow and have more right to it than me, my wife or my children,' said Usamah. 'Now the cultivated land has all been taken, and nearly all the olives cut down. Every year they take a little bit more. They think that if they can take it piece by piece there will be no trouble.'

 In the end, however, Biddya had not stood by and waited for the slow extinction that was being imposed on it. On the outbreak of the intifada Palestinian flags had been raised on the power lines, demonstrations had been mounted, stones thrown. Faced with this defiance, the Israelis could have placed the village under rigorous curfew. This would have limited the trouble but would have been time-consuming, expensive and have tied up large numbers of troops. Far less effort was the option of controlling the village through a client mukhtar who, in return for power over the village, would keep order for his Israeli masters.

 For seven years Abu Zeid had ruled Biddya as a tyrant, but since his demise the Israelis had been forced to rule the village directly. Neither method had managed to subdue Biddya, but together they had succeeded in ruining it. Of a total population of 3,300, more than five hundred villagers - most of the younger generation - were currently in prison, and forty families had had their houses destroyed. Moreover, after every incident the army made a point of cutting down an olive grove: so far two thousand trees had gone, and only a few remained. Ninety per cent of the village's income used to come from its olives, and it is now bankrupt.

 Usamah's uncle, Tariq, was part of the large Nasbeh clan that had ruled Biddya until the Israeli military authorities deposed them. We found him in the walled garden of the family's ancestral house, tending his old musk roses under a trellis of tumbling vines. Usamah had sent word that we were coming, and his aunt, Urn-Mohammed, had prepared breakfast for us. She was a big woman and wore a big blue dress, trussed at the waist. At her command we sat on stools, nibbling from the avalanche of olives, mountains of humus and several low ranges of feta cheese she had spread out for our pleasure.

 While we ate, Tariq began. 'Abu-Zeid - God burn his bones! - was a very clever man.' He rearranged his shift and twirled his worry beads around his index finger. 'Ya Allah! No one knew how to extort money like him.' 'How did he do it?' I asked. 'The wild dog!' said Um-Mohammed. 'He tried everything.' 'It's true,' said Tariq. 'My great-great-great-grandfather brought Abu-Zeid's Negro forebears here from the Hijaz to be our house- slaves. This was his way of getting revenge.' Tariq shook his head sadly. 'He did everything he could to ruin this village. He would threaten to build a road through someone's house, then collect bribes to stop it. Once he cut off everyone's water and electricity and demanded 500 dinars [£700] from every family before he would reconnect it.'

 'Tchk!' said Um-Mohammed, spitting on the ground. 'That was nothing. It was what he did with our land that made us hate him.' 'My younger brother was in prison for throwing stones,' explained Tariq. 'Abu-Zeid came to our house and offered to get his sentence reduced. He asked my father to put his thumbprint on some papers. It was only later that we discovered that he had tricked my father into signing away no dunums of our land west of the village. Ariel has an industrial park there now.' 'Abu-Zeid tricked all of us' said Um-Mohammed. 'Like a mad dog he bit everyone around him.'

 'We got a petition signed by every family in the village and took it to the Military Governor. He was a good man, and I think he would have replaced Abu-Zeid. But the settlers at Ariel blocked it. Abu-Zeid was their man. After our petition failed, Abu-Zeid arranged the killing of the old man who had organised the petition. We knew then that we had to destroy Abu-Zeid before he destroyed the village.'

 'We are under military occupation,' said Usamah. 'We have no courts or civil authorities to look after our interests. This is what the occupation has reduced us to.'

 'At that time we knew nothing about killing,' said Tariq, 'so we hired a Bedouin to do it for us. The Bedouin collaborate with the Israelis and are allowed to join the army and possess weapons. But they will kill anyone if they are paid. My brother knew this killer from Kafr Qasim. After we hired him, this man waited for Abu-Zeid and shot him with an Uzi. He took fourteen bullets in the stomach. But he didn't die. The Israelis took him to a new hospital in Jerusalem and gave him a new plastic stomach. After a month he was back. The Bedouin is still in prison.'

 Tariq popped an olive into his mouth. 'After the Bedouin failed, we vowed to finish Abu-Zeid ourselves. Our first attempt was very amateur. We tried to run him over. The first time we used a car, but he clung onto the bonnet. When the car crashed against the wall, the driver was killed but Abu-Zeid was unhurt. The next time we used a big lorry. That put Abu-Zeid in hospital - he lost his left leg - but although both his younger sons were killed, Abu-Zeid lived.'

 'We didn't give up, though,' said Usamah. 'We sent a boy to buy two grenades on the black market in Tel Aviv. When he got back he experimented with one in a cave. It seemed easy to operate, so the next day he threw the other at Abu-Zeid. It sailed through the window of his car, but it was faulty and didn't blow. After that the Israelis gave Abu-Zeid many more weapons and rebuilt his house so that it was like a fortress.'

 'Abu-Zeid went crazy,' said Usamah. 'He destroyed the houses belonging to everyone he thought of as an enemy. Then he bought two huge Rottweilers. He used to hobble around the village on his wooden leg, patrolling with the dogs, his brother and his two remaining sons. They beat anyone they found in the streets after dark.'

 'Abu-Zeid promised, "Before the next olive season I will have destroyed this village completely,"' said Tariq. 'People said he had gone insane. He blew up the olive press we had been given by the Jordanians before 1967, then began systematically cutting down the olive trees of those he didn't like. But he didn't run away. He knew we would try again, and wherever he went we would find him and kill him.'

 'The fifth attempt was a mass attack,' said Usamah. 'The intifada was at its height and the shabab [young men] had formed hit squads. On 6 March at eight o'clock the shabab attacked his house with molotov cocktails. Their object was to blow him up by ignit- ing the gas canisters he kept in his garage. But they didn't know that the Israelis had given the garage new metal doors. As they tried to break in, Abu-Zeid hobbled up onto his roof and began picking them off with his gun. After he had killed four, the village imam broadcast an appeal for help on the mosque loudspeakers. The whole village rushed into the street and joined in. There must have been seven hundred people out there.'

 'But we didn't get anywhere,' said Tariq gloomily. 'While we all went off to evening prayers, one ofAbu-Zeid's sons slipped out the back and ran to Ariel. When prayers were over, we managed to get into the garage and blow up his bulletproof car. But before we could do anything more the settlers arrived. They were all armed, and began firing into the crowd. Later, when the army came, they put the village under curfew, arrested a hundred people and demolished ... I don't know how many houses.'

 'Ya Allah!' said Um-Mohammed, who had reappeared with a little bowl of humus. 'There wasn't a woman in the village who wouldn't have gladly strangled Abu-Zeid after that.' 'It's true,' said Tariq, raising his eyebrows and giving his beads a twirl. 'But we thought he would not suspect this. So on the sixth attempt we dressed up one of my nephews as a Palestinian woman and sent him off to Abu-Zeid's house with a basket of fruit on his head. Abu-Zeid was sitting outside with Zeid, his eldest son. My nephew put the basket down, pulled out a pistol from under the figs and fired six shots from twenty metres. He hit both men and killed Zeid, but he only succeeded in taking off Abu-Zeid's left arm and wounding him in one lung. Abu-Zeid was fifteen days in intensive care and they had to give him a new arm and a mechanical lung. By this stage he was more like a robot than a man. But within a month he was back.'

 'Some in the village believed that Abu-Zeid was some kind of djinn,' said Um-Mohammed. 'We thought he would never die.' 'He escaped us six times. Six times! But we got him in the end.'

 'I saw it with my own eyes,' said Um-Mohammed, rearranging her white calico chador. 'It was a few days before the olive season. I was coming back from my brother's house early in the morning when I noticed Abu-Zeid's car coming along the Ariel road. He turned a corner and saw that there was a roadblock. At the same time two shabab leapt out from behind a wall and ~ pfoo! - peppered his car with Uzi guns.' 'The Israelis had given him bulletproof windows,' said Tariq, 'but he had left them open.'

 'Abu-Zeid tried to reverse and escape, but he hit a wall and they got him all the same.' Um-Mohammed's face exploded into a broad grin. 'He died in great pain. I was so happy.' 'The village gathered around and one of the old men said that they should pour gasoline over the car and burn it, otherwise the settlers might take him away to Tel Aviv and bring him back to life with one of their machines. After his earlier escapes they were worried he might survive even thirty bullets in the chest.'

 'But do you know the strange thing?' said Um-Mohammed, scooping up some humus on a piece of pitta bread and popping it into her mouth. 'Because he was half Negro, the smoke was as black as pitch. The place where he died, nothing grows there now.'

 'So you understand now why we were so pleased when we finally got him on the seventh attempt?' asked Tariq. 'After we killed him and made a fire of his body, the Yahoodi [Jewish] settlers saw the black smoke and came running again. But they were too late. There was only a burned skull, a leg bone, a fire-blackened lung machine and a great pile of plastic sludge that had been his stomach. All they could do was put it all in a sack and give it to his wife. '

 'She threw it onto a rubbish tip,' said Um-Mohammed. 'Abu- Zeid had another woman in Kifl Harith. His wife hated him as much as the rest of us.' 'The army put the village under curfew for two weeks,' said Tariq. 'We couldn't even harvest our trees. But no one minded. Inside every house it was like a holiday. People were singing and dancing.' 'Even in the prisons there was rejoicing,' said Usamah. 'All Abu-Zeid's old enemies - there were about two hundred of them in jail at that time - they had a big party also.'

 The curfew was due to resume in less than ten minutes. I got up and said my goodbyes, while Usamah hurried me out to the car. We drove out of the village and past the gates and guntowers of Ariel. Under the razor wire, the settlers' bulldozers were at work clearing Biddya's olive groves. 'It was a great day for the village when we killed Abu-Zeid,' said Usamah. 'But in the long run, what difference does it make?'

 He stopped the car by a pile of uprooted olive trees and got out, indicating that I should do the same: 'Such trees are 150 years old - three times the age of the State of Israel,' he said, pulling out a clod of earth from the roots and crumbling it in his hands. 'Generation after generation our people have come three times a year to dress, fertilise and harvest these trees. All our life, all our traditions, are connected to such trees. But now they bring their powerful machines from the USA and destroy our inheritance in fifteen minutes. Like us, these trees have deep roots. Look how strongly these roots bond the trees to the soil! But now they are uprooted, and with or without Abu-Zeid, if the settlers get their way we will be next. Sooner or later they will expel us all. It is only a matter of time.'

 'The Americans would never let them,' I said. 'Wouldn't they?' replied Usamah.

 'You want Utopia?' said Mayor Ron. I got Utopia! Look!'

 Ron Nachman, the Mayor of Settlement Ariel, called to his secretary. Seconds later she appeared with the official photograph album. 'Ariel was my idea,' explained Mayor Ron. 'In 1977 nobody lived here. There was nothing. Look: here — nothing except a few old trees. Here's me in the first tent... and that's the luxury caravan we moved into a little later. Here are the watertanks and the bulldozers. You see these boulders? That's the supermarket now. And over there? Those stones? That's now a lawn.'

 The secretary took the album and Mayor Ron settled down behind his desk. Above his head was a plaque:

 'I give people the chance to participate in the greatest adventure' said the Mayor, 'the building of a new. town from scratch — from nothing! Developing a new society for all our tomorrows.' Mayor Ron clearly knows the reputation he has for public relations. He is still a young man, and exudes energy and dynamism. He talks fast, in flawless American.

 'Friend, I'll tell you something. Do you know what the Arabs used to ask me? "Ron," they would say, "why do you come to this bare mountain?" I said, "Wait five years - you'll see what we can do with this land."' 'Do you have problems with your Palestinian neighbours?' I asked.

 'The Arabs don't have a problem with Jews,' replied Mayor Ron. 'They have problems with Arabs - with the PLO terrorists. The PLO are enforcing a rule of terror around here - anyone who cooperates with us is as good as dead - even the mayor of an Arab village near here was gunned down by PLO terrorists, d'you know that? Friend, let me tell you: these Arabs don't want peace with Israel - they want a piece of Israel.'

 Mayor Ron smiled a winning breakfast-cereal smile. 'But I guess you're asking about me personally. No - I don't have anything against Arabs at all. I'm no racist: I have an Arab cleaning lady.' He leaned forwards on his desk: 'That's right " an Arab cleaning lady. She is alone with my babies. I can't say everyone would trust an Arab like that.'

 Mayor Ron paused to let the full implications of his liberalism sink in. 'You know, William, I am deeply proud of what we've built here. A nice town, a clean town, full of nice people. We accept everybody. Already we are the fastest-growing town in Israel. The land is there. All we suffer from is lack of housing. If we can overcome that, soon we'll be a town of a hundred thousand, and stretch for eight miles over these hills.' He pointed to an aerial photograph of the area tacked to the wall beside his desk. 'Go on! Walk around! See it for yourself. This is a free country, a democracy - the only democracy in the Middle East!'

 Outside, tanned, healthy children were racing around the crazy paving on BMX bikes. Long lines of supermarkets, cafes, shops and jeans stores were spread out across a plaza; Kenny Rogers was piped through the Tannoy. Beyond the swimming pool and the ranks of gleaming station wagons in the parking lot, the bare hills of the West Bank stretched into the distance. The children seemed less keen on Ariel than their Mayor. 'Boring' was the opinion of most of the teenagers I spoke to, 'no nightlife'; but there was no shortage of enthusiasm among the adults. I ended up talking to Dina Salit, who had emigrated five years earlier from Canada. We sipped cappuccinos and picked at chocolate croissants, and while we sipped and nibbled, Dina enthused.

 'My husband and I are very happy here, very happy indeed. I mean, if we had just gone to Tel Aviv, we might as well have stayed in Montreal. But here we are making a truly Zionist state ment, doing something, you know, totally different. I mean, how many people get the chance to be in on the building of a new town?' Dina beamed at me. 'Here you feel that your presence really makes a difference. Here you feel .. . valued.' 'Yes?' 'Deeply valued. Howard is the director of a security company, so he feels valued too.' 'And what about the Arabs?' I asked.

 'Before the intifada we made friends with several A-rabs,' Dina said, drawing out the first syllable. 'To me, as a Canadian, that was a miracle. I didn't know it could be done. I mean, you know, A-rabs. But all the same we did used to have some of the A-rab construction workers in for coffee. I'm not saying we were best friends, that it was a love affair, but it was OK.' 'Has the intifada changed everything?' 'Yes and no. We don't have A-rabs in for coffee any more, but you know, the political scene is seldom a topic of conversation here. We're all much more concerned about gossip, or street cleaning,' Dina giggled. 'That's a much greater problem!'

 I paid the bill, and Dina walked me over to the Ariel bus stop. As we strolled, I asked: 'So what would you say to those Israelis who would give away your settlement and the rest of the West Bank in return for peace?' 'I've never heard any A-rab say they want Judaea and Samaria only,' she replied. 'For them it's only the first step. They want to drive the Israelis into the sea. Everyone knows that. I won't be taken in by that terrorist Arafat - forget it!'

 She paused, and in the silence I could hear the strains of Kenny Rogers still drifting over the shopping arcade.

 'Arafat and his terrorists are playing political games - and we're talking people's homes. You know what that means? People's homes.'

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