RAMALLAH--In the big photograph in the waiting room Yasser Arafat and Abbas Zaki sit next to each other, their hands stretched along the armrests and intertwined in a vigorous clutch. Zaki’s collaborators shuffle around from office to office, where visitors chat and smoke waiting to meet Fatah’s Central Committee member.

"I have always declined to be elected to the Palestinian parliament. I opposed the Oslo Agreement, raising my hand when we were called to decide. Abu Ammar knew it," Zaki said in an interview. "When the Israeli army besieged him here in Ramallah in 2002 I went to the Muqata’ for a visit. 'You saw things that I couldn’t see,' Arafat told me. Oslo was an accord without clarity that has served only Israel. If I had voted for the Agreement I couldn’t be in politics now. I have never had contacts with the Israelis. I made no money, my suitcase is ready, as the sheet to cover me if I die."

 In March 2009 Zaki survived an assassination attempt in the Palestinian refugee camp of Mnieh Mnieh, Sidon, that killed three Palestinian officials and his deputy, Kamal Naji. They had for a long time been managing the PLO diplomatic relations in Lebanon. In 2011, after Obama’s UN speech on Palestinian statehood, Zaki called the US president and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “scumbags”, while realistically adding that "The greater goal cannot be accomplished in one go... If Israel withdraws from Jerusalem, evacuates the 650,000 settlers, and dismantles the wall –- what will become of Israel? It will come to an end."

 The context, since the cold love affair between Obama and Netanyahu, has even worsened. ‘We are in the most dramatic situation. Oslo has anaesthetised the Palestinians. From a state Israel became a gang under the settlers’ guide, and now they say we have two states if we want, Gaza and Jordan. To the UN resolution 2334 that in December reaffirmed the illegality of the post-1967 settlements in the West Bank Tel-Aviv answered by approving the construction of another 2500 residential units. The racist apartheid is now openly displayed. Hundreds of Palestinians are in jail because they held a knife or threw a stone, even kids. When an Israeli soldier executes a Palestinian, on the contrary, he receives an 18 months sentence, and the day after ministers of the government call for his release," Zaki said, referring tothe case of private Elor Azaria.

 On March 24 last year Azaria, aged 21, killed Abdul Fatah al-Sharif in a shooting near a checkpoint in the West Bank city of Hebron. Sharif had attacked the Israeli unit with a knife and had been severely injured and immobilised them. Azaria had then decided to kill him, saying during the court hearings that he deserved to die. Israeli public opinion was deeply divided over the issue, with the more liberal groups denouncing the outrageous leniency of the sentence. In Israel 11 months are by law inflicted to cannabis consumers.

 The juridical ease reflects the Israeli attitude on the ground. It is somehow surprising seeing the Beit Hadassah settlers jogging comfortably in Shuhada street. Three years ago in Hebron II, the 20 percent of the city under Israeli control, maintained their Arab street names, the tourist information point and the small chilling areas did not exists . The door of the Ismail family did not exhibit a blue David star on its white surface: “They have increased the military presence. Now we have two soldiers at the check point, two at the end of the road, and often two going to and fro. All of them within two hundred meters. It’s very difficult, very difficult”, says Ahmad, father of four. “Yesterday a settler came to harass me shouting ‘Now you are alone, don’t you realise it?”, tells Issa Amro, non-violent activist and leader of “Youth Against the settlements”. “Trump’s election has boosted their self-confidence, now they’ve got no restrictions. Today I have been detained twice, once for an hour and a second time for forty-five minutes. For no reason, just for being Issa Amro”.

 “After Rabin we have had nobody to collaborate with. Now we have Trump, a merchant, with no balance whatsoever. All his major aides in the cabinet are Jewish or pro-Israel. Sometimes, like Friedman, the next American ambassador in Tel-Aviv, are settlers. We respect their religion, but we know that none of them want to recognize the State of Palestine. The previous administration looked at the area with the eyes of Israel. This one acts according to the interest of the settlers”, Zaki sums up.

 In Yitzhar the yeshiva, the Jewish religious school, is a wide cube of red bricks built on the edge of a crag that dominates the valley crossing perpendicularly the road linking Ramallah and Nablus. From the hilltop Haifa, Tel-Aviv and the Mediterranean Sea are visible when the sky is clear. The colony was established in 1984, and since the last years of the 1990s has become one of the notorious epitomes of the ultra-orthodox presence in the West Bank, home now for more than 400,000, who have been for the umpteenth time declared illegal dwellers by UN Resolution 2334, the last and belated action of the Obama presidency in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  In its struggle for land the Yitzhar’s 1,400 strong population has applied the ‘price-tag policy”: whoever opposes their colonialist strategy becomes a retaliation target. Palestinians from the surrounding villages, soldiers, policemen and Israeli pacifists.

“We have the right to defend ourselves, and the best defence is  attack”, says Yishul, a young theologian who prefers to remain anonymous. He emerged from the scattered group of students in company of rabbi Elitzur-Hershkowitz, co-author of a controversial book, “The King’s Torah”, where the killing of the gentile children is allowed, if the community is under threat.  Hershowitz, who went through several judicial problems, decides to leave to Yishul the interview.

"Eventually with Trump we have someone who is capable of thinking outside the box. Oslo has miserably failed and the Arabs must accept that we came here to stay, they must abandon terrorism and start behaving like human beings. The world needed Israel, light of the nations. I am not sure that a hypothetical one-state solution should give the Palestinians the right to vote. They can join our project, respect the commandments the Bible provides for the gentiles. Otherwise it’s plenty of Arab countries they can go to. Netanyahu? He’s just a merchant, doing nothing to make Israel a real Jewish state. Better than some leftist feminist, of course”.

 Zaki said that “A feeling of impotence pushes you to find another solution. We are like water producing electricity, constrained by a dam.”

“The whole Middle East region is devastated and the Arabs are enraged. Yes, war is approaching Palestine too.”