JERUSALEM -- The world asks when the violence here wil end. The answer is when mothers no longer weep and brothers no longer seek revenge.

Incidents that seem random acts of hatred are often knitted by a thread of past grievances: The Arab who stabs the Israeli had a brother shot by a Jew.

One act feeds another, and the circle of violence has no end. The mothers' grief is the same; only the language is different.

"The Jews are harvesting their own fate," said the brother of a Palestinian who stabbed three Israelis. Said the mother of a Jewish man whoshot three Palestinians: "The Arabs are like ravens who eat meat. They want to eat us."

Israel has been wracked by a series of stabbings and murders, once again spawning calls for stricter curfews on Palestinians. It is not a new situation, but a wave in a tide that ebbs and flows.

Much of the political troubles of the Mideast are linked to the issue of the Palestinians and the Israelis. But much of the violence here is more personal, its motive hatred sown by past offenses.

To see how one act spawns another is to realize the difficulty of ending them. The solution has less to do with James A. Baker III, Yitzhak Shamir or Yasser Arafat than with strangers like Amer Sirhan, Charlie Shllosh and Faisal Amr.

Theirs is a common bond of violence.

* "He was a good son," said the old woman, resting last week on a concrete slab of what had been her family's house. Amer Abu Sirhan was "a gentle man, a straight man. He always said the truth."

The 19 members of Khadra Sirhan's family now live in two damp, concrete storerooms of the local mosque. The homes they had built over two decades -- fine, sturdy homes of concrete and polished block -- are rubble.

The Israeli army used dynamite to collapse them. They did it at 1:30 a.m. so that the village of Abadiya, a string of Palestinian homes on a rocky ridge near Bethlehem, would awaken to the full message of the blast: This is for what Amer Sirhan did.

He now sits in a prison near Tel Aviv, serving consecutive sentences of three life terms plus 20 years for the murders of three Israelis.

Amer Sirhan is 19. Married. Mona, his wife, was pregnant when he went to prison. In two months, he will be a father.

Sirhan was a plasterer. He went to work at 5:30 each morning with his father and two brothers to construction sites in Baka, a suburb of Jerusalem.

Working in an Israeli area meant good pay, double what he could earn in the West Bank.

But there are risks for a Palestinian. In 1989 he was severely beaten by Israeli soldiers, his family said. The reasons are unclear. He spent a week in bed from the injuries. But the bitterness never healed.

On Oct. 8, 1990, Israeli police shot to death 21 Palestinians at the Temple Mount, enraging the West Bank. Two weeks later, Sirhan told authorities, he felt compelled to avenge the treatment of Palestinians.

On his way to work, he lingered in an alley in Baka. Brandishing a knife and shouting praise to Allah, he attacked an 18-year-old soldierwalking near her parents' home. He then ran to a nearby fTC street and stabbed a 45-year-old florist.

A crowd began chasing him. In it was Charlie Shllosh, a Jewish soldier in an anti-terrorist squad.

Mr. Shllosh was armed, but instead of killing Sirhan, he tried to wrestle the knife away from him. It was a fatal mistake. He was stabbed to death, and his body pinned Sirhan to the ground.

"Of all my children, he was the diamond. He was the most courageous," said Hanna Shllosh, his mother.

He grew up in Hosen, a small farming community in northern Israel. It is a place not unlike Sirhan's village of Abadiya: greener and more prosperous than the Arab village, perhaps, but still tuned to the rhythms of agriculture and sheep.

He was 26. Outgoing and gregarious, he was on his way to becoming an officer. He had just bought a new house. Yael, his wife, was expecting their first child. Their daughter was born two weeks after his death.

The stabbings split the Arab-Jewish seams of Jerusalem. In the aftermath, a firestorm of violence swept the city. Several Israelis and Palestinians were critically injured before a strict curfew on Arabs stilled the incidents.

Mrs. Shllosh still weeps at Charlie's name, and clutches his picture to her heart. A younger brother, Arye, took it harder. The 19-year-oldarmy soldier had revered Charlie.

"Charlie was a role model for Arye. He wanted to be like Charlie," said Asher Shllosh, 26, another of nine brothers and sisters.

Described by his family as shy and quiet, Arye erupted at the funeral.

"At the grave, Arye was acting crazy," Mrs. Shllosh said. "He wanted to get into the grave, like his brother. He couldn't accept it."

In time he seemed to recover, his family said, although he reluctantly returned to his army post near Hebron, in the occupied West Bank.

On Dec. 28 at 10 p.m., Arye Shllosh rose from his bunk and left his barracks with his Galil automatic rifle. He walked to the nearby Hebron Road. A car carrying Arab license plates approached.

Arye Shllosh opened fire on Dr. Faisal Amr and his passengers.

"I passed the man shooting, and the bullets went through the side of the car and the back of the car," Dr. Amr said. "I thought I passed a checkpoint. So I stopped. The moment I stopped the car, I felt blood from my side and my head."

A 39-year-old physician, Dr. Amr had been feeling joyous. His wife, Malak, had given birth that day to their ninth child. Dr. Amr was returning from the hospital with his sister and sister's baby when the car became a maelstrom of bullets.

"I opened the door and began screaming in three languages -- English, Arabic and Hebrew -- 'I am a doctor!' " he recalled. "I saw the soldier come up and start shooting straight at me. The last bullet was in my chest."

The police report said 33 bullets punctured the car. Ibtisan Amr, the doctor's sister, was wounded in the shoulder and hand. One finger was shot off. Her 10-month-old son, Aya, was sleeping in the back seat. The seat was riddled with holes: The bullets passed inches over the baby.

Dr. Amr collapsed. He was shot 14 times.

"Please help us. My brother is dying," his sister cried, according to Dr. Amr. "The soldier who had done the shooting replied in broken Arabic, 'Die, you and your brother.' "

He stayed conscious long enough to tell the soldiers who rushed from the camp how to tie a tourniquet on a spurting leg artery. A doctor in the army ambulance slit open a vein on his neck to try to pump blood into Dr. Amr's drained body.

"I told him, 'You are a very good doctor.' Two minutes later I said I felt I am going to die. He said, 'I know.' "

In the ambulance, Dr. Amr's heart and breathing stopped, he was later told. The ambulance physician decided to go to the morgue, but he made one last attempt to push units of blood into his veins, and the patient revived.

Three months later, Dr. Amr was recuperating at home. His shattered right hand is in a device to try to prevent atrophy. His leg is numb. He takes sedatives for pain. He shows a visitor his wounds: His body is a pincushion of entrance and exit holes, some of them so large they have not yet healed.

His 4-year-old son, Anon, tells a visitor, "The soldiers shot my father. I don't like the soldiers."

"I hear the kids around the neighborhood talking about it. My children talk about it," Dr. Amr said. "The kids are arguing among each other about who is going to revenge my wounds."

* Each of the attacks became political fodder.

After the stabbing of Charlie Shllosh, Prime Minister Shamir's spokesman said a U.N. resolution had encouraged Arab violence.

After the shooting of Dr. Amr, liberals noted an early parole from murder sentences of three Israeli settlers had encouraged Jewish violence.

But the political motives were only the setting. Revenge is a more personal thing, nourished by a sense of injustice.

The Sirhan family -- 19 people ranging from grandparents to infant nieces -- sees no justice in an Israeli policy that demolished their home as relatives of a "terrorist." They are barred from rebuilding, and the father and Amer's brothers can no longer work at their jobs.

Hanna Shllosh sees no justice because her son is dead, and the Palestinian murderer still lives.

Dr. Faisal Amr sees no justice because he knows his attacker will get far less than the 20-year maximum sentence. He notes other disparities: "Will they demolish the home of the Shllosh family like they do for Palestinians?" he asks rhetorically.

If there were any prospect for tolerance, it is drowned in a sea of bitterness. Asher Shllosh said he now carries a handgun with him. Hanna Shllosh insisted, "I don't hate anyone," but a moment later described Palestinians as "ravens."

Khadra Sirhan, the mother of Amer Sirhan, surveying the ruins of her house, saw only half the cause and effect.

"I don't think what my son did is wrong," she insisted. "Any people who do this must be dealt with in the same way."