RAFAH, Gaza Strip -- On a dusty dirt mound at a dreary border, an Israeli soldier who gave his name as Lev slumped down for a rest.
He was a baby-faced man, 25, with a pained look in his light eyes.
Warily, another young man sat beside him. Hisham Abu-Hatab, 20, wore the turban and robe of a strict Muslim. His dark eyes were suspicious.
They were an odd pair, both on the sidelines for a moment as Israeli troops confronted Arabs waiting for the arrival of the Palestinian police officers from Egypt two weeks ago.
Just by sitting together, they were breaking rules to which each had long since become accustomed. For decades, Israelis and Palestinians have been at each other's throats, locked in unwavering roles.
Suddenly, in the past two weeks, both have witnessed remarkable scenes from the end of the occupation in Jericho and the Gaza Strip.
They have watched what was just a month ago unthinkable: Palestinians and Israeli soldiers on joint patrols, ex-prisoners dancing in their former cells, men who fled as youths to fight Israel from abroad now returning as men to the embrace of their families.
Israelis have withdrawn, to watch developments from a near distance. The Palestinians still are mesmerized by the torrent of this watershed in their history.
The baby-step of the "Jericho-Gaza First" plan of Palestinian autonomy may tumble in failure. Already, on Friday, Palestinians who want to wreck it killed two Israeli soldiers in the Gaza Strip, giving fuel to their comrades-in-purpose, the Israeli opponents of the peace plan.
But for a short spell, Lev and Hisham sat contemplating scenes from the end of an occupation.
Before them, Palestinians in a line sang and shouted slogans. They pushed forward until the soldiers, nervous from the tumult, began shoving back. From the rear of the crowd, rocks whistled forward, and the army fired back stun grenades. With a shout, the soldiers charged, batons swinging, and the Palestinians scattered. The soldiers regrouped in a line, and gradually, the Palestinians inched toward them again, singing and shouting.
"People can't stop their instincts," Lev said, musing to his companion.
Tentatively, Hisham offered questions to Lev. What did he think about this? Why was he here? Did he think they could live in peace?
"What would you do if I came to visit you in Tel Aviv? Would you invite me in for tea?" asked Hisham. His cheek bore a ruby scar, and his lip was deformed from rubber-coated steel bullets fired from Israeli soldiers' guns.
Lev did not answer quickly, giving the question due weight. "Yes, I would," he replied in seriousness. There was a pause. "I wonder if your children will hate my children."
Lev's colleagues called him back to work and then roughly rousted the Palestinian from the dirt mound. But Hisham remained impressed. He had never before had a conversation with a soldier, he said.
"Most soldiers are tough, but this one is very nice," said the young Muslim. "I can believe now there are more soldiers like him."
Return to prison
When Israeli troops left the Gaza Central Prison, Palestinians swarmed in. For those who had been locked in there, it became a macabre reunion.
"I spent four years in this room, 2 1/2 years in that bed," said Abdu Rauf, 44, as he toured the prison the day after it was evacuated. "I was 83 days in investigation. We called it the 'Slaughterhouse."
During the Palestinian "intifada" or uprising, many men spent time in jail, swept up in wholesale lockups or targeted for arrest for belonging to one of many Palestinian factions.
Their stories have long since been documented by human rights organizations. It was routine to be interrogated for weeks, hands and feet bound in unbearable positions.
"Being here makes my legs shake," said Mohammed Awad, 45, who spent three years in the prison. He had returned the day it was evacuated to film the place with a video camera.
The cells had been whitewashed, the interrogation rooms stripped and cleaned by the departing Israelis. But memories still cried out from the sanitized chambers.
"The first days, you think you will go crazy," said Eyman al-Jaradli, 23, recollecting six years in the prison. "Slowly, step by step, you accept that you have come to live here."
Pilgrimage to Jericho
The single main road into Jericho is a baked line of asphalt. It shimmers in the rising heat. These days, it is filled bumper-to-bumper with cars bearing license plates from Hebron and Ramallah and Nablus.
Palestinians throughout the West Bank come "to sniff the air" -- as the Arabs put it -- of a place under Palestinian control. They ignore the heat, and they clap and sing in their cars as they approach Jericho.
For the first time, cars with the yellow licenses of Israel are stopped at the military checkpoint.
The West Bank tourists are rewarded for the trip. "They don't believe there's no soldier left, no clashes, no army, and the Civil Administration building is now a place for Palestinians," said Ziyad Shalan, who is doing a respectable business selling Jericho vegetables to the growing crowds.
Soldiers' homecoming
Mats placed on the bare-sand floor of a home in the Beit Lahia village of the Gaza Strip offer a homecoming for three Palestinian soldiers. Two brothers and their brother-in-law, they look smart in their uniforms.
They fought against Israel in Lebanon in 1979 and again in 1983, they said. With the Palestinian Liberation Army, they were shuffled around the Middle East like unwelcome relatives passed from cousin to cousin -- Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen.
"Many of the Arab countries didn't want us. Egypt was the worst," said Abdul Ghani Mohammed al-Amudi, a handsome man of 41.
Palestinians seem followed with bad luck. The civil war in Yemen burst out just as they tried to leave. They spent 28 hours on a bus getting to Saudi Arabia, before finally flying to Egypt and the border.
"All their life was so difficult, so complicated," said their father's brother, the only relative who remained in the Gaza Strip when the others left to join the fight in Israel more than two decades ago. The old grizzled man looked admiringly at the officers, now returned heroes.
The soldiers admit to being unsettled by their new role as Palestinian Police, in which they must cooperate with the long-despised Israeli Army.
"It's very strange for us. We think they should be out of our sight," said Captain al-Amudi.
His father fought the Israeli Army and fled the Gaza Strip in 1967. His brother was killed in a shootout with Israeli soldiers. The Army demolished the family house, jailed his sister and imprisoned young al-Amudi, then 17, for four years. He was released to leave the country in 1974.
"There are many families like this," said the uncle, Hassan Ahmed al-Amudi. "They do not forget."
Steadfast hostility
A rare tingle of goodwill spilled from the narrow Gaza Strip and tiny Jericho into the rest of the West Bank. Those places are first, and perhaps soon we will be celebrating, said Palestinians elsewhere.
But Hebron, the grim, angry town where Jewish settler Baruch Goldstein sought righteous redemption by killing 30 praying Muslims, erupted again last week. A group of armed settlers marched toward a mosque. They were met with stones from Arab youths and opened fire.
The occupation quickly returned. Soldiers ordered an immediate curfew of the Arab residents. They ordered shops locked and doors closed; within hours, the city of 80,000 looked like a ghost town.
But still strutting through the streets were Jewish settlers. Eighteen-year-olds, too young to legally carry a pistol but issued Uzi submachine guns by the army, moved like gunslingers in a Western movie.
Reconstruction
The palms that once framed a gracious town square in Jericho are bedraggled and spare; the fountain in the plaza is long dry, the concrete broken, the garden littered with refuse.
The new Palestinian authority has decreed restoration. As soon as they get municipal trash bins, the litter that drifts in the breeze must be removed, the authorities said. The storefronts, now angry with spray-painted slogans, will smile with a fresh coat of paint, they said.
Palestinians with bulldozers worked through one night to rip down the stubborn, high fence that had surrounded the police station and glowered over the town square.
It fell to reveal an inviting porch on the building, seen in recent years only by handcuffed Palestinians being hurried inside to the jail.
Residents will abandon their litterbug ways, assured Samir Hilo, a civil engineer sitting in a small restaurant. "When I clean the town, I clean my home," he said.