"I think the Israeli mood is more hawkish than ever before," says Olmert. "The Israeli people are peaceloving, but they feel they are left without a choice.

"Have you ever heard the Arabs even mention a peace treaty?" he asks. "No. This is the problem. We don't want to remain in Sinai for ever and ever, but the Arabs won't even agree not to attack us in return for our withdrawal from some of Sinai. Where is the peace here?"

"I don't think Egypt will give any political concessions," says Avidor. "Without a peace" treaty, why should we withdraw? Even then, I don't think we should withdraw from the Golan Heights or the West Bank.

"The problem is not withdrawal," he says. "The problem is the Arabs' unwillingness to recognize our existence. I think it's wrong that Rabin is willing to withdraw without a directly negotiated peace treaty.

"In any case," Avidor continues, "we should make a peace treaty only with states. We should not talk with the PLO which is a Nazi organization dedicated to the murder of Jews. They should be destroyed as enemies of the free world.

I also don't agree to the term "Palestinian Arabs," he says. "The Land of Israel is the correct name for what the Arabs call Palestine. The Arabs who are now in the Land of Israel can be rehabilitated have. Those refugees in Arab countries should be rehabilitated there."

"You can't talk about the Palestinians as a nation in the current sense of the word," says Olmert. "They don't have their own language, their own common history, their own culture.

"They are people who have begun to feel an identification with a certain cause," he says, but you certainly can't compare them to the Jewish people, the Jewish history and culture. Until 1967, they never even talked in terms of being a national entity.

"I think the Palestinian issue is a problem," Olmert admits, but it's not the primary one. The Arab countries, who haven't been able to reconcile our existence are using the Palestinians as a tool to fight Israel Before 1967, the Arabs had the borders they say they want us to return to now. So what's the problem in their eyes if not our very existence. If they were concerned about the Palestinians, why didn't they--the richest countries in the world--do something about it?

"We don't need to talk with the Palestinians, and certainly not with Arafat," says Olmert. "He's not their leader." The Palestinians already have a state and spokesman--Jordan. Let the Palestinians talk with Hussein and make an arrangement on the east bank of the Jordan for some sort of state.

"But Israel should keep the West Bank" says Olmert. "If the Palestinians want to solve any national aspirations they might have by creating a separate nation, this is not the place to do it."

* * *

Shulamit Aloni leads the new Citizens' Rights Party, whose social and political reform platform gave it enough voter appeal to gain three Knesset seats. "For 15 years," she says. "I was the only one in this country who fought for real human rights. I gave free legal aid. I wrote in newspapers about red tape in the bureaucracies and about constitutional rights."

Aloni left Rabin's Labor Alignment coalition last year, partly in protest over the inclusion of Mafdal in the coalition. "We have religious coercion that effects legislation," she says. "The religious community can worship however it wants, but it shouldn't force me to do the same in a secular state."

Aloni's views on the Arab-Israeli conflict are equally vehement. "I think we're strong enough to risk some steps towards peace," she says. "Everything, including Jerusalem, should be negotiated. We didn't negotiate earlier, with Jordan, for example, because we thought we could postpone the decision. The government listened to the right wing too much too often.