“Fatah is living through a crisis of vision,” said Mahdi Abdul Hadi, chairman of the Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs in Jerusalem. “How can they combine being a liberation movement with being a governing party? This is one way. The idea is to awaken national pride and fulfill the people’s anxiety and passion. Of course, Hamas and armed resistance still remain a real option for many.”

Image The Palestinian prime minister, Salam Fayyad, said he planted trees in the West Bank last month “to establish our presence on our land and keep our people on it.” Credit... Rina Castelnuovo for The New York Times

Khalil Shikaki, who runs the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in Ramallah, said: “The society is split. The public believes that Israel responds to suffering, not to nonviolent resistance. But there is also not much interest in violence now. Our surveys show support for armed resistance at 47 percent in March. In essence, the public feels trapped between failed diplomacy and failed armed struggle.”

Israeli military authorities have not decided how to react. They allow Mr. Fayyad some activity in the areas officially off limits to him, but on occasion they have torn down what he has built. They reject the term nonviolent for the recent demonstrations because the marches usually include stone-throwing and attempts to damage the separation barrier. Troops have responded with stun grenades, rubber bullets, tear gas and arrests. And the military has declared that Bilin will be a closed area every Friday for six months to halt the weekly marches there.

“We respect Salam Fayyad,” one military official said, speaking under the army’s rules of anonymity. “But we don’t want him to engage in incitement. Burning goods is incitement. Destroying the fence is incitement and is not nonviolent. They are walking a thin line.”

One reason a violent uprising remains unlikely for now, Palestinian analysts say, is that in the two years that Mr. Fayyad’s security forces and ministries have been functioning, daily life inside West Bank cities and their surroundings has taken on much greater safety and normality.

The police and the courts are functioning again after the intifada of 2000 that led to many deaths on both sides. Traffic tickets are now routinely handed out. Personal checks, long shunned, are increasingly in use.