AT MIDNIGHT the Palestinian vigil against the predations of nearby Jewish settlers begins. Five students, armed with a pocket-torch, stand guard at the hilltop entrance of the small Palestinian village of Kfar Qusra. Farmers and their wives pitch camp in their fields, watching their flocks.

It is not an even fight. Jewish settlers wield M-16 rifles. Villagers have mobile phones and stones. But after religious zealots from the nearby Esh Kodesh (“Holy Light”) outpost scrawled “Muhammad is a pig” in Hebrew on the walls of the village mosque and rolled burning tyres inside its prayer hall, the villagers decided that the moral high ground was no longer enough. “The age of sumud (stubborn steadfastness) has passed,” says a local businessman. “We must defend ourselves. The whole town is prepared.” At an evening planning meeting, an 85-year-old landowner encourages his sons to abduct the next settler who chops down trees in his olive groves or slaughters one of his sheep.

So far the new, more robust tactics of the villagers have worked. On September 16th, a week after the attack on the mosque, a Qusra farmer, Fathallah Abu Rayda, spied a band of settlers near his local well, seemingly intent on destroying or poisoning it, and notified the village network. Within minutes the mosque's loudspeakers had sounded the alarm, and hundreds had gathered to shoo the intruders away. One fled, said villagers, in his underpants. In the panic Mr Abu Rayda was shot in the leg, but they have yet to return.

Mahmoud Abbas's diplomatic manoeuvring in New York has left many villagers confused. But he may have raised expectations, especially in Area C, the rural 60% of the West Bank, including Qusra, which an “interim agreement” between the Palestinian Liberation Organisation and Israel in 1995 left under Israel's full control. Ever since, Israel has tightened its grip over Area C, weaving a web of settlements, military bases, roads, separation barriers and checkpoints. Palestinian police in the designated area patrol in plain clothes and unarmed, but are not allowed to use force to restrain the settlers if they seek to impose themselves on the Palestinian villagers either by attacking them or by damaging their property. Settlers now outnumber Palestinians in Area C by two to one; they regard the territory as theirs. Hence their horror at suggestions that the proposed two states should be based on the pre-1967 line, for that would mean their removal.







With Mr Abbas now promising to secure Palestine's legal right to the land at the UN, other Palestinian villages are also establishing networks to look out for trespassing settlers. A new group called Youth Against Settlements has opened an operations room in Hebron to co-ordinate 300 volunteers who patrol the southern part of the West Bank that surrounds the city by car, by bicycle and on foot. They now scour the land, watching out for settler raids.





In response to the UN bid, Jewish settlers are mobilising too. By day they march about, brandishing large Israeli flags. By night, activists exact what they call “price-tags”, for instance by defiling mosques, in the hope of provoking a conflict which the well-armed settlers feel sure they could win. They have also used their formidable presence in Israel's combat units and supporters in Mr Netanyahu's ruling coalition to press home their advantage. To ward off anticipated Palestinian demonstrations in the wake of the UN vote in New York, Israeli soldiers armed with stun-grenades, tear-gas and a foul-smelling liquid known as skunk have moved into settlements near Palestinian towns. If hordes try to enter, says a settler security officer, the settlers are licensed to shoot.

Even before Mr Abbas at last declared his intention to bid for statehood at the UN Security Council, friction was mounting. As Jewish settlers and Palestinian villagers race to fill the West Bank's remaining open land with orchards and housing, it has been getting increasingly crowded. Bizarrely, each side, in some respects, feeds the other's appetite. Settlers pay Palestinian labourers to build their homes; Palestinians use the proceeds to expand their own villages. Zealots on both sides see land as sacred. Qusra's villagers celebrated their success in chasing settlers away by staging their Friday prayers in the fields, prostrating themselves on the ploughed earth. Might such rural friction trigger broader unrest? Ramallah, Mr Abbas's seat of government, is but half an hour's drive south, provided you get through two checkpoints without being delayed. But its stylish cafés offer an agreeable diversion from Area C's grim daily grind. Mr Abbas's men have laboured to harness rural vigilantes to ensure that demonstrations are confined to the West Bank cities they control. But the interim agreements prevent them from operating in Area C, so they are powerless to deter or contain clashes between villagers and settlers. Moreover, the radicals of Hamas, the Islamist group that abhors Mr Abbas and his ruling faction on the West Bank, have a freer hand to stir up trouble. In the past Hamas has sought to undermine Mr Abbas's diplomatic initiatives. On the eve of talks between Mr Abbas and the Israelis last year, Hamas staged a lethal drive-by shooting near Qusra.

Indeed, the sneers of Hamas against Mr Abbas appeal to quite a few of the villagers. Six years ago Hamas won local elections in Qusra and nearby villages, and could do so again. While lauding Mr Abbas for his recent stand in New York, some Qusra people say he has run to the UN only because he is too weak to act on the ground. All anti-settler monitors say they will abide by his calls for non-violence (though stone-throwing is thought not to count). But a villager adds menacingly, “If Hamas were in charge, not a single settler would dare raid our land.”