Boom-boom-boom. Another one bites the dust. Boom-boom-boom. Another one bites the dust. The computer mouse vibrates to the unmistakeable tom-tom thud of Queen’s camp classic.

A sector on the operator’s screen flashes from yellow to pink. The monitor shows a camera panning at enormous speed across six miles of metal fence, military road and concealed sensors. Target pinpointed to a yard within seconds. Ready to intercept intruder.

The giggling 18-year-old Israeli girl soldiers are relaxed: it’s only the mechanical sweeper that removes stones thrown by the Palestinians. We’re on the green line that divides the Jewish state from the occupied territory of the West Bank. Here is the vulnerable choke point of the country some 15 miles from the sea, less than 20 minutes’ drive away.

We’re also close to the heart of Israel’s high-tech industry: the cluster around the buzzing metropolis of Tel Aviv will soon be second in importance only to California’s Silicon Valley. The industry’s triumph is this surveillance centre of marvellous James Bond gadgetry in a mundane setting.

Our guide is Zohar Schlesinger, the 26-year-old deputy commander of the artillery battalion based outside the Palestinian town of Qalqilya. His grin could come from central casting. He shows us the new checkpoints and yellow gates that let farmers work the land on either side of the divide.

The security fence, sometimes reinforced by a wall at strategic points, keeps out the suicide bombers who have written a Hebraic script of red across the country since Yasser Arafat launched the second intifada.

The International Court of Justice has ruled the fence illegal: at points south of Qalqilya it extends far beyond the green line into Palestinian territory. Is Israel creating “facts on the ground” that could move the border in any final negotiation? But even those Israelis initially sceptical about the wall’s construction are happy. The suicide bombers are no longer getting through. This is partly due to the fence and partly to Israeli forces assassinating the terrorist godfathers one by one with the same remote-controlled high-tech precision.

But the fence cannot keep out “the other” for ever. Schlesinger shrugs: “We are only buying time.” On Monday, at Rafah, on the border of the occupied territory of the Gaza Strip, fundamentalist militants in the Hamas organisation have tunnelled like sappers from an earlier war underneath a similar fence. They packed it with high explosive and sent five co- religionists, Israeli bedouin soldiers to paradise. Boom-boom-boom. Another one bites the dust.

Now Arafat is dead. One of his achievements was to destroy the peace-minded Israeli left, not so much by rejecting President Bill Clinton’s Camp David settlement as by backing suicide attacks afterwards. Ten years ago I was in Palestinian Jericho where the bunting was up for his return and hopes were high on both sides of the green line for peace. It seems like ancient history.

All eyes now turn to Arafat’s old enemy Ariel Sharon, the man who hounded him out of Lebanon and penned him up in a compound during his last days. “Arik” is, or rather was, the settlers’ friend, a nationalist super-hawk among hawks, reviled for failing to prevent Christian Lebanese killers entering the Sabra-Chatila refugee camps of the Palestinians.

Sharon plans to remove 7,000 Israeli settlers who are hopelessly exposed in the Gaza Strip where some 1.25m Palestinians also rot. This military calculation designed to spare the lives of the Israeli soldiers who guard them has taken on a life of its own with Arafat’s passing. Disengagement — withdrawing the settlers — could be the beginning of something greater. If it took a red-baiting Richard Nixon to go to China, could Sharon be the hardman able and willing to deliver a deal? For it seems like only yesterday that the old Sharon declared one of these settlements in the Gaza Strip, Netzarim, as dear to him as Tel Aviv. Yet now, under his plan, its angry inhabitants will be forced out by bulldozers this summer.

After an attack such as that on Rafah, the old Sharon would have hit back with an iron fist. The wily new Sharon has been more restrained, judging it better to let the elections for new Palestinian leaders go unhindered. That said, a car bomb has exploded in the Syrian capital Damascus, where the Hamas leadership is based. It missed its Hamas target: only just. Boom-boom-boom . . .

It is hard to imagine Sharon as a peacemaker, not a warrior. But I heard even some of the prime minister’s bitterest Israeli enemies speak of him with grudging admiration. “He’s a mensch (a real man),” says one former ambassador to Paris, now a doveish academic.