THE Israeli Palestinian peace process always depended on co operation at two levels between the political leaders of the two sides, and between their forces in the field.
On the political level, the prominent Palestinian leader, Dr Hanan Ashrawi, asserted yesterday, "there has been no peace process since the Israeli elections. The government has been implementing a war agenda." This week's continuing clashes between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian policemen cemented the breakdown on the ground as well.
The relationship between Israeli troops and their Palestinian counterparts was always fragile. Many of the first Palestinians pressed into police uniform were former PLO fighters, brought in from training camps throughout the Middle East.
The first force deployed in Jericho, for example, were members of the PLO's Al Aksa Brigade, and arrived to join the Israelis on joint patrols in May 1994 direct from training in Iraq.
Some of the 30,000 strong police and security forces were recruited from among the "generation of the stones" - the activists who initiated the Palestinian intifada uprising against Israeli occupation.
Many members of the police force lost relatives and friends during the intifada. Many of them have relatives deeply involved in the Hamas Islamic, movement which consistently opposed the peace process and" worked tirelessly to undermine it.
Against this background, it is easy to understand why the Palestinian policemen have always, had to deal with divided loyalties, and why so many of them turned their guns on Israeli troops this week. It is all too easy to believe Mr Arafat's own assessment that, at best, he now controls only about 80 per cent of the men in the field.
Those divided loyalties were most clearly expressed on Thursday, at the Joseph's Tomb shrine in the West Bank city of Nablus. Egged on by thousands of Palestinian youths, Palestinian policemen laid siege to the complex, set part of it ablaze, and shot dead six Israeli soldiers. But when the implications of the bloodshed became clear they stopped shooting, helped evacuate the wounded, and protected the other soldiers.
Many Israelis, even some of the staunchest supporters of the peace process, have been horrified to see Palestinian policemen, men they hoped were their partners, becoming enemy gunmen. Equally, the Palestinian police and their families have only become more mistrustful and resentful of the Israelis as their casualty figures have mounted relentlessly.
After the bloodiest days of violence here in nearly 30 years, it is quite impossible to envisage those same soldiers and policemen, any time in the foreseeable future, sitting together in their jeeps and setting off, side by side, on joint security patrols.