In the middle of Jerusalem, there's a little street, a pedestrian precinct, full of restaurants and coffee bars. It's one of my favourite spots in the city, and I visit it most times I'm there. On Saturday nights, it's full of young people out for a drink after the Sabbath has ended. And it was there, just after midnight this Saturday that two suicide bombers struck, and then a car bomb, leaving 10 people dead and 180 injured. And as Elaine and I were shaking with the news yesterday morning, someone rang to tell us that a bomb had exploded in a bus in Haifa. Another 15 dead; another 40 injured. Why did it happen now? Because American envoy Anthony Zinni is visiting the Middle East, trying to engineer a cease fire. Those who carried out the attacks were willing to murder, maim and commit suicide rather than contemplate the possibility of peace.

I've supported every peace initiative in the Middle East since the 6 Day War, which happened when I was 19. I did so for the simplest of reasons. Regardless of where our sympathies lie, it should be obvious that from peace all sides gain. From war, violence and terror everyone loses. People lose their jobs, their future, their security, their lives. Whatever resolution is there to be had, it can only be reached by negotiation, compromise and the slow building of trust. There is no other way. Nothing was ever gained by terror in the modern world, and those who practise it always end by harming their own side more than their enemies. Terror - the deliberate targeting of innocent victims - is evil, whoever practices it and whoever it is practiced against; and if we forget that, there's nothing left worth remembering.

Is there, even now, some source of hope? Perhaps just this, that Jews and Muslims both trace their descent to Abraham, and it was in his day that the first recorded territorial dispute took place in the promised land. It happened between Abraham's shepherds and those of his nephew Lot, and Abraham's words then have lost none of their power now. He turned to Lot and said: The whole land is before you. If you go to the left I will go to the right. If you go to the right I will go to the left. Only let there not be a quarrel between us, for we are brothers. May those who believe in Abraham's God choose Abraham's way: the way of peace.

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