JERUSALEM — After all the speeches and proclamations of the last two days here about the Middle East peace process, I decided to go see what people on the street thought about President Bush's visit.

I walked into the Old City, and was blown away by the richness of character and personal background in the few people I was able to talk to.

To a person, all of my interviewees dismissed Mr. Bush's visit as a hopeless effort, even if some of them felt the U.S. president was well-intentioned.

"I love President Bush. I believe he is committed to peace, but he can't do the impossible," said Neal Turk, a U.S. citizen who lives in Miami Beach, Fla., but once lived with his wife in Israel for three years.

Mr. Turk, 49, stood on the plaza next to the famous Western Wall, proudly waiting for his 22-year old son to be inducted into the elite Israeli paratroopers, who famously captured the Old City during the 1967 Six-Day War.

As he talked there was a festive, triumphant, proud spirit among the Jews standing and walking about on the plaza.

Groups of newly minted young Israeli paratroopers, in their olive green uniforms, toting machine guns, strolled and posed for the crowd. Mr. Turk told me that the reason they have the ceremony in the Old City, next to the wall, is because the paratroopers were the ones to capture the Old City in 1967 (they were memorialized by David Rubinger's famous picture).

The pride and the power of the Israeli people and nation was palpable. It was a stark contrast to the streets of Ramallah I saw earlier today. Perhaps it is an unfair comparison, because Ramallah was under a curfew. But the deserted streets were also much more rundown than Jerusalem's. Even the Muqata, the office compound for Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, was far more decrepit than any Israeli building I've seen in Jerusalem.

But Mr. Neal, who wrote a fierce letter to the editor in the Dec. 31 Miami Herald, had little sympathy for the Palestinians.

"There is only one issue: whether the Palestinians are ready to accept a Jewish state. Until that happens there will not be peace," Mr. Neal said. "The Israelis want to believe so badly that the Arabs are ready for peace, that they are willing to make concessions that are dangerous. They aren't ready."

Micha Makovsky, 47, an agricultural instructor who lives in a kibbutz in Stotyan, near Caesaria, was more blunt.

"Bush comes. Bush goes. Clinton comes. Clinton goes. Still we will fight," said Mr. Makovsky.

He was waiting for one of his twin sons to be inducted into the paratroopers. His eldest daughter and other twin son are also in the Israeli army.

"Yes, we want peace. I don't want my kids to go to the army. I don't sleep at night," Mr. Makosvsky said.

But then he pointed to his 6-year old daughter, who stood nearby.

"See this girl?" he said. "She will go to the army, too."

Earlier I had walked through a number of shops in the Christian quarter of the Old City, and I stopped to talk to Adnan Dakak, 45, a Palestinian shopkeeper.

Mr. Dakak said that "it seems [Mr. Bush] doesn't know what the problem is."

"Not knowing that Abbas doesn't control Gaza is strange," said Mr. Dakak, referring to Mr. Bush's demands that Mr. Abbas stop Hamas from firing rockets into southern Israel from the Gaza Strip.

Mr. Dakak is an electrical engineer by trade but is now running the family business because there is no work for him as a Palestinian in Jerusalem.

"I am a second-class citizen, so I don't get equal rights," he said. "But I have to stay here. It's my homeland. Even if I don't get to practice in my field, I want to stay."

Later, leaving the Western Wall, I ran into a newly married Israeli couple, Yitzy Schmidt, 24, and Tzipora Schmidt, 20.

Yitzy is a U.S. citizen who grew up in New York, and Tzipora is South African native. The two were introduced by a relative and met in Jerusalem only three months ago, they said.

The young couple were as adamant as Mr. Dakak that Jerusalem belonged to the Jewish people.

Jerusalem is "where we serve God," said Mrs. Schmidt. "We know that it's ours in the Bible, and we won it in a war."

Telling Israel to give Jerusalem or any of their land to Palestine is "like telling the Americans to give back land that they took from the Indians, or the English," said Mr. Schmidt said.

As I walked through the Armenian quarter on my way to the Jaffa Gate, I saw a T-shirt for sale that displayed an Israeli jet and said, "America, don't worry, Israel is behind you."

Below, you can see the Western Wall as the sun was setting today, with the Dome of the Rock right on the other side.

— Jon Ward, White House correspondent, The Washington Times