Peacemakers: an Israeli & a Palestinian.

The two men are sitting in the foyer of their Barcelona hotel in early September: Amos Oz, Israel's best-known novelist and veteran peace campaigner, and Sari Nusseibeh, Palestinian philosopher and leading moderate. They have just won the 2004 Catalonia Prize and they look exhausted. All day, it's been interviews, interviews.

Behind us, outside the window, is Barcelona's fourteenth-century cathedral. I wonder if they've even had a chance to look at it yet. I sense that Oz would rather talk about his recently published autobiography, and Nusseibeh about his work as president of Jerusalem's Al-Quds University. But though they may curse it at times, it has been Oz and Nusseibeh's fate to be bound together in trying to find the palliative, if not the cure, for the conflict that has dominated their lives.

Oz was born in 1939 in the West Jerusalem district of Kerem Avraham. In his new memoir, A Tale of Love and Darkness (Harcourt), Oz remembers it as a down-at-the-heel place of petit-bourgeois Jews, which his parents always wanted to leave for "a more cultured neighborhood." Ten years his junior, Nusseibeh grew up in the East Jerusalem district of Sheikh Jarrah, then located in Jordanian territory on the other side of the heavily fortified Green Line, which historically separated the Jewish and Palestinian communities. Unlike Oz's district, Sheikh Jarrah was an area of middle-class villas. The Nusseibeh family can trace its presence in Jerusalem for over a millennium. In the twelfth century, warring Christian factions appointed the Nusseibehs custodians of the key to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, on the ground that they were Muslim and therefore neutral.

Kerem Avraham and Sheikh Jarrah are located a few miles from one other. But even though the Green Line is now invisible and Jerusalem, according to Israel, is a "united and indivisible city," it still acts as a formidable psychological barrier between the Arab and Jewish populations. So the fact that Oz and Nusseibeh are now sitting together on the same sofa in the same hotel in northern Spain is a historical anomaly. This is why, of course, they have been jointly awarded the Catalonia Prize.

Yet both men have plenty of critics: people on either extreme of the Israel-Palestine debate, who say that one or the other has not done enough to condemn the sins of his own society. Before tackling these criticisms, though, it's only fair to lay out both men's dovish credentials.

Nusseibeh used to teach Islamic philosophy to Jewish students at Jerusalem's Hebrew University. In the late 1980s, he suggested that his fellow Palestinians should accept and recognize the state of Israel. His defining moment came in 1987 when he was approached by Israel to take part in secret peace talks. The talks foundered, but they were the first step toward the peace process. Recently, Nusseibeh launched the People's Voice, an initiative that asks ordinary Palestinians where they think compromise should be sought--a "bottom-up approach," he argues, that is the only way to a lasting solution.

Oz is a founding member of the Israeli peace movement Peace Now. As a journalist, he has criticized his fellow Israelis' often implacable attitudes about Palestinian rights, and has spoken out against West Bank settlements. He also participated in the Geneva Accords, an initiative organized by Israeli and Palestinian intellectuals last year, which attempted to hammer out a series of bilateral compromises.

It was Oz's stance at Geneva that earned him recent brickbats. As the Middle East Review put it last year, "Amos Oz reinforces Israel's self-righteousness and confiscates from the Palestinians the position of the victim by representing himself and Israel as the true victims."

Certainly, when pressed, Oz does not espouse opinions that most Palestinians would want to hear. His fiction may be replete with sensitivity and lyricism, but on what concessions should be granted to the Palestinians he is brusque. I ask him if his opposition to resettlement of Palestinian refugees in Israel is merely pragmatic.

"No, it's an ethical position because I happen to believe that the Jewish people have the right to be the majority in one small piece of this world. The Palestinians are entitled to have a state. They are not entitled to two states."

When speaking of what Israel's leaders need to do to gain the trust of the Arab world, though, Oz has a tendency to talk in general terms: "It's high time for the leaders to speak with sympathy about the Palestinian tragedy without necessarily putting the entire blame on Israel," he says. "We have to do things that are far removed from military action."

Yes, but what things? "Things of the imagination, things of generosity, things of emotional openness," he suggests, using the vague terms that so irritate his left-wing critics. Nonetheless, Oz is insistent on his record: "The Palestinian people's right to a state of their own is indisputable, and I have said this ever since 1967."

Nusseibeh's assailants, meanwhile, challenge his claim to being a man of peace at all. This is because of his now infamous appearance on Al-Jazeera back in 2002, something that continues to damage Nusseibeh's image in the West as a moderate Palestinian. Search online for "Nusseibeh," and you'll find numerous Web sites claiming he supports suicide bombers.

The very mention of Al-Jazeera triggers a response from Nusseibeh. He sits upright in his chair, clearly wanting to get this damaging story straight. He doesn't deny the basics: that Al-Jazeera interviewed him alongside the Hamas leader Khaled Meshal, and the mother of a Palestinian suicide bomber, Umm Nidal.

Nusseibeh's critics allege that during the interview he said, "listening to Umm Nidal, I recall the Qur'anic verse stating that Paradise is at the feet of mothers.... I do not wish to mix politics with the respect felt by each Palestinian toward Jihad warriors."

So, did he say it, or not?

"Look. This is what happened: Al-Jazeera didn't tell me in advance ... about Khaled Meshal. They gave him a lot of space and they didn't talk to me. And then ... they showed pictures of a mother wailing that she lost her child ... so my first response to that was to say that the 'paradise is under the feet of the mother.' Mothers are respected by God. Having said this, I went on to show why I thought that suicide bombings were not functionally justifiable."

But are they morally justifiable?

"Look," Nusseibeh's agitation is growing, "if I had been in a philosophy class I would have used the moral argument. But in my situation I was talking to millions of Arabs all in a state of emotion and rage.... So, I used the functional argument and I think it worked."

Nusseibeh says that he has "come under a lot of pressure" for speaking against suicide bombings. Still, his defense--that he had been manipulated by Al-Jazeera--doesn't dispel the discomfort his comments provoked among many Westerners. On the other hand, it seems unfair not to take into account the "pressures" that Nusseibeh describes. While both he and Oz argue that certain values transcend individual and ethnic differences, neither operates in a vacuum: they also have to conform to the powerful codes and expectations of their own societies. It is not an enviable position.

Both men also spring from a humanist tradition that is often at odds with an increasingly militant Middle East. Oxford-educated Nusseibeh laments the role of the Palestinian clerics, saying they lack the "religious values that are human values." At the same time, the postcolonial theories of the Western Left, most notably those inspired by Nusseibeh's compatriot Edward Said, are attacking the Enlightenment assumptions that form the core of Oz and Nusseibeh's thinking.

Oz's defense of this tradition is vehement: "In my view, outside the realm of the Enlightenment there are no values. There are either dogmas or total relativism. Values only exist within the realm of the Enlightenment." His and Nusseibeh's fight against such dogmas will be long and hard. Extreme religious nationalism is being nurtured as never before in both Israel and Palestine. One thinks again of that massive key to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, entrusted centuries ago by Christians to the Nusseibeh family. There's a metaphor there (a tired one, perhaps, but then this is a tired war): if people like Oz and Nusseibeh aren't key to overcoming the region's woes, it's hard to see who is.

Julius Purcell is Spain correspondent for the Tablet of London. He lived in Jerusalem in the late 1990s, working as a reporter for the Jerusalem Times, a Palestinian weekly.