HEBRON, Occupied West Bank – On a hill overlooking this ancient town, where bulldozers have hacked away the vine-covered terraces, Muhammed Rabah Drese scuffled his feet through the dust and stones, his shoulders hunched with the weight of dejection and pain.

"I used to be a gentleman," said Drese, 53. "Now, I'm on the ground like a worm.

"All this was grapes," he said with a sweep of his arm to the rocky hill and the fresh gouges of dirt. "There, on the top, was my grandfather's house. Mine was near those trees where the stones still lie. There were peaches here, the apricots there…"

It is hard for a visitor to see it all as Drese still can in his memory. The hill now is bare but for a few fig trees that somehow escaped the earthmovers. A new road, 40 feet wide, unused and half-paved, now climbs up the hill to five flat, dusty plots, each the size of a football field.

On one plot, behind a chain-link and barbed-wire fence, a steel-walled factory building has attracted a bevy of cranes and forklifts. Soon factories will stand on the other plots to form the industrial park for the new Israeli settlement of Kiryat Arba.

It has been several years since Drese first learned that his 125 dunams (about 30 acres) would be taken by the West Bank's Israeli military government for the benefit of new settlers.

He had been notified, he recalled, but somehow it didn't seem as if it could be true. "This was my grandfather's," he said, "this was my great-great-great-grandfather's grandfather's…"  And as he spoke, he flicked his hand over and over, brushing away the generations his family had farmed in the Judean hills.

"One day they came to me at the market and told me, ‘The Jews are working your land.'  I went crazy. I stood right here and threw stones at the bulldozer until they made me go away and there was nothing 1 could do."

Drese is quieter now, like all of Hebron in the tenth year of Israeli occupation. Like other farmers and townspeople, he bides his time. And he remembers.

"There were here 2,700 grape vines, 30 fig trees, 25 peach trees, two wells for water, 33 almonds, four pomegranates, 10 pears, four olives and two nuts," Drese said.

"They asked me to take money – 3 million Israei pounds!  But I don't sell my grandfather's land. It is my sister. My daughter. How could I sell my land?"

Suddenly Drese turned and scrabbled over a pile of rocks, up the hill to a terrace yet unbroken, where he burrowed for a moment, then returned. Then, slightly out of breath, and without another word, as if not another word was needed, he presented in his palm to be seen and felt a little mound of brown, sweet soil.

The future of the Mideast hinges on the future of West Bank hills, on land so sweet and so sacred to all who have held it.

The old stone town of Hebron, clinging to the hills without changing their shape, has been lived in for 6,000 years. For most of those years, the town has been held sacred as the home of Abraham, the first Jew, the first man to proclaim that there is one God.

King David ruled here for seven years before moving to Jerusalem. The three Jewish patriarchs – Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob – and their wives were buried in a cave in the center of town. A mosque has stood over the mouth of the cave for more than 1,300 years.

An ancient Hebrew legend holds that Hebron is also the burial place of Adam and Eve, that they lived here after their expulsion from Eden.

When the Israelis conquered the West Bank and returned to build a settlement here, they called the collection of white cement and stone flatblocks Kiryat Arba, the Town of the Four, for the biblical figures whose graves lie here.

To the Arabs, this land is sacred not only because of the patriarchs – regarded by Muslims as major prophets – but because they have farmed the hills for thousands of years.

In the Judean hills, farming is done not acre by acre, but inch by inch. Like Drese, the farmers know every tree, every stone that halts the plow, every life-giving spring. It is a difficult land, one that turns to barren scrub and stone if neglected even for a year.