It was Dennis Ross, US Special Envoy to the Middle East, who hit the nail on the head at the time.

“I can think of a lot of bad ideas, but I can’t think of a worse one,” he reportedly commented, on hearing of then Israeli opposition leader Ariel Sharon’s intention to go walkabout on Haram al-Sharif back in 2000.

While the Haram is the third holiest shrine in Islam, its site is also equally revered by Jews, who call it Temple Mount, the location of the Biblical First and Second Temples, and the most sacred place on earth.

Sitting high overlooking east Jerusalem, which has been under Israeli occupation since 1967, this 35-acre esplanade has lain at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and it remains one of the greatest obstacles to securing a meaningful peace.

Given the obvious sensitivities such a place invokes, few doubt that on that day September 28, 2000, when 72-year-old Sharon, the hard man of Israeli politics, set out for the Haram, he knew exactly how his visit would go down with Muslims throughout the Arab world, and Palestinians in particular.

In a play on words using Sharon’s nickname - bulldozer - a Palestinian colleague I knew at the time likened the gesture to that of ‘the bulldozer in the china shop’.

Surrounded by more than a thousand Israeli soldiers, riot police and a handful of Likud politicians, Sharon marched up to the site of the al-Aqsa mosque and the burnished golden Dome of the Rock, a landmark that is to Jerusalem what the Eiffel Tower is to Paris.

Almost immediately the barrage began. Chairs, rubbish bins, stones, whatever came to hand, scores of young Palestinians threw at the man they had long since come to revile.

The day following Sharon’s walkabout, Friday, the Muslim holy day and the start of Jewish Shabbat, the sense of foreboding was almost palpable. I’d had the same feeling a few times in the Middle East just before momentous events.

The first shots came from the direction of Jerusalem’s Western Wall. From along its top edges, Palestinians had begun stoning Jewish worshippers at the face of the famous site beneath them.

There were no half-measures now. The lid was off, and it would be a long time before the cauldron cooled sufficiently for it to be replaced.

For Palestinians on that day back in 2000 a collective rage was exploding, unleashing the al-Aqsa intifada or uprising, the second in recent history.

One senior Israeli intelligence officer at the time is said to have joked about how this was the start of a ‘Six Year War’.

He was of course indulging in some world-play by comparing the intifada, which he saw as a potential long-term sore, with the quickie Six Day War that pitched Arabs and Israeli against each other in 1967. The officer however wasn’t far off the mark, as subsequent events of the intifada would prove.

I’ll never forget the scenes that day in 2000 as the second intifada erupted in Jerusalem’s Old City, just as many Israelis and Arabs will never forget that other hugely significant event that took place on that very same spot 50 years ago this week.

It was on Monday June 5 1967 that the Six-Day War broke out. Arabs of course have another name for it calling it the June War.

Whichever name you chose, within those few short days of that brief and bitter struggle, one of its most iconic moments would be captured in the now famous black and white photographs of Israeli paratroopers as they “liberated” Jerusalem’s Old City, which had been under Jordanian control since the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948.

Like so many events in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that moment is etched into the collective psyche of those who were caught up in it at the time. Today, 50 years on, it remains a source of wounding that has never healed for a generation which still finds itself trapped in this seemingly interminable battle of wills.

The two Palestinian intifadas of 1987 and 2000, the bombings and assassinations, the building of separation walls and creation of what is effectively an apartheid state, Israel’s extension of its occupation of the West Bank and isolation of the Gaza Strip, the annexation of East Jerusalem, all these things are a legacy of those six days 50 years ago.

If ever peace between these two sides were possible it would depend in great part in unravelling the consequences of what happened during that momentous week back in 1967.

Over many years as a correspondent I have been up close when key moments of that legacy have played themselves out.

In that time I have never doubted that both sides, Israeli and Palestinian, have their own respective narratives of victimhood.

Each community has a story to tell, a litany of atrocities that has befallen them over the years at the hands of each other’s soldiers, gunmen, bombers and assassins.

I recall once in 2002 coming across a group of Israeli soldiers as the world still reeled in horror from the events that unfolded in the wake of the Israeli Army’s assault on the Palestinian refugee camp at Jenin.

“I’m an old soldier, a paratrooper. This is my third war, including Yom Kippur and Beirut in 1982. These last 11 days of fighting here have been the worst I have ever seen,” Israel Caspi told me as he sat down wearily among the other dirty and exhausted men of his reservist unit.

Caspi at 48 years old was indeed an old soldier compared to those in their late twenties who made up the bulk of the reservists in the 5th Infantry.

Whatever their age though, none of the men I met that day was typical of the Israeli soldiers I had so often encountered in the past. Gone was the usual swagger and confidence.

What I encountered that day were sombre, introspective men, men clearly marked by the things they’d seen and done inside Jenin camp.

As for the Palestinians who lived, fought and died there, the struggle for the camp would quickly enter the annals of intifada folklore.

“This is the most terrible situation I can remember in my entire life,” said Khaled Amoudi, an 80-year-old Palestinian grandfather, who had lived in Jenin camp since his family was first made homeless during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.

The old man told me how he and his wife Suda, along with some of their children and grandchildren, had decided to flee as the fighting intensified in their neighbourhood.

“Believe me when I say there were many dead in the street, and after a few days the smell was choking. What else could we do but leave?” Khaled said with a shrug.

“In 1967 we lost the West Bank, but now it’s worse because we are losing so many of our people and everything we have,” the old man continued, barely able to hold back the tears.

Here were two men, one Israeli the other Palestinian, both veterans and victims of a conflict that exploded back in 1967, and the reverberations of which were still wrecking lives.

“Fly on, attack the enemy, pursue him to ruination, draw his fangs, scatter him in the wilderness, so that the people of Israel may live in peace in our land, and the future generations be secured…”

So read the battle order of the officer commanding the Israeli Air Force on that day June 5 1967.

To this moment Palestinians still refer to that time as the year of the “Naksa” or “setback.”

That the Palestinians have since been scattered to the wilderness, goes without saying. That the Israelis have lived in peace is an illusion, while securing land for future generations has taken the monstrous and contentious form of illegal settlements.

It was barely months after the end of the Six Day War, when the government of Levi Eshkol, the fourth Prime Minister of Israel gave permission to a group of citizens to re-establish the community of Kfar Etzion, south of Bethlehem. From that day onward the settlement by Israelis of the West Bank was under way.

Right now that number has swollen to more than 730,000 living beyond the Green Line, Israel’s pre-1967 border, with 430,000 in the West Bank and 300,000 in Jewish neighbourhoods in east Jerusalem, comprising some 13 per cent of the Israeli population.

There are also more than 100 other “outposts” as the government calls them, usually unauthorised smaller hilltop communities.

Writing recently in the Washington Post, Dan Ephron, former Jerusalem bureau chief for Newsweek magazine, made the point that while for decades Israel has been debating what to do with the West Bank for that same amount of time it has always continued to build settlements.

“Their combined mass, physical and political, has become so dense in the past 50 years that a question about their impact looms large on this anniversary of the war,” says Ephron, before asking the question of whether a broad Israeli withdrawal is “even conceivable anymore?”

Meanwhile for the 2.8 million Palestinians still living in the West Bank, these settlements are both provocative symbols of the occupation and life-altering realities that include pass laws, segregation, land confiscation, and huge economic cost.

There is a Hebrew word, hafrada, which is used to refer to the concept of “separation” and “segregation”. Years ago while reporting from the region, an Israeli colleague told me that at one time hafrada might for example have been used in the fairly benign context of separation with regard to a person’s marriage breakup. But all that had changed he told me. By 2004 as we spoke, Israel was well into the process of building what some call its ‘separation barrier’.

To anyone who has never seen the wall - for that’s what it is - it’s hard to over emphasise the sheer injustice of this concrete scar that gouges its way across olive tree orchards, family homes, grazing areas, places of work, schools and anything else that, frankly, the State of Israel has decided to confiscate from the Palestinians.

Its sheer physical presence bears down when you are near it. Walking beside it, on either side, you can see Palestinians trying to live their lives under its weight.

The wall’s construction as my colleague was to tell me ran in tandem with the word hafrada taking on a whole new resonance. It had in effect entered Israel’s mainstream political lexicon underscoring a them-and-us attitude towards the Palestinians and shaping much of Israeli government policy.

As another Israeli told me if “Apartheid” was South Africa’s airbrushed term for policies of racial segregation then “hafrada” is Israel’s equivalent for policies of ethnic segregation.

A few years ago while visiting the Palestinian West Bank city of Ramallah, the Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad al-Maliki told me how the Palestinian Authority had commissioned leading international experts on South Africa’s former apartheid system to help make the case that Israel today is equally guilty of running a similar regime.

“Israel has a political system that has built an illegal structure to prevent our rights to statehood,” al-Maliki said, speaking of the wall.

“The settlement enterprise too is eating up the possibility of a viable Palestinian state,” he continued, stressing that “time was now of the greatest essence,” if this was to halted.

“I was 11 years old when the occupation in 1967 started. I am now 61. “There are people here now that have only known occupation,” al-Maliki explained.

The terrible irony is that among Israelis too there are those who share al-Maliki’s concerns over the settlement programme and its consolidation of the occupation.

Only a few days ago as the 1967 anniversary drew near, the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz, ran an article in which two veteran officers of the Israeli Army’s 16 Jerusalem Brigade looked back on the events of that time and what they have learned since.

Reuven Gal and Yossi Langotzky were among the first Israeli soldiers to cross the Green Line and begin the occupation of the West Bank, but today they see things differently.

Speaking of the settlers today, Yossi Langotzky didn’t pull any punches.

“They don’t understand how their settlements have corrupted us from within by making us the masters. All because of their idiotic messianic belief that we are a Chosen People,” Langotzky argued.

For his part Reuven Gal, Langotzky’s former comrade in arms, was concerned about the political direction in which Israeli is heading, a view I also was to hear from many Israelis during my last visit.

“I’m worried about the future of Israeli society, an entire public that can’t recognise we are occupiers and the negative and immoral aspects of ruling over our neighbours for so many years,” said Gal, now 75 years old.

“Our oppression of them - the Palestinians - has desensitised us. We see human beings as objects and are passing that onto our children,” he concluded.

This week marks a sad milestone in the division between Israelis and Palestinians. The overwhelming majority of them are decent men and women who want nothing more than to live their lives in peace.

Fifty years on the Six Day War and Israel’s subsequent occupation of the West Bank affects us all. It lies at the centre of the current conflict between the West and the Islamic world.

Most Palestinians - and Israelis - can scarcely begin to think of a day when their lives will be at peace. For many Palestinians who continue their struggle against the Israeli occupation it must sometimes feel more like ghost dancing rather than nation building.

As I once wrote a few years ago, at the very least though this struggle has crystallised their sense of being a nation, even if it remains a phantom one. Insubstantial perhaps, but in terms of hope incandescent yet.