The Palestinians need far more practical support than Tuesday's non-binding UN General Assembly vote condemning Israel's construction of the West Bank barrier, writes Graham Usher in Jerusalem A day after the Israeli army finally ended the devastation of Rafah Israeli airplanes and helicopters launched five separate missile attacks on Gaza, leaving 12 Palestinians dead and 100 wounded, most of them civilians. This was followed by an army invasion of Ramallah, with one Palestinian dead and 12 injured. Elsewhere Israeli soldiers killed a Fatah activist in Hebron and a Popular Front man in Qalqiliya, and arrested 18 Palestinians across the three West Bank cities. The attacks on Gaza were said to be in reprisal for eight rudimentary mortars fired harmlessly into Israel on Sunday. The raid into Ramallah was said to be in pursuit of the Hamas cell that killed three Israeli soldiers in a nearby village the same day. Palestinians accept neither explanation. They say the sheer scale of Israeli assaults -- particularly in Gaza -- aim at collectively punishing Palestinian civilians for the temerity of hosting armed fighters among them. "The message is that you [the Palestinians] better clamp down [on the militants] or we make it a living hell for you in Gaza," said one Israeli military analyst, quoted in Tuesday's Jerusalem Post. It is a policy that has never worked in the past and it is unlikely to work now. In visceral protests accompanying the funerals of seven of the victims in Gaza the Palestinian chorus was less against Hamas's suicide operations than the current strategies of the Palestinian Authority leadership. "Stop talking about peace and cease-fires. Fight to death or victory," cried the mourners. Which is precisely what Ariel Sharon wants. Addressing the Knesset while the missiles rained in Gaza he promised more of the same attrition, lit only by a mirage that "in the coming months there will be a real chance of breaking the impasse imposed upon us and resuming genuine progress towards peace". He reiterated his government's commitment to the roadmap, including "Israel's 14 reservations, which are an integral part of the plan" and which, if adhered to, make it impossible for any Palestinian leadership to implement. He reaffirmed that Yasser Arafat "is the greatest obstacle to peace" and that his government remains "committed to removing him from the political arena". He assailed those Israelis -- like Yossi Beilin and other former negotiators who recently drafted a "model peace agreement" with their Palestinian counterparts -- for peddling "false impressions of alternative plans". He also said his government would not only accelerate but "complete" construction of the West Bank security barrier "within one year", including the areas "surrounding [occupied East] Jerusalem". If carried out, Palestinian geographers predict this would leave "Palestine" with three non-contiguous cantons in the West Bank and enable Sharon to impose a "provisional" state upon them, with or without the roadmap. It will bury chances of a genuine settlement for generations. "You can have peace or you can have the wall," said the PLO's UN representative, Nasser Al-Qudwa, at the General Assembly on Tuesday. "You can't have both." It is abundantly clear which Sharon has chosen. Is there any power that can stop him? The Palestinians received a massive symbolic victory for their campaign against the barrier on Tuesday when 144 countries -- including the 15-member European Union bloc -- supported a UN General Assembly resolution describing Israel's construction of the barrier on occupied territory as in "contravention of international law" and demanding that it halt the present building and reverse those sections already built. The challenge facing the Palestinian leadership is whether it can translate what is now an enormous international consensus against the barrier into a political strategy that can break an equally solid Israeli consensus in favour of it. Last week the 13,600 Palestinians whose 15 villages are ensnared between the Green Line and the barrier received the predictable notice that they would now require Israeli permits to live and work on their own land. The official PA position is for the villagers to refuse the permits, aware that this would be another step towards Israel's de facto annexation of the territory and another push towards expelling its owners. In practice PA officials are telling the villagers to collude with the permit system in the hope that at some point the world's condemnation will become substantive as well as declamatory. A better approach would be to turn these passive responses into an active campaign of non-violent protest, drawing on the growing disquiet shown by the Israeli peace camp (including elements within the main opposition Labour Party) over the barrier's route. There have been intimations of such an alliance. Last week Palestinian villagers and Israeli peace activists joined forces to try to breach the barrier and allow Palestinian farmers to harvest their olive trees. But without leadership from the PA and mobilisation by the Palestinian factions such demonstrations are likely to remain ephemeral. As one farmer from the divided village of Ras Tira put it: "The problem is when the protests stop the bulldozers start." In the absence of protests of this kind will come others. Following the carnage in Gaza Hamas and Islamic Jihad vowed to "confront the Zionist aggression in Palestine and to urge all factions and resistance forces to coordinate among each other to confront this aggression," including, presumably, the launching of suicide attacks inside Israel. This may slake Palestinian revenge and boost the Islamists' popularity ratings. But it will also rally Israeli opinion behind the barrier (regardless of the route it takes) and deter the world from doing anything other than passing non-binding resolutions at the UN General Assembly. It will also serve Sharon, who needs a constant atmosphere of threat and violent reaction among Palestinians to cloud his colonial ambitions in the occupied territories. The supreme test of the Palestinians -- leadership and factions alike -- is how to resist the latter without succumbing to the provocations of the former.
