Diplomats scurry to the region seeking peace. But unless they challenge Israeli policy they will find only desolation, writes Graham Usher from Jerusalem Israel and the occupied territories are about to shore a tide of diplomacy. In the coming days German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, the European Union's Javier Solana, US Assistant Secretary of State William Burns and CIA Chief George Tenet are due to visit the region. Their aim is to further movement towards some kind of regional peace conference in the summer. The touted means are a "meaningful cease-fire" as a prelude to political negotiations and "reform" within the Palestinian Authority, principally the unification of its 12 security forces under one central command. The view of most Palestinians is that diplomacy alone will achieve neither. Since Sunday the Israeli army has invaded Qalqilya, Bethlehem, Beit Jala, Jenin, Hebron and several West Bank and Gaza villages in incursions aimed at mopping up residues left from April's full-scale re-conquests of Palestinian areas and consolidating Israel's military rule throughout the occupied territories. Four Palestinian civilians were killed in the raids, including, on Sunday, a woman and her 12-year-old niece shot dead by an army patrol while tilling their land near Gaza's eastern border with Israel. Dozens were arrested, swelling the number of Palestinian prisoners now in Israeli jails to over 2,000. Some 1,200 of these are kept in Israel's Ofer military base near Ramallah and -- according to Amnesty International -- are subject to "severe physical abuse... including torture". Five hundred are in the re-opened Ansar camp in the Negev Desert, including 300 administrative detainees, the highest count since the 1987-1993 Intifada. In a resistance more visceral than calculating, Palestinians fought back. On Monday a Palestinian suicide bomber killed a woman and 18-month old baby outside a café in Petah Tikva. The bomber was 18-year-old Jihad Titi, cousin of Mahmoud Titi, a militant in Fatah's Al-Aqsa Brigades assassinated by Israeli tank fire in a Nablus cemetery last week. On Tuesday Fatah guerrillas killed four Jewish settlers, including three Yeshiva students about to go into the Israeli army from the Itamar settlement near Nablus. Fatah sources say this may mark a turn away from suicide operations inside Israel to attacks on soldiers and settlers inside the occupied territories. Palestinians, generally, back both types of response, though polls show greater enthusiasm for confining the resistance to targets in the West Bank and Gaza. The same polls show majority Palestinian support for the Saudi/ Arab peace initiative, a desire to seek "reconciliation" with Israel and Israelis once an independent Palestinian state is established and massive support for effecting "fundamental changes" in how their Authority is run, with most wanting elections sooner rather than later. This paradox in Palestinian attitudes reflects the contradictions of their existence, between the pale beacons of "peace" lit by the diplomats and the dark wash of Israel's deepening occupation in the West Bank and Gaza. This now consists of a new regimen in which the West Bank is divided into eight isolated cantons and Gaza into two. To travel to the cities and villages within them Palestinians require passes from a revamped Israeli Civil Administration that resembles nothing so much as the "homeland" system established in apartheid South Africa. To trade, goods must be unloaded and reloaded "back-to-back" on lorries at eight Erez-like crossings at entrances to the cantons, at a huge hike in time and cost for an economy that can afford neither. The result -- say World Bank analysts -- is a society where one in two Palestinians live below the poverty line and an economy that may soon be reduced to barter and is already dependent on permanent injections of humanitarian aid. The reason, say the Israelis, is that such measures are necessary to secure their citizens, 30 of whom have been killed since the new order was set up. But the truth -- quietly acknowledged by all -- is that such a regime is required to enable the incursions into the Palestinian areas and allow the settlements to grow, unmolested, beyond the 42 per cent of West Bank land already colonised, according to a recent study by the Israeli human rights organization, Btselem. As long as this reality prevails Palestinians know talk of "cease-fire", "reform" and "negotiations" will remain castles in the sky and Palestinian resistance -- suicidal and otherwise -- will have a mass following. As for the diplomats, they will be condemned to face the charge leveled by the ancient Roman historian, of "making a desert which they call peace".
