Hiking up the price

Ariel Sharon's current strategy has all the symmetry of maths: the more the Palestinians resist, the more they lose. Graham Usher writes from Jerusalem
"The Palestinians are paying a political price for taking the path of terror," Ariel Sharon told a police ceremony in Jerusalem on Tuesday. The first part of the sentence is certainly true -- and the price is becoming steeper by the day.
Following death by suicide bomb of 15 Israelis in Jerusalem last week, Israel took over nine Palestinian institutions in occupied East Jerusalem, including the PLO's de facto headquarters, Orient House.
After a similar attempted attack outside a restaurant in Haifa on Sunday -- leaving 20 Israelis injured and an Islamic Jihad bomber dead -- Israel launched its deepest incursion of the Intifada into Palestinian-controlled territory on Tuesday, pushing 12 tanks and two bulldozers two kilometres into the West Bank town of Jenin.
In an operation lasting three hours, the squadron destroyed a Palestinian police station, commandeered the Jenin governor's house and -- according to unconfirmed Palestinian reports -- released 70 Palestinian collaborators from Palestinian Authority jails.
It also met with Palestinian resistance, though less from the police officers whose station had been sacked than from Fatah fighters in Jenin refugee camp. Despite such individual heroism, scenes of Palestinians celebrating the army's "retreat" from the town were merely poignant. If anything, Israel's latest incursion merely confirmed the ease with which it can enter, destroy and leave a Palestinian area without incurring a single casualty.
A similar -- or worse -- scenario seemed imminent on Tuesday night, when Israeli tanks and infantry encircled Beit Jala, Beit Sahour and Bethlehem after a day of fighting around the East Jerusalem illegal settlement of Gilo. According to Israeli press reports, a full invasion of Beit Jala was only averted on intervention by the US government, which had earlier rebuked the Jenin invasion as "provocative."
But all are aware that Israel's presence around Beit Jala is now a mere stay of execution. "Israel will soon reach a point where Gilo won't be under fire," Sharon promised his police audience, to rapturous applause. He means it. And, to show he meant it, one day after he bowed slightly to American pressure he flouted it yesterday by having one of his snipers shoot dead another Fatah activist, 27-year-old Imad Abu Sneineh, outside his home in Hebron.
Against such a battering, the PA resembled a boxer who knows neither what has hit him nor where the next blow is coming from. After the closure of institutions in East Jerusalem, Palestinian Speaker Ahmed Qrei declared there would be no talks on a "cease-fire" or anything else until Israel re-opened Orient House. After Israel's actual incursion into Jenin and threatened invasion of Beit Jala, the PLO formally requested a meeting of the UN Security Council to dispatch an "international protection force" to the occupied territories; meanwhile, PLO negotiator Saeb Erekat warned that, by these actions, Israel "has opened the gates of hell."
Hell has long been the place where the 3.2 million Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza reside. But the gates of the Security Council will likely stay locked, courtesy of an almost certain US veto on any motion to send international observers. Taking a break from an arduous round of golf, George Bush told the world the "cycle of violence must end," Israel should act with "restraint" and, above all, Yasser Arafat must "clamp down on the suicide bombers." And that was it.
Faced with so little succour, Arafat again flew to Cairo to meet yesterday with Arab League Secretary- General Amr Moussa and the foreign ministers of Egypt and Jordan, while an Egyptian delegation led by presidential aide Osama El-Baz was in Washington to discuss the "next steps for the region."
The Palestinians expect nothing from either meeting. They are still smarting from the derisory Arab response to a call on Monday for a "day of rage" across the region to protest Israel's closure of Orient House. "The Palestinian day of anger did not witness any marches of anger in the Arab and Islamic world," wrote Hafez Barghouti wearily in the Fatah newspaper Al-Hayat Al- Jadida. "We have lost hope in people on earth, but we still have faith in God."
This is of course the message of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and their language is as mordant as Sharon's. After the Jenin incursion, Hamas announced it has another 14 martyrs waiting in the wings, through whom Israel would "pay dearly." It will, and so will the Palestinians -- only more so.
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