THE SUMMER doldrums affect even the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which over the past few weeks has been killing fewer than the long-term average of three Palestinians and one Israeli per day. This relative scarcity of atrocities makes it a good time to remind ourselves of the basic strategies too ugly to mention when the horrors get too thick - that shape this struggle.
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, does not really want an end to the suicide bombings. On the contrary, he wants the attacks to escalate until they give him the pretext to drive all the Palestinians out of the West Bank. And the Palestinian terrorists who send out the suicide bombers are not just wicked murderers; they are also men so stupid that they do not realise they are serving Sharon's goals, or so intoxicated by faith that they do not care.
For over fifty years, the Zionist movement has been divided between those who were willing to share Palestine with its Arab inhabitants, and those who insisted that everything west of the Jordan River must be theirs.
The split first surfaced in 1947, when the World Zionist Congress voted to accept the United Nations resolution partitioning the territory and 160 'Revisionist' delegates rejected the proposal. Their contemporary descendants populate today's governing Likud Party, whose central committee voted last May to reject statehood for Palestinians under any circumstances.
The problem for all of Israel's 'revisionists', until recently, was that a majority of Israelis DID want to exchange territory for peace. Sharon's brutally direct solution to that problem, after the failure of the
Camp David summit two years ago gave him a window of opportunity, was to march onto the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount in Jerusalem surrounded by almost a thousand troops and police, with the deliberate purpose of provoking a Palestinian uprising that would end peace talks and bring down then-prime minister Ehud Barak.
Once that purpose was achieved and Sharon became prime minister, he set about to stoke the intifada by 'targeted assassinations' combined with indiscriminate repression of the general Palestinian population. Naive critics accuse him of having no strategy for stopping the terrorist attacks, but they totally misunderstand his purpose. His strategy is aimed not at ending the attacks but at changing Israeli attitudes - and it is working.
Two years ago, less than 8 per cent of Jewish Israelis favoured the drastic and illegal measure called 'transfer': the expulsion of all two million Palestinians from their homes in the West Bank and their forcible 'transfer' across the river to Jordan. By now, according to a Tel Aviv
University survey, 46 per cent of Israeli Jews back 'transfer'. Indeed, 31 per cent of Israeli Jews even support the expulsion of their Arab fellow citizens, one in five of all Israelis. Sharon has prepared the ground - and now he is awaiting a pretext to act.
It is the Palestinian 'rejectionists', with their quixotic belief that Israel can be driven out of all of former Palestine, who have enabled Sharon to come so far so fast.
Originally, they were drawn equally from the old Marxist left and from the new Islamist right. The religious radicals of Hamas and Islamic Jihad later grew far more influential, but left or right, they had the same problem as Israel's 'revisionists': most of their fellow Palestinians were willing to make peace with Israel if they could only have a legitimate state on their remaining land.
Until recently, therefore, the only time the rejectionists defied Arafat openly was after his negotiating partner under the 1993 Oslo peace accords, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, was assassinated by an anti-peace Jewish fanatic in 1995. Fearing that a sympathy vote would give Rabin's successor a mandate for a rapid peace settlement, the Palestinian 'rejectionists' carried out a series of terrorist bus bombings during the Israeli election campaign in early 1996 that discredited the pro-peace Shimon Peres and brought the 'revisionist' Binyamin Netanyahu to power instead.
Then the rejectionists stopped killing again, until Sharon triggered the intifada almost two years ago. Since then, he has played them like a violin, goading them into ever-greater atrocities and patiently building his case with the Israeli electorate for the final solution: 'transfer'. They are his enemies but also his pawns. And so the region drifts towards a catastrophe of hitherto unimagined dimensions.
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles re published in 45 countries.
