Word: gaza
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...Palestinian thinking. The Israeli withdrawal was celebrated throughout the Arab world as a famous victory - indeed, it was the first time Israel had been compelled, by force of arms, to withdraw from Arab territory. And nowhere was the lesson more ardently embraced than in the West Bank and Gaza, where rank-and-file Palestinian activists had grown increasingly skeptical of the prospects for the peace process to secure an Israeli withdrawal from those territories...
...generation of Palestinians who waged the first intifada from 1987 into the early 1990s had watched with considerable skepticism as Arafat brought the PLO exile apparatus back from Tunis, installed them as the pashas of the West Bank and Gaza towns handed over to him under Oslo, and promised to negotiate away the Israeli occupation and in its place put a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital. By last year, the peace process had delivered precious little of what Arafat had promised his people it would bring. And as he approached his moment of truth at Camp David...
...emphasis in the Mitchell Report on the issue of suggests the international community believes there's little chance of getting Palestinians to stop fighting Israel as long there's no hope of the current conditions of Israeli rule on the West Bank and Gaza being changed...
...Arafat may have some control over the militants in his own Fatah organization, but he is not capable of restricting the Islamist groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Today the Israelis defused 20 powerful roadside bombs in Gaza, and there was some mortar shelling. And if he goes after the Islamists, he'd be in big trouble among his own people and throughout the Arab world. On the ground, the radical line is winning these days...
With so much blame to go around and such thirst for revenge, neither side's leadership seems willing or able to find a way out. Sharon called the deaths a "horrific murder" and ordered a missile strike on Yasser Arafat's Fatah offices in Gaza City, which wounded 20 Palestinians. But Sharon is caught between his hard-line constituents' demands to raise an iron hand against the Palestinians and the outside world's pleas to pursue a diplomatic solution. Even as fresh blood soaked the soil of the disputed land, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres was in Europe searching...