Word: gaza
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...moves mostly designed for domestic consumption, Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat are burning the almost completely collapsed bridges that lead back to the peace process. Israeli helicopters launched new rocket attacks on Palestinian Authority buildings in the West Bank and Gaza overnight, making good on warnings by the Israeli defense minister that Israel plans to ratchet up its level of force in dealing with what he described as "guerrilla warfare" by the Palestinians. And Arafat responded that the raids could not "shake one eyelash from the eyelashes of a Palestinian child holding a Palestinian stone to defend holy Jerusalem...
...faces the choice of either becoming the spokesman for their renewed intifada or else simply being sidelined. Still, neither side can achieve their political objectives through an escalation of violence - the Palestinians are militarily unable to muster the means to end Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza; the Israelis are politically unable to deploy force on the scale necessary to crush an overwhelmingly popular uprising. So both sides will maintain the posture of escalation while knowing it won't get them beyond the impasse that sent them to the negotiating table in the first place...
...been singularly unsuccessful. Arafat's headquarters had been in Jordan in the late '60s and Lebanon in the '70s and early '80s, but by 1987 he was billeted in far-off Tunisia with few instruments to pursue his nationalist struggle. Then came the uprising in the West Bank and Gaza. The young men of the territories occupied by Israel in 1967 may have suffered heavy casualties as they hurled stones and gasoline bombs at a well-armed adversary with little patience for their protests, but they also created a political crisis for Israel. It was the intifada more than anything...
...peace process is no longer dependent on the vagaries of Israeli politics. In the West Bank and Gaza, the clock has been set back more than 10 years as young men armed with stones and gasoline bombs confront the guns of the occupying army, and the body count mounts almost daily. The fact that there are a lot more guns on the Palestinian side this time around makes the conflict likely to be more protracted and even bloodier. And Yasser Arafat finds himself its prisoner. He needed this uprising to prove to the Israelis and Americans that the deal being...
...course, it's a circular game: The Palestinians can't muster the requisite force to expel the Israelis from the West Bank and Gaza, but they can make life there extremely uncomfortable for Israeli soldiers and settlers. Meanwhile, the Israelis can't crush the rebellion, and the force they're applying in pursuit of that goal will force even friendly governments in the Arab and Western worlds to distance themselves from Israel. So the situation stalemates once again in an ugly equilibrium. Ugly, but not necessarily unstable...