ARABS-ISRAEL - Feb. 11 - 'Total War' As Positions Disconnect.

A 35-year-old Israeli motorist is shot dead just south of Jerusalem. A fierce night-time battle in Bethlehem rages between Palestinian gunmen and Israeli soldiers. (The Israeli view of the historical conflict now is almost totally disconnected from that of the Palestinians as the big majority on both sides believe the 1993 Oslo peace process is dead). A coalition of Islamist and nationalist groups, including Arafat's Fatah, calls for a "day of rage" on Feb. 13 to be followed by "total confrontation" on Friday Feb. 16. Calling Sharon a "terrorist" and "raging bull", it says the Palestinians should not give him a chance to "impose any stability". (The chaotic situation is undermining Arafat's PA - see Palestine). A poll by the Israel Democracy Institute (IDI), a Jerusalem research entity, shows that only 20% of the Israeli public believes genuine peace with the Palestinians is possible. Israeli writer and journalist Yossi Klein Halevi says: "Not just the election of Sharon, but the margin by which he was elected means the Israeli public understands the Oslo process is dead.

Peace is going to take a generation at least. What the Israeli electorate wants Sharon to do now is convey two messages to the Arab world. That Israel has not lost its will to fight, and that we still have red lines in negotiations" (meaning limits). Haim Cohen, 49, an Israeli park ranger, is quoted as saying: "We gave and we gave and we gave, and we saw the Arabs don't want peace. We need someone who will deal with them in a different way". Ruth Gavison of the IDI says Israelis feel the track Barak and the late PM Yitzhak Rabin took was leading to "too many concessions but no real end of the conflict, plus a serious loss of personal security. They don't like this deal". (Thus a dispirited and disheartened Israeli public threw Barak out and with him the notion that peace with the Arabs was possible. But the Palestinian side is equally disappointed. Since 1993, the number of Jewish settlers living in the West Bank had doubled to nearly 100,000. While Barak talked of turning over most of the West Bank, the pace of Jewish housing starts had accelerated under his government. To the Palestinians, the uprising which erupted after Sharon's defiant Sept. 28, 2000 visit to E. Jerusalem's Haram Al Sharif was the inevitable response to the frustration caused by those new settlements and the map that the accords had wrought: small, self-governing Palestinian cantons, scattered in a disconnected patchwork and separated by Israeli settlements, army checkpoints and zones of control.

The poor Palestinians got poorer and, thanks to corruption within the PA, the rich and highly-connected got richer. Repeated Israeli closures of the territories have made the situation much worse, with the rate of unemployment reaching explosive proportions - to the extent that when Arafat telephoned Sharon to congratulate him on his Feb. 6 victory the PA President told the PM-elect the Palestinians were on the brink of starvation. If that was Oslo, Fatah activists said, the Palestinians wanted none of it. Palestinians also choked on Israeli's insistence on its own security. Of the more than 400 who had died in violence since Sharon's Sept. 28 move, nearly 90% were Palestinians. It was the Palestinians' security that was at risk, not the Israelis' security, they insisted. But to the Israelis who gave Sharon a wide margin of victory, the hundreds of Palestinian deaths and thousands of injuries barely registered. Many Israelis have barely ever spoken to a Palestinian. Almost none had ever met the teenage stone-throwers who were dying daily in clashes with heavily armed Israeli troops. They blamed the Palestinians for spurning Barak's concessions and turning to violence. Yet in the face of continuing corruption within the PA, with many PA officials having become millionaires, the military might deployed by Israel against the poorly-armed Palestinians was far out of proportion. And the appeal of the Islamist-nationalist coalition also reflects growing dissent among Palestinians about the future direction of the uprising and collapse of central authority).