TANKS WON'T BRING ISRAEL LASTING PEACE.

Byline: Mehran Kamrava Local View

THE Palestinian-Israeli conflict has reached one of its most critical stages in recent memory as the carnage continues unabated.

Israel has been racked by bloody suicide bombings. Israeli tanks and soldiers occupy most of the areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority under the auspices of the Oslo Accords. A defiant Yasser Arafat is holed up in his battered headquarters in Ramallah, surrounded by Israeli military forces.

According to the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem, in the past 18 months more than 1,060 Palestinians and 200 Israelis have lost their lives in the violence - and that total doesn't include the most recent deaths. Innocent civilians on both sides live in a state of siege and in constant fear for their lives.

While criticism of the Israeli government's actions have been little in the United States, American allies in Europe and elsewhere have been quick to denounce Israeli violations of international law and Prime Minister Sharon's draconian measures against civilian Palestinians.

Sharon's policies appear to be predicated on two basic assumptions, one public, the other private.

Publicly, his stated objective is to ``destroy the infrastructure of Palestinian terrorism.''

Since the Israeli government has evidence that personally links Arafat to terrorists, he is accused of bearing personal responsibility for the present crisis. Besieging and ramming tanks into his compound helps isolate his terror network and, supposedly, prevent further attacks on Israel.

But Sharon's ultimate objective is grounded not so much in diplomatic rhetoric but in realpolitik.

He and the rest of the Israeli intelligence community are fully aware that Arafat and his Palestinian Authority are incapable of reining in suicide bombers and other terrorists. It is, instead, the Hamas and Islamic Jihad organizations, both violently opposed to Arafat as well as to peace with Israel, that sponsor acts of violence against Israeli military and civilian targets.

What Sharon is seeking to do, according to the prime minister himself, is to humiliate and weaken Arafat and the larger Palestinian community to a point of total and utter desperation.

Once the Palestinians have been battered to the very edge of the breaking point, then the prime minister will agree to sit down and negotiate, this time from a position of unsurpassed military and physical strength.

In the meanwhile, Palestinian suicide bombers frame the moral backdrop against which any such negotiations will take place.

The old general might be uncompromising in his convictions. But he is no fool. He knows all too well how to position himself before ever agreeing to sit at the negotiating table.

Despite his protestations to the contrary, Arafat is indeed largely irrelevant insofar as the daily lives of ordinary Palestinians are concerned.

As recent events have demonstrated, his security forces have been unable to defend his own headquarters against Israeli attacks, never mind combating and destroying the secretive Hamas and Islamic Jihad organizations.

But Arafat does retain tremendous symbolic importance for the Palestinian people. Apart from his long stewardship of the struggle for recognition of the Palestinian cause, he is the Palestinians' elected president, having garnered 85 percent of the vote in flawed but generally free elections.

His weakened political position among the Palestinians, and his total incapability to stop Israel's invasion of Palestinian areas, has already heightened the credibility of the extremist Hamas and Islamic Jihad more than ever before.

Weakening him further cannot but have even more disastrous consequences.

Israel's invasion of Palestinian areas and its detention of thousands of Palestinians will not stop suicide bombers. If anything, it is only likely to strengthen the resolve of those already determined to stymie any prospects of a lasting peace between the two sides.

Surely, no one grows up with innate aspirations of one day becoming a suicide bomber. Ultimately, what matters is to understand the larger environment which conditions someone to take such an unfathomable leap of faith.

Tanks, troops, guns, prisoners, tough talk - these will not stop suicide bombers. If anything, they will only strengthen the resolve of extremists and perpetuate the cycle of violence.

Sharon's tactics may well serve his short-term objectives. But they do not bode well for the long-term future of Israel.