Chicken or the egg: Terminate the cycle of violence

The fact that six Palestinians have chosen to end their lives along with Israelis' in the past four days suggests that part of this story is not being told.

To explain recent terrorism, Israeli officials make a direct parallel between Yasir Arafat and Osama bin Laden and their "networks of terror." This is simply incorrect. Arafat's party, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, is diametrically opposed to Islamic Jihad, the group that has claimed responsibility for the most recent suicide bombings. The former advocates a secular, democratic state within the occupied territories in coexistence with Israel, the latter an Islamic state in all of former mandate Palestine. Furthermore, Arafat does not have control over members of extremist groups, as is manifest in his lack of success in deterring suicide bombers. Arafat's police torture prisoners; in September they fired into a crowd of peaceful but vehement protesters - their own people. The territories have the highest police-to-civilian ratio in the world, yet the violence continues.

Israeli and U.S. policy only exacerbates Arafat's downward spiral. Yesterday's bombing of Palestinian Authority facilities by Israel will further decrease the PA's efficacy. Each time President Bush and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon demand that Arafat act decisively against terrorism, they effectively ask him to abuse the Palestinians, ironically following in the footsteps of his violent mentor, the Israeli government.

In this conflict, no party is innocent; however, the Israeli government's causal role in terrorism has been understated in the U.S. media. The UN has repeatedly condemned Israeli institutionalization of torture and other human rights violations to no avail. Thus the present anti-Israel violence could be seen simply as a mirror of the Israel government's treatment of Palestinians. Houses are bull-dozed daily and Palestinians killed in raids on so-called terrorist haven towns. Israel and its settlers use 80 percent of the territories' water. Students can rarely go to school; because of border closures, those Palestinians who have jobs cannot get to work, government employees included. Produce rots at interminable checkpoints. The Palestinian standard of living falls and unemployment reaches daunting new heights. Yet even in such an environment, the vast majority of Palestinians do not act violently against Israel.

Palestinians also want peace. Since 1948, the Palestinians' negotiators have compromised time and again, yielding up decision-making power, political control and, most critically, land.

Meanwhile, Israel has not met a single major deadline for its side of the "peace pro-cess" since the Camp David Accords of 1978 (nevermind the much-touted 1993 Oslo Accords). The most recent intifada ("shaking off") has not been sustained for more than a year because Palestinians do not want peace; it began out of hopelessness, an effort at empowerment in the face of betrayal by the so-called peace process and by the injurious actions of the PA and its leader, Arafat. The current suicide bombings are extreme manifestations of this same hopelessness, hopelessness that cannot be controlled by Israel, Arafat or the millions of ordinary Palestinians who would like nothing more than for the violence to end. Palesti-nian terrorism is a part of the cycle of terrorism in which Israeli-state terrorism plays an equally crucial role. As the tanks roll in, Palestinians and many Israelis alike cry that the answer is less violence, not more. Alexandra Snyder, a history major from New York, NY, is currently studying abroad in London. She can be reached at snyder@princeton.edu.