MIDDLE EAST

Jerusalem

In Israel and the occupied territories, the attacks in the United States have produced an eerie sense of déjà vu. In Israel, hospitals are on high alert and people are stocking up on gas masks, a precaution fueled by news stories--some of them Israeli-inspired--that Iraq too is on America's hit list and so Israeli cities may again be targeted by Saddam Hussein's Scud missiles.

In the 1991 Gulf War, Palestinians were placed under a six-week curfew. Today their 700 towns, villages and refugee camps are blockaded by earth ramparts and army checkpoints that are manned, occasionally, by tanks. Back then, they danced on the roofs when missiles rained on Tel Aviv. Now they are trying to live down media images of a handful of their people celebrating the carnage in America.

What links the two wars and two peoples is pessimism. After a year of the latest, bloodiest and most desperate conflict, all expect that things can only be worse this time around. And both nations have already tasted the future: Palestinians via a ferocious Israeli assault on their communities; Israelis via unusually tough arm-twisting by their chief ally, the United States. In the week after two airliners plowed into the World Trade Center, the Israeli army killed twenty-eight Palestinians (most of them civilians) and invaded Jenin and Jericho, two West Bank cities under the full control of the Palestinian Authority. Israeli leader Ariel Sharon apparently assumed the world would buy his comparison that Yasir Arafat is "our bin Laden" and grant license to bring him to heel. It wasn't granted. Under European and US pressure--and criticism from Sharon's increasingly dissident Foreign Minister, Shimon Peres--the offensive was curbed, aided by Palestinian moves that for once wrested the initiative out of Israel's hands.

Convinced that Israel would use the attacks on America to destroy his authority--personal and institutional--Arafat urged a campaign replacing the stereotype of gleeful Palestinians with images of Palestinians praying, lighting candles and donating blood. He also ordered a cease-fire "on all fronts," expressing his people's "readiness to be part of the international alliance for ending terrorism against unarmed innocent civilians." Palestinians, mostly, endorsed the call. Washington nodded to Israel to reciprocate. With extreme reluctance, Sharon did so. On September 18 he authorized his army to cease all "initiated actions"(incursions and assassinations) in the Palestinian areas and withdraw tanks from Jericho and Jenin. His only rider was that there be "forty-eight hours of quiet" in the occupied territories prior to any meeting between Peres and Arafat.

But this was a condition that could not be met--at least in the armed garrison that is the West Bank and Gaza. On September 26--again due to US prodding--Sharon allowed Peres to meet with Arafat in Gaza, where they announced a cease-fire, despite a bomb blast at an Israeli army base and a clash erupting at a Palestinian refugee camp a mere three miles from where the meeting was held. These two interruptions of"quiet" left a Palestinian teenager dead and a dozen wounded, including three Israeli soldiers.

Palestinians--including the Islamist movements of Hamas and Islamic Jihad--have broadly accepted Arafat's cease-fire as meaning an end to attacks on civilians inside Israel and firing on Jewish settlements from PA areas. But they will not give up armed resistance against soldiers and settlers in those areas in the West Bank and Gaza where Palestinians live under direct Israeli occupation. "The cease-fire is not an order. We are not an army and this is not a classical war. It is a process. What the Palestinians are saying is the more Israel lifts the restrictions on our lives the more the cease-fire can take hold," says Palestinian analyst Ghassan Khatib."What Arafat is signaling is he is ready to trade the intifada for anew political process with greater US involvement," he adds. After an uprising that has cost them much and brought them little, many Palestinians would accept the trade, even if certain of their factions would not. But the transaction doesn't depend on them only.

It also depends on whether, in exchange for "a cessation of hostilities," real international pressure will be brought to bear on Israel to first lift the siege and then end the longest military occupation in recent history. The Palestinian fear is that the United States is only pressing for a cease-fire now so that the "coalition against terror" can include Muslim and Arab states without snagging on "local disputes" like Israel versus Palestine, and that the occupied territories will remain unlit by hope.

If that fear is confirmed, one thing is certain. Whatever comes from America's imminent strike on the Taliban and Osama bin Laden, the fallout will not be confined to Afghanistan. The hatred for all things American will reverberate much wider than that.

Graham Usher is The Economist's Palestine correspondent.

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