Analysis: Israel's 'policy of restraint'

Israeli military action has inflamed Palestinian passions

By Defence Correspondent Jonathan Marcus

Nobody in the Israeli Government, from Prime Minister Ehud Barak downwards, seems to believe that the Palestinian uprising can be halted by force.

Nonetheless, Mr Barak is under huge pressure from opposition politicians - and indeed some of his own military commanders - to take a much tougher line.

Some Palestinian protesters have guns, but most don't

So far he has resisted being pressured into any large-scale military offensive, knowing that even heavier Palestinian casualties would simply add weight to Yasser Arafat's desire to see the conflict internationalised with calls to bring in foreign observers or even peacekeepers.

Thus, in his own terms, Mr Barak is pursuing a policy of restraint.

But this has failed to convince either the Palestinians or many of Mr Barak's own domestic critics.

Parallel conflict

The charred remains of local Palestinian commander Hussein Abayat's car

Israeli fatalities - though far fewer than the Palestinian death toll - are also continuing to mount, many the result of ambushes by armed Palestinian groups.

Recent Israeli operations are all signals to the Palestinian leadership that these gun attacks must stop.

These Israeli reprisals include:

• Wednesday night's combat helicopter attacks on targets associated with the Fatah faction
• the arrests earlier on Wednesday of 15 alleged Fatah activists in the West Bank
• the killing of a local Palestinian commander by attack helicopters last week.

Mr Barak is in a sense trying to fight two battles at once: one against the Palestinian demonstrators on the streets; the other against the more organised elements of the Palestinian security apparatus that have joined in the fighting.

His problem is clearly that these two battles cannot be separated. Escalation in one inevitably inflames the other.

The Israeli premier continues to insist that only negotiation can bring this conflict to an end.

But in the absence of any will to end the fighting, every use of Israel's high-tech war machine - its panoply of tanks and combat helicopters - only serves to inflame Palestinian passions further.