THURSDAY, MARCH 7, 2002, — Just when everyone thought that Secretary of State Colin Powell had been muzzled once and for all on the question of Middle East violence, now comes yesterday's statements questioning the policies of the duly-elected Israeli government.

"Prime Minister Sharon has to take a hard look at his policies to see whether they will work," Powell said, according to the New York Times. "If you declare war against the Palestinians thinking you can solve the problem by seeing how many Palestinians can be killed, I don’t know how that leads us anywhere."

Powell's comments seem to reflect the insidious reasoning of the Arab League and its European Union lackeys. The problem, he maintains disingenuously, is that Israel might formally declare war against the Palestinian Authority. Powell neglects the fact that Israel’s actions follow days of suicide-bombings and the slaying of civilians. Further, Powell mischaracterizes Sharon’s military objectives — which are to root out terrorist networks that take refuge within the Palestinian Authority, exactly what the US is doing in Afghanistan.

There can be little doubt about whether war has broken out between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. A cursory reading of the newspapers shows that. Consider this from today’s Wall Street Journal: "Over 17 months of fighting [the] Palestinian message has been delivered by self-styled 'martyrs' exploding themselves on buses, outside synagogues and in pizza parlors; gunmen shooting Jewish drivers; and faceless fighters who lob missiles into Jewish neighborhoods. Wednesday, Israel shelled Palestinian targets in retaliation for a Palestinian rocket attack. Thirteen Palestinians and two Israeli soldiers were killed, bringing the total fatalities on both sides in the last two weeks alone to 178 — the bloodiest such period since the violence erupted in September 2000." Sounds an awful lot like war to me.

Given that this is nothing less than war, Powell is guilty of dangerously misstating Sharon’s military aims. The goal is not to kill large numbers of people, as Powell suggests. No. That’s what the Palestinians do. (One recent suicide bomber chose the ultra-orthodox Meah Shearim neighborhood to murder 10 Jews. Keep in mind, as Binyamin Jolkovsky pointed out in a recent essay, that the Jews who live in this neighborhood do not support the State of Israel and are led by a rabbi who is actually a supporter of PA Chairman Yasser Arafat. See http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=105001724).

Sharon’s military plan is two-fold. One part involves rooting out terrorist networks and destroying their bomb and rocket factories so these weapons cannot be used against Israelis. The other part centers on pressuring Arafat to finally crack down on terrorists. (Of course, Arafat can’t do that because so many of the "terrorists" are members of his own Fatah organization, and they wouldn't stand for it.)

The real question here is not whether Sharon’s military plan is working or not — Sharon’s Likud Party–rival Benjamin Netanyahu argues it isn’t — but why is there such a dramatic upsurge in violence right now? Nobody, especially Powell, seems to notice that the violence is tied to both the alleged peace proposal floated by Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah and the American emphasis on "quiet" right now. It is always at times exactly like this — when many in the world are desperate for a suspension of violence in the Middle East — that the Palestinian militants unleash the most bloodshed. As long as world leaders like Powell are ready to bash Israel, the terrorists have an incentive to step up the violence.

Here’s how it works. A terrorist kills Israeli civilians. Israel either strikes back militarily, for which it is condemned around the world, or it does nothing and gets attacked again. When Israel does nothing in the face of violence, it’s citizens become demoralized and the government in power loses support — another Palestinian goal. And when the Palestinians see that pressure on Israel is high, they can hope to extract even more concessions from the Jewish State. Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s generous offer at Camp David in 2000 — Palestinian autonomy over more than 90 percent of Gaza and the West Bank, and shared control of Jerusalem — wasn’t enough, and the Palestinians now hope the deadly cocktail of terrorist violence and world pressure will force the Israelis to give up far more than they are willing or even able to give. Powell’s statement only feeds such hopes, and will therefore lead to more violence — not less.