Palestinian morale rises with death toll

After 11 months of open conflict with Israel, one might expect some battle fatigue to be setting in, particularly among the Palestinians, who have taken the bulk of the casulaties.

But Palestinians are in fact voicing a deepening determination to dig in for the long haul.

Take Yacub Qaissyeh, a garrulous Palestinian merchant and real estate developer who has resorted to farming his lands to feed his family. He acknowledges that he sees no light at the end of the Israeli-Palestinian tunnel of strife. "But that doesn't mean I want to give up."

His reaction to a Palestinian raid on an Israeli military outpost in the Gaza Strip on Saturday that left the two attackers and three Israeli soldiers dead: "Fantastic. I'm speechless," he beams.

Mr. Qaissyeh is unperturbed by the F-16 fighters that Israeli forces used against Palestinian targets over the weekend, just the third time since the Arab-Israeli war of 1967. The Palestinians have a stronger weapon, he says: the F-20 and F-21 - a reference to 20-something suicide bombers.

Palestinian analysts agree that popular morale is strong. "The degree of hope today among Palestinians," says Hisham Ahmed, a US-trained scholar who teaches international relations at Bir Zeit University in the West Bank, "is much higher than it was in August or September of 2000" - the months that preceded the outbreak of violence.

Unlikely as it might seem, Mr. Ahmed says these are the best of times, not the worst. "I personally feel that Palestinians are closer to getting rid of occupation than at any time in the past.... I believe the question of Palestine has been revitalized all over again - no one can ignore it."

Several factors underlie Palestinian resilience. One is the widely held conviction that the peace process of the 1990s was deeply flawed - and that its breakdown opens the possibility of a more favorable outcome. Another is the satisfaction many Palestinians feel in actively battling the Israeli occupation of their territories. A third is the belief that Palestinians, at this juncture, have no choice but to fight.

Mohammed Taher Jaber, the Palestinian police chief in an area of the northern West Bank that Israeli jets struck early yesterday morning, insists that "whenever Israel destroys something, it has a positive effect on us."

Israeli officials said their jets targeted Mr. Jaber's police station and similar targets in the Gaza Strip in retaliation for the attack on the military outpost and a Palestinian ambush of a passenger car in the West Bank that killed two Israelis.

Few Palestinians will discuss their feelings about the present conflict without reference to the peace process - the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations that began in earnest with a handshake on the White House lawn in 1993.

It is nearly universally held that this process would have produced a bad deal for the Palestinians. "This kind of peace tries to make the PA [Palestinian Authority] into a guard service for the state of Israel and turn the Palestinian people into a minority that lives under the control of the Israelis. It means the elimination of the Palestinians as a nation and as a people," says Issa Qaraqe, a senior member of Fatah, the Palestinians' dominant political faction.

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