No longer intifada, not quite war

In the 24 hours that began Saturday afternoon, there were two suicide bombings, four helicopter-borne missile attacks, two tank attacks, one vehicle-to-vehicle shooting, one attempted commando raid, one sniper killing, and a half-dozen firefights. Five Israelis and four Palestinians died in the violence.

There were no demonstrations or clashes involving stone-throwing Palestinians facing off against Israeli soldiers.

Goodbye, intifada. Hello, something war-like - something not yet defined.

Over the past half year or so, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has become more and more militarized. The Israelis have long maintained the Middle East's most powerful and technologically sophisticated fighting force. But the Palestinians are increasingly organized into units that carry out guerrilla attacks and attempt to repel Israeli incursions into Palestinian-ruled territory. Secretive cells employ a low-tech, low-cost form of unconventional warfare: the suicide bomb.

Hatem Jamal, a bearded, droopy-eyed commander of a Palestinian military unit in the southern West Bank city of Hebron, says that militants are provided with weapons and basic training and sent on organized operations. "Sometimes we decide [on an operation] based on what happens on the ground, and sometimes we get a decision from our military commanders."

The language of the conflict is beginning to reflect the changing reality.

Throughout the Middle East and in many other places around the world, people have used intifada, the Arabic word for uprising, to describe nearly a year of Israeli-Palestinian strife. The Israelis have long objected to the term, saying they are contending with terrorists, not protesters.

Now the Palestinians are starting to agree that intifada seems inappropriate.

"It's more of an armed confrontation instead of a popular intifada," says Ali Jarbawi, a political scientist at Bir Zeit University in the West Bank. In recent weeks, Palestinian newspapers and some political figures have begun to adopt the word "resistance" - a notion that in Arabic has a militant connotation - and drop intifada, which describes an essentially nonviolent mass movement.

More than semantics is at issue. Several governments, including the Palestinian Authority (PA), find comfort in the ambiguity of calling this conflict an intifada. The notion of a popular uprising shores up PA President Yasser Arafat's insistence that he cannot control the actions of every single Palestinian militant.

Labeling the conflict a war would put the governments that claim a mediating role in a difficult position. The US, for instance, is a military ally of Israel - so its diplomats might be hard pressed to maintain their ties with Palestinians if they were seen as Israel's enemy.

Since last year, Israel has labeled the conflict an "armed conflict short of war." Israel Defense Forces spokesman Lt. Col. Olivier Rafovitch says Israel's troops and civilians have faced approximately 7,600 "real ammunition events" since last fall - in his view, all part of organized Palestinian campaign to use violence as a negotiating tactic.

The IDF's role mixes "police work" with "anti-terror surgical activities," Rafovitch says. At the same time, Israel has argued that the state of hostilities means it does not have to investigate killings of civilians, which international norms demand of police forces. Israel also says its right of self-defense allows it to assassinate alleged Palestinian militants, even though many governments have condemned these killings.

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