Reply #7: Unfortunately, what you suggest...

[punpirate]

... is precisely the same situation in which the British found themselves in India--expecting their control of the local police to enable control of anti-colonial factions. The expectation that the PA will cooperate with the IDF to further the desired aims of the IDF is an eventually hopeless one.

Beyond that, the IDF, over nearly forty years, has intentionally made the PA as ineffectual as possible to prevent it from resisting the IDF. It's hardly common sense to now expect the PA to assume responsibilities for which its capacity to act on has been greatly diminished.

Sharon has made a magician's pass. He wants the West--and particularly, the US--to look at his left hand and see his faux release of the Gaza as a genuine gesture toward peace, all the while his right hand is subtly encouraging settlers in the West Bank to ignore international calls to withdraw, and has been using a variety of methods, including zoning and redevelopment, to remove Palestinians from Jerusalem, and the building of the wall continues to annex Palestinian land. The West Bank is valuable to him (for water and for political reasons), while the Gaza is not. It's foolish to think that there are no Palestinians who have figured out what he's doing--no matter how conciliatory Abbas may be.

As for bombing army depots, consider this. Which would a desperate person consider more effective--being killed hundreds of yards from the entrance to those depots by army snipers, or having the opportunity to inflict damage which might convince the state of Israel that its current course of action is not worth the price?

M'self, I think it's a pretty poor set of choices all around. But, neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians, generally, have any contemporary history or temperament inclining them toward creative non-violence. So, Israel sends F-16s and Apache helicopters (provided by the United States) to fire missiles into civilian neighborhoods and bulldozers (purchased from Caterpillar with US development funds) to evict the remainder, and the more radical Palestinians send their only asset, suicide bombers, to do the same to Israeli civilians (let us not ignore that, in this latest intifada, the greatest losses of life, on both sides, have been civilians, and the ratio of Palestinian lives lost to Israel lives is very lopsided--that's due to the overwhelming superiority of Israeli arms which were provided by the US).

Your insistence that the Palestinians have to deal in good faith ignores the rather large elephant in the sitting room--that the United States and its role in this affair is a larger factor than that of either Israel or Palestine. The United States has had in its power the ability to end this matter many decades ago, and did not.

Cheers.