The Israeli government claimed it launched the attacks--targeting Fatah offices in the West Bank cities of Ramallah and Nablus and in the Gaza Strip--in retaliation for the deaths of two Israelis earlier that day.

The same day, Israeli deputy defense minister Ephraim Sneh said the army would deploy units specially trained in guerrilla warfare, alleging this was necessary to counter possible bomb attacks on Israeli targets by Palestinian organizations.

As the conflict between Israeli and Palestinian forces sharpened, Prime Minister Ehud Barak maneuvered for alliances with two right-wing parties--the Shas party and Ariel Sharon's Likud party--to keep his minority Labor Party government afloat.  
 
Gaza Strip divided
Tel Aviv has escalated its attacks on the Palestinians in the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which is under siege. "Israeli occupation forces have blocked Salah Al-Dein Street, the main road connecting the north and south of the Gaza Strip," the Palestinian Center for Human Rights reported October 26. Cement blocks barring passage along the road for Palestinians were set up near two Zionist settlements, which function under Israeli military protection.

"As a result of this blockage," the human rights center reported, "the Gaza Strip has been splintered into three separate cantons. Movement of people and vehicles has been denied."

The report also described the army's destruction of farms. "Palestinian olive trees, palm trees, and vegetables were leveled and a one-story house was demolished. Water facilities suffered damage as well."

The "closure" imposed by the Israeli military has starkly highlighted the reality of what has been set up under the 1993 Oslo agreement and subsequent Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. The accord granted limited "autonomy" to the Palestinian National Authority over a number of small, discontinuous spots of territory in the West Bank and Gaza. These pockets serve as targets for Israeli military assaults and are designed to fragment and isolate Palestinians while giving the outside world the illusion of Palestinian "self-rule."

Describing one such area surrounding the West Bank town of Yabed, New York Times reporter William Orme summarized the situation: "Palestinians run municipal services but the Israeli Army retains full security control." Israeli soldiers maintain a heavily armed presence under the cover of protecting a Zionist settlement there. On October 29, troops fired live ammunition at Palestinian youth throwing stones at cars headed to the rightist settlement, killing two brothers, Bilal and Hilal Salah, 19 and 21.

New York Times senior columnist Thomas Friedman wrote from the West Bank town of Ramallah, "The Israeli propaganda that the Palestinians mostly rule themselves in the West Bank is fatuous nonsense. Sure, the Palestinians control their own towns, but the Israelis control all the roads connecting these towns and therefore all their movements."

The Israeli command concentrates its forces along access roads to Palestinian towns and around Zionist settlements. These fortified enclaves have long been a target of Palestinian protest. Tel Aviv accelerated the construction of settlements after the Oslo agreement.

"According to Israeli sources, since Oslo more than 78,000 additional colonists have gone to the territories, more than 11,000 houses have been built for them, and 895 Palestinian houses have been destroyed by the army," wrote columnist William Pfaff in the October 28 International Herald Tribune.

Hospital directors in the West Bank and officials of the Red Crescent report that Israeli soldiers are increasingly shooting to kill. The Israeli chief of staff, Gen. Sahul Mofaz, said October 29 that the army plans to "move from a pattern of solely reacting, to one of initiative." In the five weeks to October 31, almost 150 people have been killed, all but 10 of them Palestinians.  
 
Barak hangs on by his fingernails
The Israeli regime, unable to crush the resistance by Palestinian working people, has sought to pressure the Palestinian leadership to keep the population in the occupied territories in check. But the Palestinian National Authority is politically too weak to do that job effectively.

Over the past decade, the Palestine Liberation Organization has increasingly relied on ties with capitalist regimes in the Mideast that claim to speak for Arabs, along with negotiations with Washington to try to secure the establishment of a Palestinian state.

In this situation, the Israeli rulers have maintained the initiative through a policy of stepped-up aggression. To survive in the Knesset (parliament), Barak's minority government has courted the right-wing Shas party, which opposes even the limited concessions of territory that Barak had proposed in talks with Arafat at the presidential retreat of Camp David earlier this year. At the end of October, Shas leaders said they would support Barak for the next month to give him a stabler base to crack down on the Palestinians.

Barak also continues to seek a coalition government with Likud. Sharon, who precipitated the current wave of repression and protests when he provocatively visited a sacred Islamic site in Jerusalem September 28 surrounded by an armed entourage of 1,000 cops, seeks to gain maximum concessions from Barak or to replace him.

Washington, whose goal is to increase its own dominance throughout the Mideast, has been pressing for a resumption of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. But the perpetual collision course between the Israeli garrison state and the Palestinian people, as well as the weakness of the Palestinian National Authority, have exhausted one attempt after another to reach any lasting agreement.
 
 
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