Arafat and the Palestinian Authority (or so we are again urged to believe) are merely bystanders.

Nobody believes this interpretation of events; and yet many, including even the US State Department, feel obliged to continue repeating them. And so they disguise from themselves – and constrain Israel too to ignore – the only possible answer to the Palestinian terror campaign: Arafat and the Palestinians have chosen war. They must therefore have war until they are sick of it, war until they decide that even a disappointing (from their point of view) peace with Israel is better than one more day of fighting. Three years of advice to Israel to show restraint, to use less than its full power against its murderous enemy, has not restored the laughably misnamed “peace process.” Restraint has prolonged and exacerbated the war, at terrible cost to both sides.