TEL AVIV

Ariel Sharon has received countless encomia from conservatives for his hard nosed approach to dealing with the Palestinians, his handling of the intifada (which his visit to Haram al Sharif helped ignite), his marginalization of Arafat, his building of the separation wall, and his supposedly courageous plan to unilaterally withdraw from settlements in Gaza (settlements of which he has been a longtime supporter). His strategy, described by Israeli army chief of staff Moshe Ya'alon, has been to make the Palestinians "understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people." Control, repression, and humiliation, enforced by military violence, have been the tools with which Sharon has tried to provide security to the Israeli people.

I think Friday's Tel Aviv bombing shows that the best that Sharon's approach can provide is perhaps a longer interval between bombings. This shouldn't be surprising to anyone, given the reprehensible measures which Israel has used to punish the suspected supporters of suspected suicide bombers, destroying family homes, uprooting family crops, indefinite "administrative detentions," measures which have proven more likely to provoke a continued violent response from the Palestinians than to cow them into submission. It's true that the security barrier has cut down on attacks, but at a huge human cost to the Palestinians, a cost which most observers agree has been completely out of proportion to the casualties suffered by Israel. Even given the extent to which Sharon's policies have cut down on the number of attacks, I don't think anyone would argue that they've cut down on the number of people who want to attack Israel, only made them think about new strategies for doing so, and thus haven't really provided any genuine long term security for Israelis, who know that another attack could come at any time.

Even as the status quo for Israelis, even in times of relative quiet, has been constant nervousness, the status quo for Palestinians is a nightmare: daily humiliation and harassment at the hands of Israeli soldiers and militant Jewish settlers who commit violence against their Palestinian neighbors with impunity, constant expropriation of Palestinian land for expanding Jewish settlements, for security perimeters for settler-only highways, and for the separation barrier. In other words, the status quo for Palestinians is constant war being waged against them by Israel. Any progress by Abbas in reigning in the rejectionist Palestinian minority and building Palestinian democracy will have to be made despite this severe handicap, a fact which is rarely acknowledged in the American media, which is what allows pro-Israel types to persist in their presentation of Israel as embattled democracy instead of a brutal and repressive occupier. The truth is that Israel is both, but there will only be more Tel Avivs until Israel acknowledges its own culpability and ends the occupation and the inhumane practices which it involves.