In the current climate in the Middle East, it is not merely difficult, it is plain implausible, to speak of a path leading out of the Intifada conflict in the foreseeable future, writes David Horovitz, from Jerusalem
On a day in which each hourly news bulletin seemed to bring word of a new attack on Israelis, the Defence Minister's comments at the weekly cabinet meeting must have sounded to many Israelis like a bad joke.
Benjamin Ben-Eliezer told his colleagues yesterday that various new measures introduced to deter such attacks were having "initial success", and that Israel had "moved things up a notch" in its battle against the bombers.
Mr Ben-Eliezer, moreover, was not speaking first thing in the morning, at the start of what he might still have hoped would be a more peaceful week. No, he was talking after news of the day's first and worst attack had already broken - the suicide bombing on a bus in the north of the country - and as the fatalities from that attack were being tallied and the wounded were being evacuated to the hospitals.
Mr Ben-Eliezer is a former general and, although not widely regarded as the smartest Israeli leader of his generation, is plainly not a complete buffoon, either.
His unlikely assertion that Israel was making progress in its efforts to safeguard its citizens from bombers and gunmen was not based purely on wishful thinking.
For one thing, he was able to cite information provided to him by the head of the Shin Bet security service, which has reported that several would-be suicide bombers had either turned themselves in to the Israeli authorities recently, or had been turned in by anxious relatives, because of the Israeli defence establishment's decision to demolish the homes of bombers' families.
For another, he was able to detail several other bombings that were prevented, would-be bombers arrested and explosives-making factories discovered, in the course of the army's ongoing re-occupation of almost all of the major Palestinian population centres in the West Bank.
But while Mr Ben-Eliezer was clearly engaged in a determined effort to see the "anti-terror" glass as being half-full, critics of his policies and those of his government made plain during the day that they saw it as half-empty.
On the Israeli left, politicians and callers to radio phone-ins alike asserted that Israel's military presence in the West Bank was a key cause of the attacks, and that "targeted strikes" such as the assassination of Hamas military commander Salah Shehadeh in Gaza City two weeks ago - a raid in which more than a dozen civilians, most of them children, were also killed - only brought fresh waves of revenge bombings.
Indeed, the far-left Gush Shalom group yesterday announced that it was intent on compiling dossiers on the actions of Israeli military personnel, for possible submission to international war crimes tribunals.
On the Israeli right, spokespeople asserted that the government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was too soft.
Where Mr Ben-Eliezer has been speaking about the deterrent value of moves to deport from the West Bank to Gaza the relatives of suicide bombers, those on the right ridicule the legal concerns that see the first two candidates for such exile now involved in a prolonged appeals process. Such concerns also led the Israeli attorney-general to rule out any thought of exiling relatives who could not be proven to have assisted the bomber.
As reports came in of a series of attacks on Israelis in the West Bank yesterday afternoon, one settler activist wondered bitterly whether the government might try to prevent further violence by giving the Palestinian Authority some more money or letting more Palestinians come to work in Israel - two moves discussed at length by ministers in recent days as they try to thwart the extremists on the one hand, while easing living conditions for ordinary Palestinians on the other.
However Mr Ben-Eliezer or his critics want to look at the glass, half-full or half-empty, it is clear that Israel has thus far failed to quell the bombers by military means. It is also clear that the government is not about to adopt the leftists' most radical solution: building a fence roughly where the 1967 border ran and dismantling Jewish homes on the far side of that fence in the West Bank, unilaterally separating from the Palestinians. It is also not going to heed the rightists' most extreme calls for the killing of Yasser Arafat, the smashing of the Palestinian Authority, and long-term Israeli rule in the West Bank.
In fact, the Sharon government is facing the precise dilemma that afflicted President Bush's dramatic June 24th speech, setting out a vision for the Middle East.
Mr Sharon, Mr Ben-Eliezer and Israel's other mainstream leaders could not agree more with President Bush's depiction of the Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat as a leader who has failed his people and who has been compromised by terrorism. And they wholeheartedly share Mr Bush's expressed desire that the Palestinian people ditch Mr Arafat and elect a "different" leadership.
Where Mr Sharon and Mr Bush part company is over creating the climate that would encourage the Palestinian people to oust Mr Arafat, switch support away from Hamas and the other extremists, and embrace moderate leaders publicly committed to genuine reconciliation between a new Palestine and the Jewish state.
Mr Bush didn't really offer concrete suggestions for making that happen - because he didn't have any. But he does believe that Mr Sharon has to signal more energetically that he supports a compromise that would give the Palestinians a viable state; he wants the Prime Minister to offer a "political horizon" that would somehow, however gradually, encourage Palestinian moderation. But Mr Sharon is ideologically opposed to that kind of compromise, ideologically opposed to relinquishing almost all of the West Bank.
In the current climate, it is not merely difficult, it is plain implausible, to speak of a path out of the Intifada conflict in the foreseeable future.
Hamas, irrevocably committed to Israel's destruction, is determinedly proving that it can mount attacks even with Israeli troops deployed in every West Bank city.
Gunmen and bombers purportedly loyal to the increasingly marginalised Mr Arafat join in at every opportunity.
Israel goes on striking at the alleged Intifada kingpins and mobilises its forces in a losing battle to keep the bombers out, infuriating hundreds of thousands of Palestinians with the accompanying curfews and closures.
Each side may intermittently attempt to take a step back and claim that the balance is swinging in its favour, as Mr Ben-Eliezer improbably did yesterday. But nobody is winning. And the bloodshed continues.