Breaking Death's Grip
Israelis' ability to adapt to, and defy, these bombings demonstrates the amazing strength of this society. When bus bombings first started, for a week after an explosion few people would ride the buses. Now they're right back on them after an hour. The radios used to stop playing upbeat music after a bombing; now they don't hesitate. I have an Israeli friend who constantly worries about suicide bombers. But when I asked her to ask her teenage daughter, Tali Weiss, whether she felt angry about them, her daughter snapped back at her mom, "I'm angry that you don't let me go out" after a bombing.

I was in a trendy Tel Aviv sandwich shop the other day and my young Israeli waitress had a fun little tattoo on her shoulder. Jews with tattoos — you don't see that every day. Message to Hamas: You may think these suicide bombers will drive Israelis to leave. But they're just digging in, and clinging to normality. The Jews are getting tattoos.

But message to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon: Palestinians are not leaving either, and your iron fist will not make them accept Israeli settlements or a truncated Palestinian state. If you think Oslo was a failure, look at your alternative. In three years, some 850 Israelis have been killed under your strategy. Yours and Hamas's are two failed strategies that add up to a human meat grinder. You want Israelis to believe they have no other choice, but they do. It is to use Israel's amazing inner strength to take a different set of Israeli actions, like really uprooting settlements, to stimulate a different set of Palestinian reactions, like controlling suicide bombers.

And some of the smartest people here know it. Efraim Halevy, Israel's former Mossad chief who just quit as a Sharon adviser, said to me: "For there to be a chance for Israeli-Palestinian coexistence, the Palestinians will have to get their act together. For them to get their act together, Israel will have to invest heavily in them — without any guarantee of success." Once Palestinians get their act together, he added, they will have to do the same, vis-à-vis Israel.

A Palestinian pollster, Khalil Shikaki, puts it this way: "Sharon wants Palestinians to take the ultimate risk — a civil war — without promise of the ultimate reward": removal of settlements and concrete steps toward statehood. It won't happen.

Israel is in such a strong position now. The people have gotten tougher, America has destroyed Saddam Hussein, and Israel-U.S. ties have never been tighter. What better time for Israel to try something new? But instead of wanting America to solve the problem, Mr. Sharon seems to want America to do nothing.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/11/opinion/11FRIE.html