During the past two months, July and August, 251 Palestinians were killed in Gaza and the West Bank, all of them by Israel Defense Forces fire. About half of them were civilians, including women, children and the elderly. More Palestinians than Israelis were killed during the war in Lebanon, even though the Palestinians did not participate in the war and were not subjected to Katyusha fire.

There has been a total freeze in the diplomatic process between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. The road map has not been mentioned for a long time. There is no disengagement and no realignment. There are no unilateral moves, and certainly no negotiations between the two sides. Occasionally, low-level officials meet to discuss essential everyday issues. And there have apparently been indirect contacts about releasing Palestinian prisoners in exchange for Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. But the only area in which Israel and the Palestinians currently maintain relations is the violent conflict: raids, shootings, shellings, terror attacks, arrests, roadblocks, expropriations. Killed and wounded.

There ought to be a state commission of inquiry about what is happening in the Palestinian territories. For all its importance, and all the shock in Israel over what happened in the Lebanon war, this war cannot be compared to what has been happening for almost 40 years in the territories occupied by Israel during the Six Day War. Whatever inquiry is conducted into the Lebanon war, it will at most find that the prime minister made a mistake one day, and that the defense minister and the chief of staff made incorrect decisions on another day, and that one general and several brigade commanders did not understand what was happening in the field on a certain night, and that food and drink did not arrive in time. There is no comparison at all between mistakes of that kind and the fateful failures of all Israeli governments since 1967 with regard to the West Bank and Gaza. These involved erroneous decisions of historic magnitude.

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The state commission of inquiry into the disasters engendered by the Israeli regime in the territories should include historians, social psychologists, sociologists and scholars of culture and religion, and not necessarily former generals and Supreme Court justices. Such a commission would probably discover that there is a strong connection between the wars in Lebanon and what occurred between us and the Palestinians during those years, and that our control over the West Bank and Gaza contributed quite a bit to the continuing deterioration in the north.

Over time, the number of those who remember what happened in the Palestinian territories after 1967 is gradually declining. Who remembers, for example, that due to Israel's belief that Arab leaders were purposely leaving the refugees in wretched situations in the camps in order to incite them against Israel, Israeli governments decided to solve the refugee problem in Gaza through reconstruction? For a while, Israel took several steps in that direction. But they turned out to be divorced from reality, and were halted. Who remembers that the basic principle articulated by then defense minister Moshe Dayan was to allow full freedom of movement for Israelis and Palestinians from Dan to Eilat, and that for over 20 years, there was not a single checkpoint between the territories and the State of Israel? Who remembers that Dayan also gave an order to reduce the official Israeli presence in the territories to a minimum: no flags, no patrols and of course, no settlements near Arab communities?

There were terror attacks then, too, but with no comparison to what began during the intifada years. There were years when fewer than five administrative detainees from the territories were in Israeli prisons. Today, as we know, there are thousands.

What happened during the 20 years that have elapsed since then? During the earlier period, were the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza fond of the Israeli regime? Of course not. So how did we get to where we are now? Does the blame lie with the settlement enterprise, which created a blatant apartheid regime in the territories and led to feelings of bitterness and deprivation, a sense of being robbed? Or perhaps the decisions made about East Jerusalem were mistaken? What resulted from the mistakes in the Oslo Accords? And where is the separation fence leading? All this is far more important than what happened just now in Lebanon, and it is this situation that should be the subject of a state commission of inquiry.