Uzi Benziman

This happy occasion, on which Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has dropped his demand for seven days of quiet prior to negotiations about a cease-fire, is not the time to settle accounts with him.

As they confront the state's daily worries and problems, Israel's leaders are not thinking about how the operational steps they are implementing will influence the future of the dispute, and ways of resolving it.

In order to assess soberly the new "buffer zones" operational scheme improvised by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in his speech to the nation late last week, it is worth reviewing previous initiatives he devised and carried out in the campaign against Palestinian terror.

When dealing with Palestinian terror, the IDF wants to say, the lives of the soldiers are its uppermost consideration. This, of course, is a heart-warming attitude, which no one disputes, yet it also incorporates a hidden state of mind: Israeli society is not willing to sacrifice itself for the sake of keeping a hold on the territories.

Whatever sympathy the Bush administration has toward Israel's agonies offers little consolation, since the administration is neither removing nor easing those woes.

There is room to wonder whether there was any point to the prime minister's conferring last week with Yasser Arafat's top advisers. Sharon's true intentions are difficult to fathom.

There is little foundation for Israel's assumption that the national dispute with the Palestinians can be reduced to rivalry with one man, Yasser Arafat, and that weakening Arafat would dramatically change the prospect of the two sides forging an agreement.

Experience teaches that the prime minister, defense minister and foreign minister are not always able to control their emotions when they order responses to Palestinian terror attacks.

Israel's diplomatic-public relations effort is now focused on trying to exploit the impressive operational success that culminated in the capture of the Palestinian arms-smuggling boat. This campaign has yet to reach its peak.

The responses from right-wing ministers to the decision of the High Court of Justice to annul Ehud Yatom's appointment as head of the Anti-Terror Council show that Israeli democracy now faces a real danger.

Should it become clear tomorrow, or later in the week, that the government's economic plan is diluted substantially in the approval process, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon will face a major image problem.

Even with Yasser Arafat subjected to virtual house arrest in Ramallah, humiliated in front of his own people, Israel still must provide some answer and outlet for the nationalist aspirations of the Palestinian people.

Instead of being creative and innovative in coming up with a solution to the national crisis, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon trudges about in the existing rutted path.

Each time it appears as though there is a lull in the violent stand-off between Israel and the Palestinians, somebody comes and shatters the illusion by perpetrating a major terror strike, or an assassination reprisal.

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has a tendency of solving problems by issuing fabricated statements or empty promises, assuming that his media manipulations will suffice to remove the issue from the state's agenda.

The analogy between the situation of the PA and that of the Israeli leadership in `48, and between Etzel and Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and between the temporary government of Ben-Gurion and the leadership of Arafat, bears no comparison.

Foreign Minister Shimon Peres has no real chance of garnering political support for the diplomatic program he is now formulating in his latest attempt to end the Israeli-Palestinian bloodshed, because it is based on the evacuation of the Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip.

As the Israel Defense Forces prepare to withdraw from Area A (the first pullback was delayed last night), it is appropriate to start evaluating the results of going into the Palestinian territories in the first place.

The assassination of Yihye Ayash, who was known as "the engineer," triggered a wave of savage terror attacks in March 1996, sowing sorrow and bereavement among dozens of Israeli families, and ushering in a turning point in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. Among other things, the turning point meant that Likud's Benjamin Netanyahu took the reins as prime minister after the June 1996 elections.

Ariel Sharon has wisely decided to bring his plan to ease pressure on the Palestinian Authority in areas where quiet reigns to the cabinet for approval today. He thus joins the game of pretend of which Yasser Arafat and the U.S. Administration are already a part.

If one were to hold on to Ariel Sharon's realm of concepts, according to which he compared Israel today to Czechoslovakia's situation in 1938, then Yasser Arafat is Adolf Hitler, Yasser Abed Rabbo is Joseph Goebbels and Marwan Barghouti is Adolf Eichman.

Too much time passed between the statements made last Friday by associates of Shimon Peres about the excessive activities of the Israel Defense Forces in Rafah that are allegedly sabotaging his understandings with Yasser Arafat and the clarification the foreign minister expressed in his own words: "The statements were not made with his [Arafat's] consent, his knowledge or at his initiative."

The thunderous collapse of the Twin Towers drowned out, among other things, the suicide terror attack in Nahariya perpetrated by Mohammed Habeishi of Abu-Snan, as well as the arrest of five youths from Umm al-Fahm who are suspected of being members of a terrorist cell.

The situation last year on Rosh Hashanah was completely different from what it is today, the eve of the new Jewish year of 5762.

Suddenly, there's a desire to judge what's going on in the Labor Party by the standards of a well-ordered, democratic society. There's an urge to tell Avraham Burg and Benjamin Ben-Eliezer that if there is any foundation to the accusations they're flinging at one another, then neither of them is fit to lead the party and the state.