thousands of inhabitants out into the Sinai desert. (That is what Moshe Dayan did to the Suez Canal towns during the War of Attrition, in the late 1960s.) It has been reported that Ariel Sharon himself proposed, after the Kami incident, the bombing of towns and villages in the Gaza Strip.⁶⁹ But nowadays this is not possible: neither the Israeli public nor world public opinion would stand for it.

The simple truth is that the generals are bankrupt. But they have no reason to feel ashamed: no other army has won such a contest in the last hundred years. The French in Algeria arrived at the same point, in spite of torturing thousands of men and women. The same happened to the Americans in Vietnam, in spite of burning down dozens of villages and massacring their inhabitants. Even the Nazis did not succeed in putting down the French resistance, however many hostages they executed.

Our generals, like all the generals before them, made the understandable mistake of thinking in terms of war. But this was no conventional war. A war is a confrontation between armies, and it is fought with methods that have evolved throughout the ages. The confrontation between an army of occupation and resistance forces is quite different. The factors governing that are not taught in officers' courses.

True, the Israeli army tried to improvise, with some success. But it could not win. Because victory means breaking the will of the opponent to resist. And that did not happen.

If that is so, did the Palestinian fighting organizations win?

Interestingly enough, this question is not posed openly, not even by the Palestinians, themselves. First of all, because the idea has been accepted throughout the world that the Palestinian resistance is "terrorism," and who would dare to assert that terrorism had won? The more so since the Palestinians-like the Israelis-committed fearful atrocities.

Also, the propaganda war between Israelis and Palestinians is a kind of world championship of victimhood. Each side presents itself as the ultimate victim. Each side publicizes pictures of dead children, weeping mothers, demolished homes.

Because of this, the Palestinian spokespersons do not boast of the fighting of their compatriots. They avoid pointing to the thousands of their fighters who sacrificed their lives, the children who confronted the tanks, the hundreds of commanders who were "liquidated" and for each of whom a substitute was found, for whom in turn a substitute was found, and so forth. About this, books will be written, songs will be sung, tales will be told in future generations.

Another fact: Palestinian society has not been broken. Israeli tanks roam their streets, hundreds of roadblocks prevent movement from

152