THE U.S. media tend to sanitize Israel's repression of the Palestinian struggle. What is life actually like under the occupation?

TOUFIC: There's no such thing as normal, daily life. The most tangible thing is Israel's closure policy. "Closure" is a misnomer--in Arabic, we use the word "siege."

What you have is areas under Palestinian Authority (PA) control completely surrounded by Jewish-only settlements and networks of bypass roads and checkpoints. The West Bank is separated into 220 different cantons.

Basically, every village is cut off from the others--which devastates village communities that are largely dependent on nearby cities for medical attention and economic life. Students, for example, must pass through checkpoints. They can be stopped and arrested or interrogated. They're generally humiliated.

In almost scientific fashion, the entire West Bank is cut up by a matrix of settlements and military installations set up since the beginning of the "peace" process--which makes coordinated struggle extremely difficult.

The main thing about the "closures" is that they're a form of collective punishment. And they have a political function--to weaken the population in an attempt to get them to succumb to the Israeli solution to the "Palestinian problem."

Since its inception, Israel has unilaterally determined the fate of the entire area--including the people who live within it--to serve its own interests as colonizer. Take water usage, for instance. Israel takes 80 percent of the water. As far as land, your land is subject to being confiscated, your house is subject to demolition, your crops are subject to uprooting. And you have no legal recourse, because this is a brutal military occupation.

What the Intifada is all about is to try to throw off this 35-year occupation--the longest-standing occupation in modern times.

Since the beginning of the "peace" process, Israel has more than doubled the amount of settlements that it has in the Occupied Territories.

TOUFIC: Every Palestinian is subject to routine danger. These checkpoints are scary things. It's not like they're kind when they stop you. They have army tanks and sniper positions.

There are now testimonies in the Israeli press from Israeli soldiers who have served in the Occupied Territories--about how they were ordered to open fire on kids, to do terrible things such as prevent ambulances from getting critical patients to hospitals.

Everything is a struggle. If you have to go to school, and there's a closure, what do you do? Do you not go to school for six months and ruin your education? Or do you take a bypass road or some sort of dirt trail that people have improvised to get to school? If you do that, you subject yourself to being shot at, because you're technically breaking the rules.

So almost every facet of Palestinian life is made illegal. For Palestinians to have a semblance of normalcy, they're forced to break rules.

TOUFIC: If I hold the phone up to the window, you can hear the surveillance planes. That's what they do prior to calling in jet strikes. Most of them are unmanned drones. They travel quite slowly, circling around and photographing what the cities look like.

If they're looking for somebody to assassinate, they might map that area and then go after him. They're doing that right now.

Why do they do that? Because they can. And this is because there has been a deliberate campaign by the Israeli government to escalate the conflict, gradually and systematically.

In the beginning, we had kids throwing rocks at the checkpoints, and the Israelis brought out the snipers and the heavy machinery and killed kids.

Then there was a small military advance, where armed Palestinians would try and shoot at settlements from afar. So the Israelis brought out the tanks and the Apache attack helicopters.

From there, it wasn't a huge stretch to bring out the F-16s.

TIKVA: The growth of F-16 strikes has meant an unprecedented attack on the PA's 30,000 security forces.

Until now, this group hasn't joined the uprising as an organization. So jet strikes are an escalation of Israel's policy of provocative operations whose aim is to draw the PA soldiers into the Intifada. If this happens, Israel can pursue even more naked repression, using the cover of "war."

Israel wants a freer hand to smash the Palestinian resistance and ultimately to commit mass expulsion of the Palestinians. A "full-scale war" for conquering control over all of historic Palestine--instead of the current "low-intensity war"--is a necessary condition for the implementation of Sharon's "big plan" to scrap Oslo and get rid of Arafat.

But contrary to Israeli expectations, the collapse of Palestinian society hasn't taken place. Nor are there any indications that there's growing pressure from within Palestinian circles on armed Palestinian organizations to end their military operations.

Moreover, Israel's campaign against Arafat has backfired, leading most Palestinians to drop their criticisms of Arafat and close ranks in a show of solidarity.

At the same time, the guerrilla resistance is strengthening. The number of military operations is growing, and the technical aspects of them are improving dramatically.

Coordination between the different military arms of the political factions within the Palestinian resistance--including the Islamic elements--is also strengthening. There's a shift from suicide bomber operations inside Israel to more and more shooting attacks on soldiers and settlers in the Occupied Territories.

Even with the current means at its disposal, Israel is unable to suppress the Intifada--hence the broad sentiment that Sharon's government has reached a "dead end."

But precisely this impotence promotes the escalation in military operations, including massive air raids and provocative assassinations of military and political activists.

And that inevitably brings us closer to implementation of the "Big Plan" that Sharon has been striving for.

TOUFIC: Throughout the Oslo process, Arafat showed himself to be an invaluable resource for policing the Palestinian street. He sat at negotiations while getting nothing, making it look like there was such a thing as the "peace process." Meanwhile, Israel continued confiscating land.

In that sense, he was invaluable to them. But it got to a point where the Palestinian population resisted the negotiating process because they saw it as something that doomed them to live in tiny bantustans.

Such a regime wouldn't have true independence. Perhaps there would be Palestinian governance of educational facilities and sewage networks, but nothing like genuine independence.

And this says nothing of the hope that so many Palestinians have that one day they will be able return to their homes and villages inside the Green Line.

Throughout the Intifada, Arafat has been very careful not to stray too far from the popular sentiment. But because he's doing that, he's unacceptable to Israel.

The Israelis haven't tolerated Arafat as chair of the PA so that he can secure Palestinian rights--they've allowed him to operate so that he can give a stamp of approval to Israel's apartheid policies for the West Bank and Gaza.

That's where the conflict rests. He was supposed to be the good kid who would do their beck and call.

The Israelis have a strategic vision, and that vision doesn't include a truly viable Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza.

TIKVA: In about three weeks, the number of combat officers refusing to serve in the Occupied Territories has grown from about 50 to 300 or so. This has shaken the military and political establishment in Israel.

No doubt the Israeli peace group Yesh Gvul ("There is a limit") has paved the way for them by challenging the legitimacy of the occupation for the last two decades. However, the new "refusenik" movement grew out of the mainstream itself, and, as the signers emphasize, they are patriots who are committed to Zionism, to the state of Israel and its security.

The army could ignore the 400 reservists who registered with Yesh Gvul since the beginning of the current Intifada, but this isn't the case with the officers.

The army's reaction has been panic at the possibility of a widening movement. After the chief of staff issued some initial stern warnings, there's been confusion about how to deal with the possibility of a growing number of officers refusing to serve.

Although it's not going to change the political terrain of Israel in the near future, it still indicates cracks in the public consensus around the occupation. And it has the potential to become a mass refusal to serve in the Occupied Territories--a development which could challenge blind obedience among soldiers to the most criminal orders they're given by their superiors.

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