Chief of Staff Moshe Ya'alon showed the political echelon how a single headline can turn someone from the solution into the problem. The same Ya'alon who promised that 2003 would be the "year of decision," understood that even the great big IDF does not have a solution to the problem of the occupation. His associates say that he reached the conclusion that if he kept quiet politically, he would go down in history as the first chief of staff to lose to explosive belts. He's finally been persuaded by Military Intelligence's assessments that getting rid of Arafat would aggravate the problem and distance the solution.

Ya'alon pulled the rug out from under his minister, Shaul Mofaz, a great believer in the elimination of Arafat, exposing the failure of the defense minister's policies. Ya'alon's criticism of how Israel foiled a prime minister obedient to Arafat was a mistake in judgment, thereby removing Arafat's assassination off the agenda. As a result, the government has no choice but to welcome Ahmed Qureia (Abu Ala), a prime minister no less obedient to Arafat than Mahmoud Abbas.

But aside from the polite welcome, Sharon and Mofaz are offering the exact same deal to Abu Ala that they offered Abu Mazen. Dismantle the terror organizations, arrest wanted men and collect illegal weapons. What do the Palestinians get in return - an end to the assassinations for a couple of weeks? Forget it. Dismantling outposts? Nothing to discuss. Freezing settlements? Don't make them laugh. According to Qureia's people, there's no chance he will accept the deal. He saw what happened to a premier who thought that if the Israelis and Americans like him it will make it easier to gain control of Hamas and Tanzim.

At the political and military levels, people are already preparing an alibi for the next wave of terror, even before Qureia announces his political and security policies. They have to explain to Israelis that if Arafat is to blame, why don't they eliminate him? If the occupation is the problem, they have to deal with the complaints from Washington about the outposts, fence and checkpoints. So, salvation is coming form the north. In the strategic dialogue last week with the Americans in Tel Aviv, Israeli officers pointed to Syria as one of the key elements behind the latest round of violence. The tracks of some of the bombers led to banks on Syrian and Lebanese soil.

With Saddam missing along with Osama, Bashar Assad has become a new bogeyman in Washington. The administration did nothing to stop a Senate initiative against Syria. In fact, the administration praised the initiative.

And the anti-Syrian lobby in Washington was recently beefed up when U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, the chief executor of foreign policy, plucked the neoconservative - and Jewish - David Wurmser, a Richard Perle associate at the Pentagon with close ties to Israel, and put him in the top team at Cheney's office. Wurmser is the fellow who wrote in 1998 that "Israel never made Syria pay for its terror," because attacking Syria would have been considered an admission that the U.S. sponsored peace process was a joke. After all, Wurmser believes that the Oslo Accords were "an unconditional Israeli surrender," the result of a "strategic retreat" after the 1982 war."

Olive Tree Massacre

Brig. Gen Ephraim Sneh, who commanded the south Lebanon area in the early 1980s and headed the IDF's Civil Administration in Judea and Samaria just before the outbreak of the first intifada and later became deputy defense minister, lately had a chance to get an up close look at the inequities of the occupation. As a Labor MK, he visited the village of Inabus in Samaria this week, saying on his return that he has never been more shocked and felt shame as he did when he saw the hundreds of sawed up olive trees owned by Fawzi Hussein. Last week, this column reported how settlers sawed down 300 decades-old olive trees in the fields of El Sawyie and Inabus. Sneh saw it first hand this week.

Before going to the groves, he met with the deputy commander of the division stationed in the area who proudly explained to the former general and current MK how the army routinely protects the Palestinian farmers in the area from Jewish settlers - as if it is perfectly natural for the government to send its best boys or even call up reservists to protect the livelihood of people from the long evil arms of Jewish thugs.

But when they reached the groves, even the officer couldn't believe his eyes. Dozens of more trees had been sawed down in addition to the hundreds already destroyed this season. Apparently someone, somewhere, told the settlers the army was on its way, and they got a jump on the operation. Sneh promised Hussein that he would not rest until the defense minister guarantees compensation for the lost olive trees - nor will Sneh rest, he says, until the Knesset discusses the scandal. Hussein doesn't have much faith in Israeli promises. He still has complaints he made to police in January 2001 when 55 trees were destroyed. According to settlers in the area, the trees were all cut down to make way for "security roads" to outposts in the area. As the Defense Ministry refers to it, "security elements."

In the latest State Comptroller's Report, the defense minister's assistant for settlement affairs says "the policy of the Central Command is that security must be provided to the Jewish residents in those settlement points that are in statutory processes for being legalized." That is bureaucratese for one of the most foul of tricks used to make the illegal outposts legal: having "security elements" is one of the basic criteria for winning status as a permanent settlement. First cut down the trees - depriving the Palestinians a way to make a living - and then pave a "security road"; that's how to make a new settlement, immune to evacuation, ready for "natural growth."

Songs for Rabin

On November 4, 1995, Bat Chen Shahak from Tel Monde was 14 years old. She wrote then to Leah Rabin a poem in memory of the prime minister: "Three shots and suddenly it's over, now they're talking of him in the past," said the poem.

Half a year later, on her 15th birthday, Bat Chen was killed in the terror attack on Dizengoff Center.

Her parents, Ayelet and Zvi, swore they would not let terror and occupation put out the candle. They joined Yitzhak Frankenthal's Circle of Bereaved Parents and went to meet the bereaved parents from the other side. They then began going from one school to the next, Jewish and Arab, throughout the land.

Similar meetings take place on the other side, and when it is possible, the Palestinian bereaved parents come to Israel. Using the power of sorrow, Ayelet and Zvi and their Israeli and Palestinian partners, like Yaacov Grossman, Boaz Kitai, Rami Elhanan and Razi Brijit, who lost two brothers, reach the hearts and minds of Israeli and Palestinian youth. Many teachers thank them for touching places where they dare not go. Others complain the words are "too political." Elhanan, for example, says that there's no difference between the terrorist who killed his daughter Smadar on Ben Yehuda Promenade in Jerusalem and the soldier who stops a woman on her way to give birth at a checkpoint in Ramallah. He says that Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir had blood on their hands, and to save more blood from being spilled, those who planned the murder of Smadar, the granddaughter of the late IDF Maj. Gen. Matti Peled, must also be freed.

A little of the mood of the generation of "candle kids" like Bat Chen Shahak can be seen in the feedback forms parents get in places like Netanya, the Sharon coastal plain towns, and Ra'anana. "The meeting changed my perspective, wrote one teen. "Before, I didn't realize the Arabs suffer like us and they also have many victims. Most kids I know aren't interested in living in coexistence. They talk about war. About killing the Arabs. The meeting sends the message that war doesn't lead anywhere if we don't take things into our hands and stop it."

"Before the meeting, I had the `death to the Arabs' feeling," wrote another. "The truth is now I still think so, but after the meeting I only want death for those who harm Jews." But there are those whose minds have not been changed. "Barak agreed to give them everything, including half of Jerusalem," wrote one. "But even then, they didn't agree to peace.

The only solution is W-A-R."