Although Israelis generally support their hard-line prime minister, Ariel Sharon, the majority of the population does not want to give up on the longheld dream of peaceful coexistence with Israel's Arab neighbors. The problem for the IDF is that international humanitarian law specifies much higher standards of protection for civilians when a military is operating in a state of non-war. So Israel is trying to define a third, in-between path, in part to absolve itself of having to account for the hundreds of civilians its forces have killed since the intifada began last year. It's hard to destroy F-16s with automatic rifles. It is true that some of the circumstances of this conflict are present in situations of war.
Hostilities are, of course, taking place.
Organizations capable of conducting war are involved. The main complexity is motive. Palestinians might want to capture parts or all of Israel, but they simply do not have the means. Nor, incidentally, do the Arab states, as a series of Arab-Israeli wars has shown. Mr. Margalit, a Hebrew University professor who laid out his feud analysis in a recent edition of The New York Review of Books, says the only way out is the intervention of a third party - in this case, the United States.