Therefore, the U.S. State Department was correct to condemn the scope of Israel's retaliation for last week's school bus bombing for being a weight that tips the scale sharply against those Palestinians and Israelis who would like to negotiate. Striking at Fatah forces makes it harder for the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to sit down to talk peace with either Israelis or Palestinians. The Israeli assumption always seems to be that their superiority in arms and ability to wage sophisticated conventional warfare will carry the day over guerrillas or terrorism. That is seldom true. It was not true for the United States in Vietnam, the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, nor for the army of Rhodesia in what is now Zimbabwe.
Terrorism is a war of psychology.
Conventional warfare is better suited for annihilating combatant troops, and that makes it hard to pass the West's test for dealing with these volatile situations. Terrorism is likely to continue in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Should it ever happen that a crime against Palestinian civilians is committed by Israeli terrorists, Israelis would be justifiably outraged at sanctioned Palestinian retaliation on an Israeli city. Yet that is what this triangulation of violence encourages. The pending Renaissance Centre deal, to build an office building and possibly a hotel across King Street from the new courthouse, should be judged on its own merits by Wilmington City Council.