Stardate 20020210.1401

(On Screen): A week ago an armed mob stormed a court in the West Bank where three Palestinians were being tried for murdering other Palestinians. The mob seized the defendants and killed them all.

It's all Israel's fault, of course.

A security officer shows me where the murder trial should have been held - now a cavity full of chunks of cement and twisted metal, underneath a partially collapsed roof.

Jenin's Deputy Governor Haider Ersheid tells me that the high walls and careful security checks here would have kept out angry mobs.

"What happened was due to the fact that the offices of the security forces and of the governor have been completely destroyed," he says.

"The police have nowhere to work from, how can we control the street when we're stranded out on the street ourselves?"

It's not that simple. A lawless society cannot be converted into one which respects law by use of concrete walls and barbed wire, and a law respecting society doesn't need to build fortresses for its courts.

But when the walls and barbed wire are removed, the lawlessness of the society is revealed for all to see. Israeli action destroyed the fortress court, but the mob was all Palestinian.

Nonetheless, it is true that the Palestinian Authority has been weakened by Israeli action over the last year and a half. That was deliberate; Israel is playing a bigger game. The idea was that only the Palestinian Authority ultimately has able to crack down on the terrorists, so to "encourage" them to do so, Israel wanted to make it so that attacks on Israel also hurt the PA. Every time there is an attack on Israel, Israel destroys something belonging to the PA. Every attack on Israel is an attack on the PA.

The only way for the PA to stop being hurt is to stop the attacks on Israel. Israel and the PA will live together, prosper together, or die together; Israel will make sure of that. Nothing can talk them out of this, so the PA has to stop the terrorist attacks because it is the only way to stop the attacks on the PA itself. That was the theory.

It hasn't worked, of course. It's almost impossible to speculate on what would have happened by now if the US had not been attacked in September, but in the event the PA has not cracked down despite application of nearly overwhelming diplomatic pressure as well as substantial military attacks by Israel. But whether by lack of will or lack of ability, this has demonstrated that the PA is not a worthwhile partner for peace negotiations, which is itself a victory for Israel.

By removing the fiction that it was actually possible to reach an accommodation with the Palestinians collectively through negotiations with the Palestinian Authority, Israel's situation will be improved. That, too, hasn't fully happened; there are still too many people who want to believe that the PA is capable of negotiating on behalf of the Palestinians collectively.

It's a shitty strategy for Israel, but it's the only one Israel has left short of full-scale reoccupation of the Palestinian territories followed by brutal suppression. Palestinian demands are untenable; as long as the Palestinians demand the right of return, no negotiated peace is possible. And as long as the Palestinian Authority demonstrates that it isn't capable of delivering peace, negotiations are pointless.