Eat your heart out, Arafat

Under Ariel Sharon, Israel has put down the intifadeh the old-fashioned way - by fighting back. Palestinians who accuse Israel of conducting state terrorism are right. Israel has indeed terrorized the terrorists into submission. The size and cost of the defeat is just now sinking in. The crowds torching Arafat's military installations are conducting their own version of a 9/11 commission.

Meanwhile, Israel is burning with a different kind of heat. The economy is going full-blast. Cranes and business startups are everywhere. Only the Palestinians are absent. Until the intifadeh, Gazans and West Bankers made good money there. Now their jobs are gone - to foreign workers and advances in technology.

There is a self-confidence in Israel unlike anything I have seen since the Six-Day War. Israelis have discovered that they have the resources to wage war with whatever ruthlessness victory requires. That attitude includes the determination to complete the security barrier being constructed through the West Bank. The recent World Court ruling that the barrier violates international law was greeted in Tel Aviv with derisive contempt, and not only by hard-liners. The barrier saves lives. In a war, everything else is secondary.