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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
On the less desperate days of the first Palestinian uprising, fifteen years ago, the rules of theatrical engagement were well understood. Foreign journalists would be notified of, say, an afternoon rock-throwing in Ramallah. The Palestinian stones, followed by the Israeli rubber bullets, would be loosed promptly upon the arrival of the press corps. Intifada I had its days of lethal violence, but, by today's standards, a Middle Eastern Marquis of Queensberry propriety obtained. The Palestinians hoped to broadcast the slingshot bravado of their young demonstrators; the Israelis, after their disastrous military campaign in Lebanon, in 1982, under Ariel Sharon, were at pains to show their (relative) restraint. Tragedy -- or, at least, tragedy on the scale to which we have become accustomed -- was usually avoided.
Now it is as if every violent reflex, every bitter impulse, had been unleashed, as if there were no limits. If diplomacy is, in part, the adoption of a decorous language to defuse historical resentments for...
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