THERE HAS been to some degree a repositioning of the tanks and armored personnel carriers and stuff like that. But overall, it's quite important to say that it doesn't really matter when they talk about withdrawal. It's a play on the word withdrawal.

They're not withdrawing from Area A, which is supposedly the place that's under complete Palestinian Authority control. They're withdrawing from what they call the built-up area. They pull their tanks back to a buffer zone, literally encircling the towns or the cities. And then they're constantly in position to re-invade. All the major West Bank cities are completely surrounded--Nablus, Jenin, Bethlehem, everything, with the exception of Jericho, which is out of the picture for the most part.

This question of the buffer zones is quite important, because they're using them to redraw the map. They're either demolishing structures that are in these buffer zones, or setting up their tanks on agricultural land, often destroying it. Just three days ago, they released 35 different orders for closed military zones.

They're not in everyone's houses, but they just surround the whole place with tanks, so you can't do much. And everything that enters and exits is, of course, up to them.

Right now, the situation is that people are trying to pick up the pieces of their lives. Nothing is working. The devastation that was done to basic infrastructure and to the ministries and to civil society organizations and cultural institutes is immense.

In the main ministries, including health, education, public works, communications, they went in and didn't leave anything in them. They blew up whole floors, they blew holes through walls, they took computers, they slashed chairs, they took hard disks. In the education ministry, they took every single file for every single child in the Palestinian education system. And the list goes on and on.

How can you say it? It's an attack on the basics of what composes a society--what keeps it together. It's a long-term strategy that Israel has always waged against Palestinian society. It's not genocide, it's socio-cide. It's an attack on a society, so that it either can't resist, or it's too weak to resist. They expect the society to just implode or fall apart--because of lack of law and order, lack of work, lack of organization to anything.

This was all done on the premise of Operation Defensive Shield, and of course, there's nothing defensive about any of these measures. It's an offensive military action against the civilian population that's under occupation, which is supposedly protected by basic international laws and resolutions.

This was very much a personal invasion of everybody's lives, both on the individual level, as well as the collective level. I know one person in all of Ramallah who didn't have their house invaded. They came and invaded the neighbor's house instead.

It's difficult to explain, but when they came into my house, for instance, they banged on the door at 8 o'clock in the morning. They were using my neighbor as a human shield, so he was knocking on the door, and he was the one communicating. And behind him were eight heavily armed soldiers.

So they came in and went around the house--and they looked bored, to be honest. It was the last day of the invasion. If it was the first day, they probably would have messed the whole place up.

A lot of people have very shocking and terrible stories about when they come into houses. I have friends who live on the other side of Ramallah, which was hit harder at the beginning. And they were messing up books, pissing on the floor and shitting everywhere, breaking any piece of glass, chucking computers out of the windows. They took over the local television station, and they started broadcasting porno movies. What can you say about that? It was just sheer destruction.

We know these soldiers, because we interact with them at checkpoints and stuff. They're kids. The ones they sent to Ramallah are the ones who don't have parents from elite classes. So they send all the kids who are poor, and they put them in tanks and behind heavy artillery. And they just go wild in a city where they know nothing. It's not their city, it's not their town, it's not their house, they'll never see these people again.

HOW HAS the battle to defend Jenin and the Israeli atrocity that followed affected the Palestinian resistance?

JENIN AND Nablus and also large parts of Gaza have shown incredible steadfastness. Jenin has been catapulted with its heroic stand throughout the invasion onto the list of examples of courage in the face of Zionist attacks.

That's part of popular consciousness now. But on another level, Palestinians on every level are resisting in one way or another.

The reason why very strong battles took place in Jenin--and in the casbah in the old city of Nablus, as well as the two refugee camps outside--is that the most disenfranchised pockets of Palestinian society that suffered the most put up some of the strongest armed resistance. Plus, these are also places that are easier to hide in and defend. When you're talking about a labyrinth of alleyways that the local people know a lot better than the Israelis, it's easier to resist.

Certainly, Jenin has entered Palestinian consciousness in this regard--in that people refused to give in and preferred death over being taken prisoner. This is a great tragedy, because of the overwhelming Israeli might. There was a very big battle that went on in Jenin, but let's not exaggerate. It was a few guns versus the top tank in the world or an Apache helicopter. In Nablus and Jenin, they used F-16s. It doesn't matter how many Kalashnikovs you have--you can't do anything against that.

The Israelis wanted to break the back of a place like Jenin. This isn't the first time that they tried to get Jenin--this is probably the fourth or fifth time that they've really tried to do it. And this time, they pretty much did the job by flattening it.

And the most important thing, which completely absent from any of the media is what it means that this was a refugee camp. It's under United Nations protection. Who can imagine this taking place to the refugee camps in Kosovo, which are under UN protection?

Furthermore, what's absent from the discussion is why are these people were refugees. I haven't heard anybody say what they were refugees from. The people from Jenin camp can actually see their land. They're from a strip of land that extends of the north West Bank all the way up to Haifa.

And even now, there's the obscenity of how the media talks about rebuilding a refugee camp. What does that mean exactly? Rebuilding refugee camps. There are people who have lived 54 years in these things.

IT SEEMS like Ariel Sharon's main strategy with this invasion was to destroy the Palestinian Authority and its ability to exercise any kind of rule.

IT'S VERY important to mention that before they invaded, the destruction of the PA had been accomplished with Israeli settlements. During Sharon's tenure, he's built an additional 35 settlements. What physically makes the emergence of a viable Palestinian state impossible is the settlement map.

What they've done is essentially turn the clock back. They've taken what they want and left what they didn't want about Oslo. For instance, the Israelis are basically saying that they're going to take control of security matters in Area A--away from the PA. But as for civilian affairs, they don't really care. They don't want to pay for schools or infrastructure, which they used to pay for in pre-Oslo days.

For Israel, this is better than the days before Oslo took place, because then, they were responsible for security and civil administration. It's clear that they don't want to run Palestinian civil administration affairs on a daily basis. Essentially, what they've done is take the bodies that would be responsible for maintaining the daily lives of Palestinians and tie their hands behind their backs and then thrown them in this wasteland.

I don't know what's going to happen to this academic year for Palestinians. And some very important attacks against the medical infrastructure have taken place, and now there are real fears of the possibility for infectious diseases being spread very widely--because throughout the Intifada, they've been unable to innoculate children against diseases.

Plus the closure prevents anyone from villages getting to towns like Ramallah. This is a serious thing. Villages that are dependent on Ramallah as a market for their products, where teachers are from, where doctors are from--they've been cut off.

And also of course, you have the wide destruction of the infrastructure, which has direct negative consequences on the health sector. So in places like Jenin and Nablus, you had dead bodies lying in the streets or in houses for days, and sewage systems and water networks that were ripped up--and even reports of them shitting in the water supplies.

But now it's a Palestinian problem to fix that kind of thing. As far as security is concerned, they seem to be taking control. I don't think they can expect for the Palestinians to begin policing themselves--or to begin liquidating opposition, like they keep on requesting, meaninglessly, over and over.

DO YOU think Sharon will try to promote a collaborationist Palestinian leadership to replace Arafat, or will he simply rely on promoting chaos and brute force?

ONE ISN'T exclusive to the other. I think both are in the works.

As far as getting rid of Arafat, I think that's going to happen. They'll find a pretext--whether it's the people that they say are inside the building with him, or whether it's some form of resistance activity somewhere else.

And it's not just Israel alone. Colin Powell was very clear about it when he came here--that he would meet with "other Palestinian leaders." They weren't really disguising the fact that they were looking for somebody else.

There's a very high consciousness in Palestinian society that there have been repeated attempts to find local leadership that will collaborate with the occupation. And it's not like they're worried about the daily lives of Palestinians, and therefore they have to find a leadership. Israel figures that over time, something will emerge on the Palestinian side--which they can encourage along the way.

This is reminiscent of what's known as the Village Leagues, which were set up by Menachem Begin in the late 1970s to try to find local shieks to run affairs--and a lot of times, they armed them. But Palestinian society was very aware of this. It failed miserably for the Israelis.

Palestinians know the game--they know what Israel is trying to do. They know the Israelis want a weak leadership that will collaborate with them. That's why a central unified Palestinian leadership threatens Israel, and that's why they want to get rid of Arafat--despite the fact that he's compromised in the past.

Certainly any attempt to find an alternative leadership would be met with failure. But Sharon doesn't have to find it now. Remember the Palestinians inside Israel. There were about 125,000 Palestinians who remained on their land in what was the newly created state of Israel in 1948. They remained under direct military rule up until 1966--for 18 years--until Israel was able to harvest a group of collaborators they could depend upon.

I'm just trying to say that no one's pushing Israel to come up with an alternative.

WHAT WILL be the impact of this last onslaught on the Palestinian left?

THAT'S A complicated question, because the Palestinian left isn't a unified thing. And it's also important to point out that the left represents only a very small percentage anyway. I think it's probably more relevant to talk about Palestinian resistance.

More or less, you people saying that what happened is a catastrophe. And that we won't surrender, but we have to be able to pace ourselves for a long-term struggle.

We shouldn't exaggerate what the resistance is. It's still a very small minority who are actually involved. When you have 200 people in the Nativity Church in Bethlehem, apparently, they represent a great majority of the local resistance. And you're talking about them going against a whole army. When Israel moved into Nablus alone, they used 450 tanks. That's probably one tank for each person on their supposed wanted list.

I think the agenda will be shifted toward waging a much more organized campaign, on both the level of resistance activity as well as the public discussion about the fight. Palestinians have been inefficient in the war of discourses--you hear what the PA says, and then you hear what the Coalition of Islamic and National Forces say, and then somebody says something else entirely. And the message isn't clearly getting through--certainly not a united message.

This is the irony of the thing. The Intifada is a popular mass uprising, and it's armed this time, but there's no centralization to it. Israel treats it as though it is, and it wants the world to think that it is, because this is an essential part of putting the blame on Arafat and accomplishing Sharon's mission of destroying the unity of Palestinian national forces and destroying any gains that were made from the Oslo process.

The resistance activity also gives out different messages. And it's not like we get together and have conferences and discuss this stuff, because you can't. So things are going more and more underground.

But leaders are talking to some degree about reassessing and rebuilding. Transfer of experience is quite an important issue. Because if you have all your leadership taken out at one go, then you start the whole movement from ground zero.

There's something very, very disturbing taking place. In Gaza, two days ago, three kids tried to go into an Israeli settlement. They were 12 and 13 years old. It's shocking. And you can only imagine what it means--the psychological state and the social state that exists to make 12-year-olds and 13-year-olds think that they have to sneak into a settlement and do a military operation. But that's the reality on the ground--it's so severe.

And the world doesn't hear it, because of what Israel's doing. It also doesn't hear it because Palestinians to some degree have an inefficient mechanism of talking about it.

Everything that has happened could have been foreseen because of the way Israel has treated the negotiations--and treated Palestinians for 50 years. But internationally, there's a great deal of cynicism--mixed with the rhetoric about a war on terror, as well as the gross manipulation of the media by Zionist forces and obviously U.S. imperial interests.

The information is there. But it's not being broadcast. It's not getting to people. Because if people knew what was going on here, I don't think anyone could really accept it.

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