Eye for an Eye.

• Author: VILBIG, PETER

ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN HATRED BOILS OVER INTO THE WORST CYCLE OF VIOLENCE THE MIDDLE EAST HAS SEEN IN YEARS

In a single shattering day, seven long years of peace negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians were savaged in an orgy of reckless mob violence, high-powered explosives, and helicopter rockets. Like the start of a grim three-act play, the violence began at 11 a.m., October 12, when an enraged Palestinian mob brutally murdered two Israeli soldiers who had strayed into a Palestinian-controlled zone. About an hour later, 1,500 miles to the south, a pair of suicide bombers aboard a small boat blew a 40-foot hole in a U.S. destroyer as it docked in the port of Aden, Yemen, killing 17 American sailors and wounding 35 more. Next, in retaliation for the murdered soldiers, Israel launched rocket attacks at the headquarters of the Palestinian Authority, which governs Palestinian territory.

Within days, President Clinton had flown to Egypt for an emergency meeting with Mideast leaders. "The alternative to the peace process," he said, "is now no longer merely hypothetical. It is unfolding today before our very eyes."

The President also sent dozens of FBI agents to Yemen to investigate the destroyer bombing. For now, no link between the bombing and Israeli-Palestinian violence can be assumed, but the State Department says most of the major radical Islamic organizations operate in Yemen, including the Palestinian group known as Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, and cells linked to Osama bin Laden, the exiled Saudi whom American officials blamed for the bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania on August 7, 1998.

In Israel, the cease-fire brokered by President Clinton in Egypt fell apart within three days. On October 23, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak announced that Israel was indefinitely suspending peace negotiations. By then, fierce fighting between Israeli and Palestinian forces had left 123 dead, all but 8 of them Palestinian.

The renewed violence left the two sides staring across a huge gulf and unable even to agree on who started the cycle of killing. Palestinians blame the Israelis, pointing to a visit to a Muslim sacred site in Jerusalem on September 28 by Ariel Sharon, a former defense minister and diehard opponent of compromise with the Palestinians. Sharon's visit, they say, was a provocation. After Palestinian youths responded by throwing stones at Israeli soldiers, Palestinians say the...