Time to get serious: The world must stand up to Sharon

Ignoring US, European and regional demands to desist, Israel continues to pursue a campaign of terror across the Palestinian territories. Some sensitive souls might prefer to describe Ariel Sharon's actions as a defensive security sweep, as a targeted military operation, or more fashionably, as a legitimate contribution to the wider "war against terrorism". But when civilians are killed or wounded in their hundreds, when a generation of children is traumatised, when the feeble structures of nascent Palestinian statehood are systematically destroyed, when a whole people is corralled, penned in, humiliated and denied basic human rights, when even the holiest of religious shrines is transformed into a battlefield, when hatred and revenge, individual and collective, replaces reason and decency as the fount of government policy, and when hope is daily blindfolded, placed before a wall and coldly executed, what other word is there for this than terror?
In fighting terrorists in this way, Israel has crossed a line no democratic government should cross. By its actions it weakens Palestinian rejectionist groups. But the suicide bombers, far from being defeated by such means, will likely become more numerous. By their rockets and tanks, they weaken and subvert Yasser Arafat's authority. Yet paradoxically, in theory at least, they want a stronger Palestinian leader to curb the extremists. By their ill-considered, indiscriminately brutal tactics, they betray the duties and responsibilities of democratic leadership, they forfeit much of their claim to moral justification, and they weaken and undermine the legitimacy of Israel's historic case. No reasonable person any longer denies Israel's right to exist. Why, then, does Israel's prime minister seek to deny that same right to Palestine?