With the protests on campus last week regarding the situation in the Middle East, I am starting to get feelings of dej… vu. Not that I have seen protests on campus like that before, even though I know some have occurred. I’m talking about how both sides in this issue persist in their tunnel vision and single-minded pursuit of their lopsided views.

The latest suicide bombing occurred early on Wednesday morning, just the latest in an orchestrated campaign of suicide attacks targeting civilians. Not soldiers, not politicians – innocent civilians.

My biggest concern here is that Hamas and similar organizations are knowingly and willingly attacking civilians. And these suicide bombers are also disguised as civilians. This means that no innocents on either side are safe – Palestinian civilians are in danger of being mistaken for suicide bombers, Israeli civilians are in danger of being blown up on a bus, in a restaurant or on the street.

The underlying issue here, of course, is the fact that the Palestinian people want (and deserve) the right to live independently and free in their own state. Israel, in my opinion, has shown a significant willingness to allow this to happen, starting with the Oslo peace process, and the subsequent withdrawal from parts of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. They had previously returned the Sinai and the Golan Heights to Egypt and Syria respectively.

Palestinians under Yasser Arafat also agreed to this phased withdrawal of Israeli troops and the plan to form the new Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. Somehow, this never prevented groups like Hamas from continuing the campaigns of suicide bombing against Jewish civilians. Arafat pledged time and time again to lock down these groups and halt their activities, and consistently failed to produce any meaningful de-escalation in these attacks.

My observation is simply that there is no longer a political solution to this situation, at least not at this point in time, because in order to defeat the spate of violence, the source must be defeated. In offering concessions to the Palestinians, a precedent was set that suicide bombings are a means by which to obtain what they want.

I liken this to children who throw tantrums – as soon as a parent starts to give in, that parent may as well forget about trying to deny the child anything. So if the turnover of the West Bank and Gaza strip is underway, and they decide that they also want Timbuktu or Tasmania as well, they simply go back to “old faithful” and start blowing people up again.

The sweep of Palestinian territory that has been going on in recent days has been yet another brutal reminder of the violent times we live in and the horror of armed conflict. But I believe that the outrage of the Arab world, and the condemnation of Israel’s actions by the European powers and the United States, are still quite misguided.

The problem is one of fighting the symptoms instead of the whole disease.

We know from experience and pure common sense that Israel has the ability to stop its attacks in the West Bank, but the Palestinian Authority has clearly been shown to be lacking in the ability to stop suicide attacks, either due to physical inability, unwillingness or both.

Europe and the United States cannot expect to be taken seriously in calling for Israel to stop its “sweep” of the West Bank until they also find a way to either convince Arafat that it is in his best interest to stop the suicide bombers, or to remove Arafat and find another Palestinian leader who can and will do that.

In the meantime, asking the Israelis to withdraw is equivalent to asking me not to defend myself and continue to be pummeled while you try to convince an attacker to stop beating me over the head with a steel pipe. That is certainly not logic I would listen to, and it is optimistic – to put it mildly – to think that Israel and its government will act otherwise.

The bottom line is that the only way to defeat suicide bombers is to physically defeat them, because no amount of negotiation will satisfy people like that.

Whether or not Israel is going about it properly is questionable, but asking them to simply withdraw troops is not a reasonable solution either.

They say they are fighting for the very survival of their people, and I am inclined to believe them, if only for the reason that they have clearly shown more credibility as a democratic nation desirous of peace. Arafat is a terrorist who in my book is not too far from Osama bin Laden.

If we stifle the Israeli efforts now, it is only a matter of time before the suicide bombers get bored with Tel Aviv and Haifa and attack Denver and Detroit, only a matter of time before there are bombs going off in the local McDonald’s, Starbucks or Wal-Mart, with the claim that the U.S troops in Saudi Arabia or Yemen are an occupation army.

People who blow themselves up in order to kill children on civilian buses are far from reasonable. I like to think we learned at least that much from Sept. 11.

Emeka Anyanwu is a senior in electrical engineering from Ames.