Who Will Blink First?

As Colin Powell left Ariel Sharon's Jerusalem residence last Friday afternoon and announced that four hours of talks had failed to persuade the Israeli Prime Minister to halt his military offensive in the West Bank, a 20-year-old Palestinian woman named Andaleeb Taqatqa prepared to die. Her plan was to walk into the Mahane Yehuda market in downtown Jerusalem and blow herself up during rush hour as Israelis shopped for fruits and vegetables in preparation for the Sabbath. When she arrived at the crowded bazaar just after 4 p.m., Israeli police prevented her from entering. She walked down the street, waited for a bus to pull up and detonated the explosives strapped to her body. Within minutes Jerusalem's streets filled with the familiar, sickening sights and sounds that accompany every Palestinian suicide bombing: blood and screams and sirens. As ambulances came for the dead and the injured--the blast killed six and wounded 80--a woman's severed head rolled along the asphalt.

The Secretary of State received news of the attack on his way to a helicopter pad outside Jerusalem, where he and Israeli defense officials boarded a Blackhawk to fly to Israel's northern command headquarters. Powell's hosts flew him over the site of the bombing, circling it repeatedly; he could see people running through the streets and ambulances taking the wounded from the scene. Once the Blackhawk touched down, eight miles from the Lebanese border, Powell took a call from Sharon and expressed his deep regrets over the attack. That day, after consulting with National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Powell delayed a planned meeting with Yasser Arafat and threatened to cancel it altogether unless the Palestinian leader denounced the bombings--which last week included a suicide attack on a bus in Haifa that killed eight. "It was a group decision," says a senior White House aide. "This was a turning point." Actually, it was much worse: Powell's mission to the Middle East, which began with lofty hopes and turned bleaker every day, was on the verge of being ripped apart by a single determined 20-year-old. On Saturday Arafat finally met Powell's condition for a meeting by issuing a statement in Arabic "condemning strongly all the attacks which are targeting civilians on both sides." At the meeting Sunday, Powell saw Arafat for three hours at his bombed-out Ramallah compound. When Powell emerged--alone because Arafat, according to aides, feared Israeli snipers--the Secretary of State said, "We exchanged a variety of ideas and discussed steps on how we can move forward."

As the shock of the Friday bombing reverberated, the White House continued to issue statements of resolve--that Powell was still pursuing a truce, that his mission to the region had not been derailed, that American prestige could still forge a peace between the Israelis and Palestinians that neither side really seems to want. "The President will not be deterred," White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said Friday. But those assurances did nothing to douse the growing sense that the combatants are waging a war driven by unquenchable vengeance and hate and that the U.S., at this late hour, may not be able to slow it down.