Breaking Point

It was late morning when Brigadier General Gadi Aizenkott appeared at the door of his boss, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, with dreadful news. Two Israeli reserve soldiers had wandered by mistake into the West Bank city of Ramallah and had been lynched by an ecstatic Palestinian mob. They were beaten, stabbed--one was tossed out a second-story window--and defiled again. As usual on a Thursday, Barak, who serves as his own head of the Defense Ministry, was at its headquarters in Tel Aviv, dressed for the part in an open shirt and windbreaker. Immediately, he summoned his top commanders into the room. Amid some of the most ferocious violence ever between Israelis and Palestinians, Barak--until the visit by Aizenkott, his military secretary--had been struggling to avoid an escalation that would imperil the peace process he hoped would bring a lasting end to such mayhem. But the Ramallah attack was "too much," says Deputy Defense Minister Ephraim Sneh. "That was the end."

From his generals across the table Barak wanted advice on where to strike back. The officers, who had been chafing at a policy they considered too restrained, were happy to oblige with a detailed target strike list. Within hours, Israeli Cobra attack helicopters were in the air over the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, unleashing their missiles on five carefully chosen Palestinian security sites, one of them close enough to rattle the Gaza headquarters in which Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat was holding court. The Palestinians screamed that Barak had declared war. "It's nonsense, bullshit and propaganda," Barak told CNN. "It was not a millionth of what we can do if it was really a war."

War is an awkward term to apply to a conflict in which the balance of forces is so lopsided. Israel's military is among the world's most heavily armed and proficient. Arafat's scruffy troops have neither tanks, artillery nor aircraft. But if it wasn't quite war last week, it was nevertheless a fierce mess. The exhaustive, seven-year effort to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through negotiation has withstood great tests, but none as scorching as this. While regional leaders agreed to a summit this week in Egypt, their ambitions were contained by the need to squelch the bloodletting. After two weeks of violence, neither Israeli nor Palestinian leaders--nor the U.S. officials who have painstakingly nurtured their talks--held out much real hope of restoring the momentum toward peace. "Something was torn here, and it seems as if the genie left the bottle," said Israeli Justice Minister Yossi Beilin.

The tortured relationship between Israelis and Palestinians was not the only thing at stake. While there remained a sound logic against a new, widespread Middle East war--namely that the Arab armies are in no shape to take on Israel's--the furious race of developments left regional leaders with a creepy hint of that possibility, especially after a new front opened up when Hizballah militiamen in Lebanon breached the border to kidnap three soldiers from Israel. Barak holds Syria, the real power in Lebanon, responsible and said in an interview with TIME that Israelis would "keep for ourselves the right to respond." He added, "We will know when and how to do it."