The killing goes on and on and on. In the morning, schoolboys throw stones at an Israeli tank in the West Bank village of Wad Burgin, near Jenin. An 11-year-old named Muhammad Salah is shot dead. On the other side of Jenin, an 18-year-old named Rami As'oos tries to move around an Israeli roadblock. He is shot dead.

That night in Jerusalem, young people, most of them Israelis, gather in the Ben Yehuda mall. Some sit at outdoor cafes. Others move around, doing what the young do in all cities on a Saturday night. They eat together, talk, crack jokes. There is music, laughter, posing, flirting.

Then the first bomb goes off, at the entrance to the mall, and seconds later, another. The street is suddenly littered with torn bodies, the moans of the dying, the screams of the living. A 19-year-old New Yorker named Hanoch Krohn is at an indoor table of the Café Roman, and after the second explosion, rushes outside to comfort a man who was almost certainly dead.

"His brains were coming out of his head," Krohn tells the Reuters news agency. "There was a hole in his head and the blood was pouring out like a waterfall. ... I tried to help him. I tried to put his brain back in his head."

A few blocks away, in front of an ice cream parlor, men try moving a car that is blocking traffic. The car is loaded with explosives, and suddenly erupts. A deafening explosion. Flames and smoke. Screams. Pieces of the car rain down on human beings like shrapnel, smashing heads, lacerating flesh. Back at the Ben Yehuda mall, a 10-year-old boy lies on the ground with an eye blown out of his head. The bodies of several humans are burning.

That's what terrorism looks like: a panorama of mutilation and death.

And still the killing was not over. Hours later, up north in Haifa, a Palestinian man boarded a bus. A man ready to die. He triggered his nail-studded bomb. And the bus was torn apart. The bomber died instantly, of course. That was his intention. But so did at least 15 other humans. None intended to die on this Sunday morning. Almost certainly, none were imagining eternity in the presence of one God or another. They probably were reading newspapers. Or dozing. Or thinking of wives or grandchildren or the aggravations of work. They surely did not choose this moment to die. But they were blown into pieces, or mutilated, and then added to the statistics of death.

Pathetic Symbol of Impotence

What is to be done?

Probably not very much.

Certainly, Yasser Arafat should resign as president of what is left of the Palestinian Authority. He has become a pathetic symbol of bumbling impotence, unable to control the radicals of Hamas (which took "credit" for the slaughters) or Islamic Jihad. After every new terrorist outrage, Israeli government officials aim their rhetorical cannons at Arafat, and hold him "responsible." But they must know this isn't very precise. If they truly believed that Arafat works in collusion with the terrorists, they would have killed him long ago.

But Arafat has nothing left to add to this terrible drama. By all accounts, many Palestinians hate him. The haters include moderates and extremists. They hate his teetering between toughness and weakness, between nationalist rhetoric and stuttering apologies. They hate the corruption that permeates Palestinian society. They hate the torture employed in Palestinian jails. Sober, rational Palestinians would like to live in a peaceful, just society. Arafat can no longer make that society real. He should go.

A Future of Violence

But if he goes, nobody knows who — or what — will replace him. Just as nobody in Israel knows what will happen when Ariel Sharon lumbers into history. Since he took his little stroll on the Temple Mount 14 months ago, many hundreds of Israelis and Palestinians have died in the deadly intifadeh. Sharon has tried almost everything demanded by the Israeli right: tanks, roundups, death squads. None of his tactics have made it safe to dine in Jerusalem on a Saturday night or take a bus in Haifa on a Sunday morning.

If the Sharon government collapses, his successor probably would be Benjamin Netanyahu, and that choice would almost certainly increase the violence. But at this point, only a starry-eyed optimist could believe that the future holds anything else but violence.

Every act of Israeli violence serves as a recruiting tool for the Palestinian extremists. Every fresh act of Palestinian terrorism feeds the need for violent Israeli vengeance. If you kill my son, I will kill your daughter. If you kill my mother, I will kill your father. On and on and on.

The Americans would like to see this end, of course, as do all of us who want to see a safe, flourishing state of Israel. Bill Clinton tried valiantly to broker a peace and failed. For a few months, the Bush administration adopted a policy of "benign neglect," but the killing went on. The events of Sept. 11 forced Bush to get more actively involved in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Now Secretary of State Powell speaks optimistically about the need to create a viable Palestinian state, existing in harmony with Israel, but the details of making it happen are as vague as dust and smoke.

Islamic militants in many countries (including the stateless Osama Bin Laden) cite American support of Israel as justification for their own dreadful acts. This is too easy, by far, but Americans have died because of those extremist beliefs — in Africa, Yemen, Lebanon and the World Trade Center.

And yet some Israelis also have turned on the U.S., literally the only friend they have in the world. A few months ago, Sharon made an outrageous comparison of U.S. efforts at conciliation to Neville Chamberlain's craven weakness in negotiations with Adolf Hitler. He later apologized, of course, but the message of contempt was very clear. Yesterday, Powell's peace envoy, the retired Marine Corps Gen. Anthony Zinni, was verbally abused by some Israelis as he came to lay a wreath in the Ben Yehuda mall.

These are all signs of a growing madness on both sides of the quarrel between Israelis and Palestinians. Terrorism is vile, heartless, indiscriminate and, by every human measurement, sick. There is little hope of "victory." But destroying human life — as they have done at the World Trade Center and again in Israel — can be a demented form of therapy.
The terrorists can die in a state of mindless exaltation. They can make their enemies die or weep. They are doing it now, and there seems little hope that they will go away. Not tomorrow. Not for many, many years.