Yesterday’s news that Palestinian and Israelis are on the verge of reaching a tentative cease-fire agreement should be met with relief — and a hefty dose of skepticism. Although details remain sketchy, the two sides are apparently close to reaching a deal that would end the seven-month-old uprising and get peace negotiations moving again. The talks would restart from anywhere between four weeks to three months after the truce takes effect.

Many wonder how a truce in the violence which has spilt so much blood can last for three days, let alone three months. It would take only a single act of violence for the entire near-accord to unravel and for the parties to return to square one.

Then, of course, there is Ariel Sharon who can shatter any peace dream. He has made no secret of his lifelong ambition to retain the West Bank and Gaza, maintaining Israeli colonies on the territories. It is an objective that is part and parcel of the ideology of the Likud Party he heads. The real trouble with Sharon’s position is its preclusion of all other, non-military solutions.

Sharon pays lip service to the idea that there is no military solution to the conflict. Yet he has gone out of his way to rule out concessions that might make negotiations work. He insists that he will not withdraw a single settlement from the occupied territories, in recent days he has announced expansion of settlement activity. He said he regarded the 1948 war as ongoing and envisions no final agreement with Palestinians but only a long-term non-belligerency arrangement in which the Palestinians would rule only pockets of territory.

This means that if such a peace plan is eventually achieved it will be despite Sharon and almost exclusively due to Palestinian steadfastness. For seven months, Israel has fought a brutal, vicious and inhuman war, which has created even more facts of occupation while wreaking havoc on Palestinian lives and livelihood. For decades, it has occupied Palestinian territory to which it has no claim in international law, annexed its land and diverted its water, employing measures of repression that would be unacceptable in any Western democracy.

Its fundamental objective is to force the Palestinians to accept a bantustan under Israeli military, economic, political and security hegemony. The undeclared aim of such oppression is to exhaust the Palestinians into giving up the fight. The idea is to hit Palestinians in every way possible, making their lives unbearable as to make them feel that they can no longer endure remaining there.

But the inability of Israel’s military intimidation to end the uprising was long ago demonstrated. The might of the Israeli Army did not succeed in breaking Palestinian resolve. It has tried everything yet the Palestinians are still standing. They can be punished, killed, maimed, confined, intimidated but they are still there. As Americans painfully learned in Vietnam, when one side fights with resolve and for a cause and the other fights without, the former wins.

Sharon has been persuaded that the war against the Palestinians can’t be won. Nothing, it is said, silences guns like the prospect of no victory.