If Israel’s Prime Minister Ariel Sharon reads one book in the coming year, it should be "Reaching for Glory," by presidential historian Michael Beschloss, that details the secret tapes of Lyndon Johnson’s private conversations on Vietnam, published last month.

While President Johnson was telling audiences in the mid-1960s, during the first major escalation of combat forces in that sad Southeast Asian nation, that "America wins the wars that it undertakes, make no mistake about it," and exhorting soldiers to "nail the coonskin on the wall," he was tormented, the tapes reveal, by the suspicion that the US would fail to achieve not only a World War II-style surrender, but even the limited goal of breaking the spirit of the Vietcong to a point where they would be forced to the negotiating table and into signing a settlement responsive to Washington’s dictates.

And there is an observation by Johnson cited in "Reaching for Glory", quite telling for its plaintive tone, about what the American president really thought of his Vietcong adversaries: "I don’t believe they’re ever going to quit."

That, of course, turned out to be true, true because there has never been a case in human history, and certainly not in the 20th century, of a people who had embarked on a national struggle for independence who ever quit, or even threw a furtive glance over their shoulders to question their conviction that life without freedom is hollow and worthless.

Don’t Israeli leaders get it? Palestinians fought Zionism, in a long and protracted struggle for 30 years from 1917 to 1947, and they have been fighting it for the last 35 years from 1967 to the present, with no sign that they are "ever going to quit." So, don’t these Zionists get it? Don’t they get the idea that the longer they occupy a people (read, rule over, rob, incarcerate, pauperize and kill them) the more they harden their resolve to fight back?

And that is what these young militants who mounted their attacks last weekend in Jerusalem and Haifa are saying, if unconsciously, to Israelis: "You continue occupying us, squatting on our land, and denying all of us the right to be free, then all of you will pay the price."

That’s a dreadful situation, no less for the Palestinian leadership than it is for Israel.

Yasser Arafat finds himself at this point in a bind. He is being urged by Washington in no uncertain terms to "move immediately and decisively" to arrest militants, in effect to tackle Palestinian groups such as Hamas — the lethally efficient organization that took responsibility for the attacks — whose popularity now rivals or exceeds his own. A difficult task indeed. Last month, for example, when Arafat’s security agents arrested a single commander of the group Islamic Jihad in the West Bank town of Jenin, more than 3,000 Palestinians rioted, burning cars and shooting in the air.

What is even more confounding for the Palestinian leader is that this time, given the severity of the bombings and the death toll, the US administration did not revert to the old ritual of somberly urging "both sides to exert maximum restraint" to prevent further violence. This time, with buildings still ablaze near the Gaza headquarters of the PA, and with Israeli forces pounding his airport runway, destroying two helicopters and igniting a massive fuel fire, the Bush administration had few words of sympathy for him.

In fact, last Sunday, as President Bush met with Ariel Sharon, it became apparent that Israel was being given the green light by Washington to react whichever way it pleased. Sharon effectively left the American capital knowing he had a carte blanche, with no expectation that the US government will object to his actions. In that regard, Donald Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense, responding to questions that day, went out on a limb saying that any projected military attacks by Israel "should not be seen as revenge" but as "self-defense."

The American administration, you see, is particularly miffed this time because it reads the weekend bombings as a slap in the face to recent steps it had taken to address Palestinian concerns. These included Bush’s recognition of the need of a Palestinian state in a United Nations speech, Secretary of State Colin Powell’s conciliatory Nov. 19 speech in Louisville, and the dispatch to the region of Anthony C. Zinni, a politically savvy retired general, presumably with superb contacts in the Arab world.

You can be sure that the Palestinian leader will try — and try is all he can do at this point to get back into the game, and this time make a bigger show of cracking down on militants. But the genie may already be out of the bottle. The Palestinian "street" will not stand for it, and those militants will not yield, for they know that they, in effect, exert a veto over his negotiating possibilities.

The Israeli Army’s current deadly attacks in the occupied territories will no doubt prompt Palestinians, In retaliation, to mount equally deadly attacks against Israelis, which will prompt the Israelis to respond to the attacks that had been the Palestinian response to their earlier attacks, which in turn will result in Hamas fighters ... Where were we?

Those who want to see this cycle of violence come to an end should tell Israel to just get the devil out of the West Bank and Gaza (this less than 20 percent remnant of the Palestinian people’s ancestral homeland) and take with it its occupation army, its settlers, and its supremacist vision that has enabled it all these years to lord it over another people.

There is no other solution. For does anyone really believe that the Palestinians are ever going to quit?