RAMALLAH: When I crossed into this West Bank city the other day, I had to line up with everyone else and carry my bags through a checkpoint.

But then the young Israeli soldiers staffing it allowed a taxi to take me across the 200-yard transit zone. Most Palestinians get no such favours.

Israel has made a sizable investment in erecting fences with transit zones like this one around Palestinian cities — a sign that Israel has embarked on a long-term policy. The West Bank is being diced into a series of isolated, economically strangled Palestinian ghettoes.

Three weeks after intensive global diplomacy lifted the Israeli sieges around Yasser Arafat’s headquarters here and at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, life in the Holy Land remains extremely tense. It could explode into a broader conflagration at any moment.

Both the Israelis and Palestinians are experiencing serious government crises that stem directly from the continuing crisis between them.

Meanwhile, the Israelis still launch raids into this and other Palestinian cities whenever they want, leading to a pervasive sense of Palestinian insecurity. The tight noose of Israeli control around Palestinian cities has made economic recovery impossible.

For now, the Palestinians seem unable to challenge Israel’s harsh measures. During the April incursions, the Israelis smashed most of the social-affairs and security infrastructures that the PA had built up under the 1993 Oslo agreement. So long as Arafat was besieged and Prime Minister Sharon was calling for his ouster, the Palestinians rallied around him. But as soon as the siege was lifted, he met a barrage of criticism from his people. At the Palestinian academic conference I attended, one participant even asked whether the PA had perhaps been just a “junior subcontractor” for the Israelis all along.

I heard several Palestinians remark that Arafat has now led his people to three major defeats: in Jordan in 1970, in Beirut in 1982, and now the destruction of most of the PA. This last one will most probably be his last defeat. A group of us from the conference had a 30-minute visit with Arafat. He seemed unable to describe a strategy his people might follow, and allowed his advisers to interrupt and contradict him. I’ve followed his career closely for nearly 30 years, and have never seen him so lacking the capacities of a national leader.—Dawn/The Christian Science Monitor News Service.