Tactical Advantages of Modern Day Kamikazes

Experts scramble to find explanations why Arafat lacks the control of leaders such as Prabhakaran. "It's partly a function of the very varied political and cultural differences of the Palestinian Diaspora," says Khalidi. "Palestinians in the West Bank are separated from those in Gaza who are separated from Palestinian refugees in Lebanon and Jordan — there are cultural, institutional as well as physical divisions among Palestinians."

And the heterogeneity of Palestinian groups and factions have led to persistent questions of Arafat's hold on power.

"Arafat can't do everything," says Mathew Levitt, a senior fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy. "He certainly has less control over all the Palestinian factions and segments than he did before September 2000 (when the current intifada began). But it's also very clear that there's plenty he could still do."

A Public Condemnation and Public Support

This weekend for instance, following Friday's suicide bombing attack in Jerusalem, in which eight Israelis were killed, Arafat faced intense international pressure to denounce suicide bombings as a means of achieving political aims.

It was only after Arafat issued his condemnation — in Arabic — that visiting Secretary of State Colin Powell met with the besieged Palestinian leader at his headquarters in the West Bank town of Ramallah.

But a day before Arafat issued his condemnation, in what was widely seen as a reflection of the mixed messages emerging from the Palestinian and Arab leadership, a Saudi-owned magazine published an interview with Arafat's wife where Suha al-Taweel Arafat publicly supported suicide bombings as a legitimate means of resistance against Israel.

On its part, the suicide bombers' targeting of civilians has earned such international opprobrium that the Bush Administration has taken to calling the attacks "homicide attacks," a semantic change that puts the emphasis on the victims while failing to distinguish the attacks from conventional ones where attackers prefer not to lose their lives.

Speaking to reporters in Washington on Friday, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said President Bush believed that people "who go where you can find civilians for the purpose of murdering civilians, are terrorists."

But many Palestinians view Washington's calls on Arafat to denounce suicide bombings as another sign of a U.S. bias towards Israel.

"How many times must Arafat condemn suicide attacks?" asks Khalidi. "The United States is jumping through hoops put up for them by Israel. It's a sign of the lack of moral equivalency that there is a difference between thousands of innocent Palestinian deaths and hundreds of innocent Israeli deaths. "

At least 1,272 Palestinians and 452 Israelis have been killed since the intifada began in September 2000.

A Little Bit of Hope

But Palestinian experts also note that the number of suicide attacks have been low during peacetime, before Palestinian hopes for a peaceful resolution to the conflict appeared to have all but died.

In 1999, the year before the current intifada began, the only suicide attack recorded against Israelis by Israel's International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism was in the southern Lebanese town of Klaiyat on a military target.