(IPS) As the end nears of the war in Afghanistan, the terrorism of Palestinian extremist groups has grown to unbearable levels for Israel, for the international community, and for Palestinian society. Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, in response, is launching an aggressive policy of retaliation directed primarily at the Palestinian Authority, asserting as justification that President Yassir Arafat is responsible for the attacks.

But this doesn't seem to be the case. Despite his state of enforced isolation, Arafat has continued to support every initiative and means to overcome this phase of death and destruction. He backed the Mitchell Report without reservation and supported efforts to restart dialogue.

While it is true that he could always do more to fight terrorism, the fact that in this climate he doesn't or cannot start a civil war between Palestinians does not mean that he is encouraging or collaborating on activities that are directly undermining his authority. It is obvious that the attacks by Hamas and Islamic Jihad are intended as much to weaken the Palestinian Authority as to terrorise Israeli society.

On the other side we have an Israeli prime minister who throughout his long political career has never hidden his rejection of peace talks. Without going back to the grim acts attributed to Sharon during the Lebanese war, we should bear in mind that as foreign minister during the Netanyahu administration he came out consistently against the timid peace agreements reached by that government.

In Wye River, not only did he refuse to shake hands with Yassir Arafat - a symbolic gesture - he didn't favour implementation of the agreement and later was primarily responsible for blocking the peace initiatives with Syria.

Two choices

In the electoral campaign and his first days as prime minister, he made it clear that his idea of a peace accord included conditions that were impossible to fulfil - like creating a Palestinian state on 46 percent of the territory, excluding Jerusalem, when he knew that former prime minister Ehud Barak had offered about 90 percent of the territory with Jerusalem as the shared capital.

Given these precedents, it is valid to ask whether Sharon has a real strategy for achieving ''security and peace'' or whether he is merely engaging in a short term play for ''security without peace''. Rabin maintained the ''fight against terrorism as if there were no peace process'' and continued the latter ''as if there were no terrorism'' - which seems the only strategy possible. This is definitely not Sharon's approach.

So where does this leave Arafat? With Palestinian society hemmed in and without resources, with a security force that lacks well-defined loyalty and a culture of service to a state (whichwould be impossible in any case), his options are civil war or war against Israel. Are these the alternatives the international community wants him to choose between?

The international community cannot stand by and watch as Arafat falls, without providing him with the means he needs to pursue a more efficient policy against terrorism. To ask him to massacre the extremists whom a broad swath of Palestinians see as the only resistance against an unjust and intolerable situation is to ask him to precipitate a bloodbath that would set off a revolution against the Palestinian Authority and destroy everything achieved in the 1990s.

Not blindly obedient

What Arafat desperately needs are better arguments. If life were not unbearable in the Palestinian territories, if the people didn't have to wait hours to travel a short distance, if the sick didn't languish at checkpoints, if there were some prospect of an end to the conflict, Arafat would appear to his people as a leader who in his fight for peace must fight the extremists who stand in the way of a better future.

It is an extremely delicate situation. The Israeli population and the international community are sickened by months of the Intifada and blind, indiscriminate terrorism. The world is concentrated on a fight against international terrorism.

Sharon must read correctly the messages that the West and the Arab world are sending, because to return to the peace process must clearly be a priority on the post-Afghan war agenda.

A number of high-ranking authorities have indicated that Arafat cannot solve this crisis, and they are partly right. Without a cogent argument for his actions, Arafat will not direct his security forces against the extremists, for two reasons: first, they are not blindly obedient. And second, given his own history as a leader, Arafat will opt for dignity whatever the pressures are put on him.

Even so, with the tiny of manoeuvring room left to him, he has condemned the attacks and arrested and prosecuted those responsible. He has never done this, all would agree, to the satisfaction of Israel. And he has never done enough to stop attacks, but nor has he had an argument for doing so.

Undesirable scenario

Arafat assumed an ambiguous stance at the beginning of the Intifada, and he was probably wrong to deal as he did with the Barak government which could have provided him, in the form of a peace accord, with the necessary arguments.

But to let Arafat fall would be to let Palestinian society slide into total chaos and hand large parts of the occupied territories over to Islamic Jihad and Hamas and, in the short term, to obligate the Israeli army to occupy the territories.

And it would be to abandon the east of the Mediterranean, after ten years of hope, to endemic violence, which could spread to countries like Egypt, Jordan, and Algeria. We should shake up the current mindset, offer Arafat persuasive arguments, and require of him the desired results.

A destabilised Mediterranean is the most undesirable scenario imaginable for European Union and US interests. We still have time to act; indeed it is our duty to do so before it's too late. For this, however, the international community, which is essential to resolving the conflict, must make its voice heard in a clear and decisive manner.

LUIS YANEZ-BARNUEVO is a deputy in Spanish parliament and ex-secretary of state for international cooperation and for Iberoamerica. BERNARDINO LEON is a diplomat and ex-chief of staff for the UE Special Envoy to the Near East.