The news from the Mideast is, day by day, becoming more unbearable. True friends and supporters of Israel are weeping at the misery and devastation Sharon's policies are bringing to its streets and shops and universities -- no one and nowhere is safe, not even the babe in his mother's arms or the joyous celebration of a wedding party.

Sharon sows wave after wave of high-tech destruction on Palestine, and Israel reaps wave after wave of escalating terror. Far from stopping the suicide bombings, his policies have encouraged them. No matter how many of the enemy he destroys, there are always more willing to rise up and destroy in turn. Every day brings reports of new terror bombings, more victims, more reasons for implacable hatred on both sides.

The hard line isn't working. That's undeniable at this point.

Wise men never mistake revenge for security or allow mutual destruction to become the only option. Sharon is not a wise man.

He has allowed his nation's overwhelming power in relation to the enemy to seduce him into creating conditions in which the enemy has nothing left to lose. But those are the very conditions from which the weak draw their greatest strength -- you cannot stop terror with simple brutish power, only feed it. Step by step, whether it is, as some say, his intention or not, Sharon is marching toward a point where his only option will be genocide.