The Mideast peace process is not the victim of the current violence but the root of it. Unless the American, Israeli and Palestinian officials who meet in Paris this week acknowledge that fact, efforts to stem the current bloodletting will be nothing more than palliatives. PNS commentator Kathryn J. Casa reports from Israel.

Contrary to popular belief and widespread media representation, the Palestinian people do not combust spontaneously or at little provocation. In fact, their collective patience would rival that of their Biblical cousin, Job. Palestinians have lost their homes, land, rights, their very humanity to Israeli occupation. They have been waiting more than 50 years for the world community to acknowledge and act against the injustice of their situation.

Periodically, the waiting becomes intolerable when they see their livelihoods taken away, their rights usurped, their land confiscated, their water expropriated, or when their loved ones are arrested, humiliated, tortured and killed and their occupier supported carte blanche, both morally and financially. Then the injustice takes shape as rage, slow, simmering and, yes, it spills over. It is not sudden, but it should not be unexpected. Not to President Clinton or Madeleine Albright, least of all to Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat.

Yet these players will go to Paris this week because Washington wants to have another meeting. Wide-eyed U.S. officials are disingenuously asking: How did this round of Israeli-Palestinian violence begin? Apparently, it bears repeating:

The Old City of Jerusalem is like a time tunnel. There are the same worn, expectant faces there, year after year, each time grayer, the eyes slightly sadder, the draw on the cigarette deeper, as years and missed opportunities extinguish hopes for a just peace.

Each year finds more Jewish occupants in the historically Arab, Christian and Armenian quarters of the city, more armed guards at the doorsteps of Israeli-owned curio shops, more Israeli kindergartners escorted by walkie-talkie carrying, Uzi-wielding soldiers, more yeshiva students hurrying through the souk. Neighbors, yes, but intruders also, whose very presence is meant to assert what they perceive as their right to live in the scant sectors once reserved for Palestinians.

Nowhere today -- not in one corner of Jerusalem, the West Bank or Gaza -- is there a place Palestinians can call their own. The pockets of land under Palestinian control -- thanks to the Oslo agreement -- are, in fact, only partially controlled by the Palestinian Authority. But broach the issues of water rights, land use, air space, defense, and suddenly there is a higher Israeli authority to contend with.

Drive south toward Jerusalem from the hillsides of Nablus. The fields where Palestinians once harvested their olives are carved with huge expanses of cleared, leveled ground that cut a wide swath through the gentle hillsides, tearing down the stone walls and uprooting the gnarled olive trees that symbolize the Palestinians' historic ties to the land. This ravenous asphalt monster is creating a virtual Arab-free superhighway to string together a broad network of strategic Israeli settlements that perch like Roman outposts atop hills from Jenin to Ramallah.

Throughout the land, on the stoops of any hovel in any refugee camp, in any village living room or city coffee shop, unemployed young men sit and watch and ruminate. What the world refers to as a peace process is, on the ground, little more than an exercise in semantics. To the Palestinians, Oslo is a sedative that has lulled the international community into benign complacency at best. Meanwhile, Jewish settlements mushroom, and the Palestinians' hold on their shrinking corners of Jerusalem and the West Bank becomes more tenuous.

Now the Palestinians have had enough. Their patience destroyed, they have emerged again as fighters armed with stones and slingshots and, this time, guns. Israel is fighting back, again with disproportionate force: helicopter gunships, missiles, tanks and snipers.

The overwhelmingly Palestinian death toll becomes a media exercise, woven into the lead of news reports with details relegated to the jump page. With a formulaic attempt at "balance," reporters somehow attempt to equate the deaths of 2- and 12- and 16-year-olds with the injuries of fully armed and trained adult soldiers and police officials.