The terrorist who shoots, maims and rips apart Jewish men, women and young children and who now seeks to transform pain into power has already learned from the torturer. He understands that pain, to be purposeful, must point toward death, but that it must not actually kill. This is not to suggest, by any means, that frenzied Palestinian terrorists do not seek to produce dead Israelis, but only that leaving live Jewish witnesses who will themselves now fear annihilation is an essential part of the drama.

In the fashion of the torturer, the terrorist takes what is usually private and incommunicable, the pain contained within the boundaries of the sufferer's own body, and uses it to affect the behavior of others. A grotesque form of theater that draws political power from the innermost depths of privacy, terrorism manipulates and amplifies pain within the individual body for the express purpose of influencing others who live outside that body. Violating the inviolable, it declares with unspeakable cruelty not only that no one is immune, but also that everyone's most personal horror can be made public.

Israel hears from the Arab world and elsewhere that the "martyrs" of PA and Hamas have a distinct political motive. Surely, these killers do not kill gratuitously. Rather, they kill to "recover the homeland," to "reclaim our rights," etc. Once these allegedly proper objectives are realized, Israel is told, all will be well. The killers will "return" to a life of peace. There will be no more infliction of pain. The deconstruction of a Jewish civilization, the uncreation of what has been so painstakingly created for over three thousand years, will announce its own end.

But what Israel hears it does not understand. Like the victim of torture, who is told again and again that his pain is related to a reluctant disclosure of information, Israel confronts a masquerade. With Israel, as with the torture victim, the declared motive of the perpetrator is largely a fiction. The torturer tortures because he enjoys torturing. The Palestinian terrorist murders Jews because that, exactly, is what he wants to do. The torturer cannot be stopped by answering his questions (the overwhelming majority of torture victims know absolutely nothing about such questions, and the torturer knows that his victims know nothing). The terrorist cannot be stopped by giving in to terror. In the case of Israel, the Palestinian terrorist will cease his terror only when the Jewish State has itself ceased to exist. It is not surprising, in this connection, that all official PA maps identify Israel proper as "Occupied Palestine." And Israel does not exist on the maps of a single Arab country.

The terrorist and his victims experience pain and power as opposites. As the victims' suffering grows, so does the power of the terrorist. And as the power of the terrorist grows, so does the pain of his victims. For the bystanders, and this includes all of Israel that is not directly involved in a particular terrorist attack, each infliction of pain is a mock execution, a reminder of total Israeli vulnerability and a denial of authentic Jewish power.

For the terrorist, pain is inflicted to alter consciousness, but it has always to be a purposeful alteration. Here Israel must understand that what matters most to the terrorists, after they have inflicted great pain upon fresh victim Jewish populations, is not so much the content of the Government's response (this content, after all, has become predictably craven) but rather the form of the response. Paradoxically, the mere fact that the Government has chosen to answer the terrorists with words, apart from the precise content of that answer, may represent a growth of terrorist power.

The terrorist, like the torturer, can alter even human language. With each successive victimization by Palestinian terrorism, Israel loses more of its "voice." After a time, if nothing more is done about the terrorist exploitation of Jewish pain as Islamic power, Jerusalem will be forced to prepare for an irremediable silence. In response, the Arab terrorist, confronted with a Jewish victim that has become substantially pitiable, will close in with forseeable ferocity for the coup de grace.

There is one last point, an observation spawned perhaps by this writer's long scholarly and operational involvement with the threat of "higher-order" (chemical/biological/nuclear) terrorism. A terrorist escalation in the "quality" of terror could follow directly from a correlation of pain and power. All terrorism intends to change a prospective victim's general awareness that "All persons must die" to the more specific awareness, "I must die - and maybe soon." Insofar as a resort to vastly more destructive forms of terror could hasten this change, such resort should certainly not be dismissed out of hand. The argument that "terrorists have no reason to escalate" is certainly a product of the most fragile syllogisms.

The pain occasioned by Palestinian terrorism, a pain that confers power upon the terrorist, begins within the private body, and then spills out more widely into the body politic. Wanting the two realms to become indistinguishable, the Palestinian terrorist understands that it is not enough that his victims feel pain. Rather, the pain must also be felt, vicariously but palpably, by all those who might still become victims in the future. It is these prospective Jewish victims who should now pay special heed. Israel is at war and must fight back before there are still more Jewish body parts to recover from its unspeakably blood-stained streets.