Palestinian violence is not a response to the capture of the West Bank and Gaza. Palestinian nationalism's roots are not so shallow.

Economic support from the rest of the Arab states to the fledgling Palestinian Authority in the West Bank is virtually non-existent.

The occupier's retreat from Gaza and northern West Bank is a result of resistance.

Needless to say, if the Arab-Israeli conflict is about interstate disputes and the need to resolve the future of the West Bank and Gaza, it can be solved; if it is a religious conflict, nothing but violence is ahead.

We don't have a state, neither in Gaza nor in the West Bank. Gaza is under siege and the West Bank is occupied. What we have in the Gaza Strip is not a state, but rather a regime of an elected government. A Palestinian state will not be created at this time except in the territories of 1967.

Mr. Arafat cannot accept less than 100 percent of the 1967 border of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.