Further attacks provide Sharon with reasons for his 'war on terror'

Another suicide bombing – the fourth in four days, but one that this time failed – allowed Israel's tireless publicists to complete their transformation of Yasser Arafat into Osama bin Laden Mark Two.

As they paraded in front of the cameras to protest against what could easily have been another atrocity against civilians in Jerusalem, there was a shift in the story-line devised by Ariel Sharon's spokesmen. Mr Arafat, bottled up in his West Bank headquarters in Ramallah, was not only responsible for failing to stop suicide bombers infiltrating Israel. He was sending them.

This claim, made on the BBC by a leading official spinmeister, Arie Mekel, is the culmination of the Sharon government's campaign to portray the Israel-Palestinian conflict as a "war on terror", part of the new global battle between good and evil no different from the one to which President George Bush repeatedly refers. In it, Mr Arafat and his Palestinian Authority are terrorist enemies.

In Israel, still dazed by three suicide bombers who killed 25 people in 12 hours, this narrative is easily sold. The country has moved sharply since the intifada began 14 months ago; even before the weekend's horror, many Israelis saw the conflict in these terms.

But it has not convinced everyone. The European Union said yesterday that it did not share the Israeli cabinet's view of the Palestinian Authority as a "terror-supporting entity", adding that the Jewish state needed a partner to help to fight extremism and make peace.

There is also unease within Israel. Only a few days after the Hamas onslaught, critical voices have begun to be raised. Some object to the bombardment of Mr Arafat's security forces by Israeli F-16s and helicopter gunships, attacking the very institutions that are supposed to be rounding up those behind the suicide bombings.

Others allege that the long-term strategy of Mr Sharon has nothing to do with peace- making, but is part of a long-term plan to go to war with Yasser Arafat, in the hope of finally suppressing the Palestinians' nationalist aspirations, as well as the armed groups fighting for them, through military might.

Allegations are flying among Israel's depleted left wing that the 73-year-old Prime Minister is unchanged from the army commander who used assassinations and bulldozers to suppress the Gaza Strip in the 1970s, or the Defence Minister who initiated Israel's disastrous invasion of Lebanon in 1982 in an attempt to destroy the PLO.

The left-wingers point out that he has devoted his entire career to supporting illegal Jewish settlement-building, consolidating Israel's presence in the land it seized in 1967 – territory regarded by the international community (even including Israel's American allies) as occupied, but by Mr Sharon as part of Israel.

"The doomsday prophets were right," wrote Tallie Lipkin-Shahak, a prominent Israeli commentator with extensive contacts within the military, "Ariel Sharon is taking Israel to the place with which he is most familiar and enamoured – war."

She stated that Mr Sharon was implementing a long-held combat plan, codenamed Large Pines. "For those who looked closely, it was clear that the Prime Minister, acting under the auspices of a broad national consensus and a yearning for unity, would thwart every chance of reaching an agreement and would capitalise on every opportunity provided by the acts of violence perpetrated by evil-doers in the Palestinian Authority and rejectionist organisations, to achieve his goal."

Within the Labour party, an uneasy partner in Mr Sharon's coalition, suspicions abound that the Prime Minister's plan is to overthrow the Palestinian Authority, abandoning all diplomacy in favour of force.

Its ministers, led by Shimon Peres, walked out of Monday night's cabinet meeting before the vote designating the Palestinian Authority "as an entity that supports terrorism, and must be dealt with accordingly", although they are expected to remain in the government. The former Labour minister Yossi Beilin, an architect of the 1993 Oslo accords, has accused Mr Sharon of planning a war that will set Israel back by years.

The evidence cannot easily be dismissed. Although Mr Sharon claimed to have embraced the US-led Mitchell peace plan, he determinedly blocked it, insisting on seven days of total calm – a demand that was never likely to be fulfilled in any circumstances, and certainly not while Palestinian towns and villages were blockaded by Israeli troops. Shortly before the arrival last week of the US mediator Anthony Zinni, he personally ordered the assassination of Hamas's West Bank military leader. Hamas replied with a weekend of carnage.