When I am abroad, I am often asked by people what lies behind the Muslim rage that produces atrocities like 9/11, the Bali bombing and the Madrid train slaughter.

I go into the usual explanations that include poverty, unemployment, frustration over the backwardness of the Muslim world, and above all, fury over the free hand the West, specially the Americans, have given Israel to oppress and humiliate the Palestinians. After the next terrorist attack, my answer will be simpler: "Sheikh Yassin."

In a sense, this latest act of Israeli state terror symbolizes the arrogance of Sharon's government as well as its contempt for world opinion. The Hamas leader was a cripple whose moral authority derived from his saintliness rather than any of the physical attributes of power. And while he certainly authorized the use of terror, including suicide bombing, he was also ready to negotiate a peaceful resolution to the conflict based on the concept of a two-state formula.

When he was released from an Israeli jail in 1987 and established Hamas, there were rumours that the Israeli government encouraged him as it thought the emergence of an Islamic movement would erode the popularity of the secular Yasser Arafat and his PLO.

In the event, Hamas quickly captured the imagination of a whole generation of young Palestinians and brought a new level of commitment to the struggle to liberate Palestine from Israeli occupation.

As though their repression had not been brutal enough during the first intifada, 9/11 gave Israeli forces a blank cheque to intensify their crackdown. It was an easy matter for Sharon to convince Bush and his neocon cabal that Islamic terrorism was the same whether it bore the Al Qaeda label, or called itself Hamas.

In this simplistic worldview, the good guys were the democratic, western nations heir to the Judeo-Greco civilization, while the bad guys were the violence-prone, backward Muslims.

Like the US cavalry charging the primitive Red Indians in the 19th century, the Americans and their sycophantic British allies went into Afghanistan and Iraq, guns blazing. But just a few days before the invasion of Iraq, Bush and Blair tried to mollify opponents of the war by launching a so-called 'roadmap to peace'. Less than a week before Baghdad was set ablaze, Bush said with a straight face: "America is committed, and I am personally committed, to implementing our roadmap toward peace."

With the attention of the world focused on Iraq, Sharon felt free to unleash the full force of his military against the Palestine resistance. Arafat was surrounded and isolated in his office and humiliated for weeks.

Houses were destroyed, olive groves that had stood for centuries were chopped down, and bulldozers driven across farms. Above all, a monstrous wall is rapidly separating the West Bank from Israel and expropriating hundreds of square miles of Palestinian land, all in the name of security.

At each escalation, there have been mild sounds of disapproval from European leaders who have diplomatically tempered their criticism by making mealy-mouthed references to 'Israeli victims of terrorism'. But few such expressions of sympathy have been offered to those hundreds of innocent Palestinians killed and maimed by the Israeli state.

While ordering the murder of Sheikh Yassin, Sharon must have calculated that his death would spell the end of a powerful symbol of resistance. In this calculus, Israeli planners probably felt Hamas did not have much to offer by way of retaliation except for suicide bombers, and since this weapon causes abhorrence in the West, its use would lose the Palestinians whatever sympathy they would garner over Sheikh Yassin's assassination.

The problem with these narrow tactics is that they do not take into account the stature of Sheikh Yassin in the Islamic world. Over the years, he became an icon of resistance. Paralysed, hardly able to hear or speak, he led a heroic struggle against vastly superior forces.

When British troops were attacked in Basra by unemployed Iraqis recently, the Sheikh's name was invoked by several attackers. This could be a foretaste of things to come in other Muslim countries.

Indeed, by these crude attempts to decapitate the resistance, Sharon is giving more ammunition to the very forces of extremism the Americans are now trying to crush. Moderate leaders like President Musharraf are thrown on the defensive each time the Americans or the Israelis are viewed as stepping up their anti-Islam campaign.

As it is, the current tide of Islamic extremism is threatening to sweep away those modernizing leaders who reject the siren call of jihad. Provocations like the murder of Sheikh Yassin make it that much harder to maintain their balancing act.

Indeed, images of the frail, paralysed Sheikh in his wheelchair being targeted by American-supplied Israeli helicopter gunships are the best recruitment material al-Qaeda could hope for.

But as far as Sharon and the Israeli right is concerned, the bigger the backlash from Islamic fundamentalists against western targets, the better it is for Israel. This will further reinforce their ties with America which will view its ally as the only island of sanity in a sea of extremist violence.

This is clearly a win-win situation for Sharon who is now under no pressure at all to make any concessions to the Palestinians. To all intents and purposes, there is now no peace process, no roadmap to give the Palestinians even a glimmer of hope of reclaiming the West Bank.

So where do they go from here? Even pro-Palestinian western liberals recoil from their tactics of suicide bombing. But what options do they have? They have no weapons to confront the mighty Israeli war machine.

For years they tried to negotiate, but to no avail in the face of Israeli intransigence. The charge that Arafat refused the best chance he had at Camp David where the Israelis offered to return 98 per cent of the occupied territory is absolutely false.

Edward Said, among others, pointed out that this offer did not include the land expropriated earlier and attached to Greater Jerusalem, or the roads connecting West Bank settlements to each other and to Israel, or the 'security zone' that would stay under Israeli control for the foreseeable future. In fact, the Palestinians were being offered around 82 per cent of the occupied territories.

The sad truth is that the Palestinians are totally isolated in the Muslim world where unelected leaders pay lip service to their cause to keep their own streets quiet. These generals and kings are too busy sucking up to Washington for support to dare annoy the current occupant of the White House.

But it is also true that the Palestinians cannot hope to win back their land and their freedom by force of arms. Their best chance is to resort to passive resistance, and this means no rocks, no guns, and above all, no suicide bombers.

By filling Israeli jails, and if necessary, Palestinian hospitals, without resorting to violence themselves, they might arouse the conscience of the world, including the Americans.

This is a difficult advice for an oppressed people to act on, but by seizing the high moral ground, they might succeed where violence has only given Israel an excuse to escalate the conflict.