By Richard Cohen

Ariel Sharon has been so busy as of late it's understandable if he missed an anniversary last month -- the end of the Franco-Algerian war. Before that war was over in 1962, at least 250,000 Algerians and 25,000 French soldiers had been killed. Add to that total about 4,500 European settlers, the pieds noirs, and maybe as many as 150,000 Harkis, Algerians who worked, and sometimes fought, for the French. They were slaughtered at the war's end.

I summon up the Algerian war because I have long thoughtit was the direction the Palestinian insurrection would inevitably take. It's not just that both societies are overwhelmingly Muslim but that they both consider themselves occupied by colonizers who, in turn, consider themselves to be virtually indigenous. Remember that Algeria was not a French colony; it was part of France itself.

And remember, too, that the French did not fight half-heartedly. From the very beginning of the war, the French responded to guerrilla and terrorist tactics with extreme repression. Assassinations were commonplace, torture routine -- human rights abuses, such as gang rapes, hardly uncommon. The French considered their enemy barbaric. They descended to that level themselves.

The Battle of Algiers is now being fought in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, in Haifa and Netanya -- anywhere a Palestinian suicide bomber can infiltrate. It is being fought, too, with increasingly desperate Israeli tactics -- first pre-emptive assassination, now the virtual reoccupation of the West Bank.

The turn that the war -- the Palestinian struggle -- has taken may be lost on Sharon and, it seems, President Bush, but not on some of those involved. "If they kill us, we kill them," said Muhammad Odeh. "It will never stop." Odeh knows whereof he speaks. His son, Abdel Basset, blew himself up in Netanya last week, killing 22 others at a Passover seder.

Another observer, the astute Israeli columnist Nahum Barnea, said something similar. He noted that terrorism had become like "a popular sport" for young Palestinian men and women. "You can kill, deport and deter professionals," he wrote. "There is no military way to fight suicide bombers."

I understand Sharon's rage and why he lashes out at Yasser Arafat, who is, for sure, complicitous in the suicide bombings. It is how I felt on Sept. 11, down by the World Trade Center. First came a sense of utter impotence -- all those deaths and nothing anyone could do about it. But then, instantly, came a wave of anger -- a desire for revenge that has never left me. I burnish my anger and treasure it. It is my own memorial to the thousands murdered.

This is how George Bush feels, too. But this altogether understandable and even laudatory desire for revenge-cum-justice has led him to essentially endorse Sharon's actions. Bush does not seem to appreciate that even when it comes to terrorism, distinctions have to be made. Downtown Manhattan or the Pentagon is not Israel or the West Bank.

The deeper Sharon plunges the Israeli military into the West Bank, the greater its peril. He and the military must then swim in a sea of sharks, in a culture where suicide bombers are valued, praised -- where they bring distinction and some money on a family that has little of either. He can, if he so chooses, get rid of Arafat. But even that, in the long run, will not change matters. A new leader will arise. The struggle will continue.

The Palestinians are practicing terrorism. No doubt about it. It is inexcusable but not inexplicable. It is their chief weapon and, moreover, it works. Terrorism will persist until Palestinians feel that their political concerns are being addressed. It is folly to keep yelping "Tenet and then Mitchell" as if it is some sort of magical incantation that will make terrorism go away.

The tragedy here -- the tragedy to be added to all the others -- is that the major parties ostensibly agree: There should be a Palestinian state and Israel should be entitled to live in peace. For that to happen, though, first Israel must get out of the West Bank and abandon most (not all) of the settlements. A withdrawal, a disengagement, a retreat to the '67 borders might well be a capitulation to terrorism, but they are also in Israel's best interest.

The French, who now lecture the United States on human rights, proved in Algeria that nothing -- not repression, not warfare, not torture, not assassinations -- could prevail over an enemy who fought dirtier, meaner and with more determination than they could. There is a lesson there for Ariel Sharon and George Bush. Take it -- or repeat it.