Accounting for the Motives of Bombers : Terrorism: The IRA aimed at restarting a peace process; Hamas probably wants to stop one dead.

What, if anything, separated the IRA lad who blew himself up on a bus in London from the Palestinians assigned by Hamas to blow themselves up with their victims in Ashkelon, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv?

Ed O’Brien, a 21-year-old Irishman, most surely wasn’t aiming to die or to kill anyone on the bus where his bomb accidentally detonated. If recent IRA tactics are anything to go by, he was planning to leave the bomb somewhere in central London, with the objective of destroying as much real estate as possible. O’Brien and those assigning him his mission no doubt entertained the possibility that people would die, but it’s unlikely that was the intention.

The purpose, as with the Canary Wharf bomb last month that destroyed much property but also killed two, was to alert the British government to the fact that the IRA had lost patience with Prime Minister John Major’s foot-dragging on all-party talks about Northern Ireland’s future.

Violence worked, as the British government immediately conceded. There was little of the usual bluster about “not giving in to the men of terror.” Major agreed to talks at the start of June.

The mystery is why it took two bombs and three lives to budge him. It wasn’t as though the IRA was demanding a united Ireland or a full and immediate British withdrawal. All that was required was a pledge for the all-party talks and Major could have given it months ago.

The British probably thought that foot-dragging would sideline the IRA as the months passed. The IRA then forcibly reminded them in the Canary Wharf bombing that it is still in business. The two bombs were deployed according to a specific, limited objective.

What has been the aim of Hamas in sending the Palestinians on their suicide missions? In the wake of the terrible explosions, faxes have come from Hamas announcing specific objectives: release of Hamas prisoners, an end to “hot pursuit” of Hamas personnel in Gaza and the avenging of Yehiya Ayash, the Hamas bomb maker killed by the Israelis.

But it is impossible to take these “demands” at face value, any more than one could seriously take an IRA demand to hasten the “peace process” if it came after the planting of a bomb in a Protestant pub in Belfast or--without warning--in a crowded shopping mall in London.

There is much speculation about splits within Hamas, and “rogue units” mutinying against central command. It is just as logical to propose, as some in the Middle East are doing, that the sponsors of these bombings in Israel are powers that have no desire to see the emergence of anything resembling an independent Palestinian state or a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Prime candidates here would be Iran or Jordan or even Syria.

The bombings are a disaster not just for Shimon Peres and Yasser Arafat, but for those who have argued that, whatever their defects, the Oslo accords were engendering a Palestinian state on the West Bank. If Hamas has simply decided to destroy what it derided as the fraud of the “peace process,” it has succeeded.

Probably something like the hated West Bank “cantonization” will now come into being, with Israeli search-and-destroy missions and the renewal of a major Israeli security presence, isolating Palestinian communities from one another. This is what, without total justice, foes accused the Oslo accords of producing. Now it will truly happen, with a vengeance.

One final analogy for Arafat. In 1922, in the wake of the 1921 treaty by which the British ceded the bulk of Ireland, assassins killed Sir Henry Wilson, one of Britain’s top military commanders, as he was entering his house in London (my mother, then 8, was a witness). The British took this as a Hamas-type attempt by Irish Republicans to undermine the treaty. They conveyed their view to the infant Irish Free State government, which then unleashed an artillery barrage upon Republicans holed up in Dublin’s Four Courts, destroying the building which housed the national archive, including every Irish birth certificate.

This is what the Israelis have been urging Arafat to do to his opponents in Hamas. But the Irish Free Staters were at least able to point to the three-quarters of Ireland under their control. Arafat could probably have moved more ruthlessly against Hamas last year, just as the Free Staters did against the Republicans. But he hasn’t much to boast of, certainly not enough to persuade those Palestinian bombers that there is more to their political future than blowing themselves up, along with whole busloads of ordinary people on their way to work.