A fair assessment
Plenty of armies have gone into battle in the past not expecting to survive. The idea that nothing is worse than death is a modern secular view, alien to most of mankind for most of history, and certainly not the ethos of most soldiers.
Entirely rational men understand that all men are mortal, that death may be an evil but is not an avoidable one, while other evils are avoidable. Including dishonor. The article treats ordinary courage as though it is an unprecedented mental illness. It is not. Courage isn't even scarce. Justice is much, much scarcer. Any kind of real insight or wisdom is scarcer still.
What is bad about the terrorists is not their willingness to die, but their willingness to kill innocents, deliberately. Their systematic avoidance of targets of real military utility. Everyone notices the way this spreads a sense of danger beyond the confines modern western ways of war tried to keep it within.
But this is not new in history either. Nor unknown in modern times. Russians and Poles were not exactly treated well by occupying Nazis, who in the long run planned their systematic extermination. In pre-modern eras, violence was routinely directed at civilian populations by armies.
Slavery was normal in most of the world for most of history. The civilian population was treated as loot - men killed, women raped, children sold into slavery. Only the prospect of oppression to the point of outright ownership of other human beings interested conquerors in the conquered. Where the political traditions of the conquered made it unlikely they would prove willing subjects, they were often exterminated.
The mores of chivalry that changed that in the west have been imperfectly observed for only a few centuries, and only over a small portion of the world. And not by all parties even there. They have almost never been observed on some entire continents.
Then there is his justification of assassinations. I think they are justified as military operations against an enemy one can rarely get to, only reachable for fleeting moments. But this must be seen as a fall back position justified only by a hard necessity and by a practical difficulty.
The best thing is simply to sweep the whole opposed populace and capture those one would otherwise target. If they resist of course they can be fought. If they submit to arrest, if they are guilty of war crimes or attacks on civilians, of course they can be tried and punished, capitally. Otherwise they can be held indefinitely, as long as conflict continues.
Sometimes this may not be practical. It is acknowledged. But the justification of such tactics is that this standard way is not practical, not that the enemies are somehow so awful they deserve it. Desert has nothing to do with it. And it is not at all obvious the alternative is actually impractical in some contemporary cases. When we could not easily grab him, we tried to bomb Saddam. When we could, we grabbed him instead.
Then there is the lament that the EU and west continue to support the PA. I sympathesize, it is ridiculous. The deference still shown by Israel is no less so. Perhaps it is partially excused by external pressure, but plenty of it seems to have the same muddle headed internal left wing pressure causes as we have here.
Why, for example, are any of the borders to the territories still open? Why isn't the entire west bank under curfew until all attacks cease? Why does Israel continue to collect taxes for the PA and give it access to bank accounts? They come and blow up buses. So, don't let any of them come. Duh.
Being willing to blow up oneself and others did not make the suicide belt a wonder weapon in the western front in WW I. The only reason it isn't just as impotent in Israel is Israeli reluctance to do the obvious, practical, un PC thing, and simply cease all contact between the populations, if necessary with barbed wire, land mines, machineguns, and on call artillery.
Or, if you also want the ground, you can send soldiers into the west bank and put all the young men behind barbed wire indefinitely, shooting those who resist. "But everyone would howl". So what? Do they not howl at targeted assassinations? - to say nothing of the writer's comments about atom bombs. It is crazy to be talking about slaughtering people you aren't even willing to arrest, as though the latter were somehow worse.
You can defend or you can attack, as seems to you best, with conventional military means. The writer's statement that terrorism "has disarmed armies" is just horsefeathers. It has done nothing of the kind. Your unwillingness to use your army is not anything terrorists have done to you, or any magical power in the tactic.
None of these things requires "negotiating" with enemies willing to die. Those willing to die you accomodate, those prefering to live you give a much more structured life behind barbed wire until they think better of their present course. They aren't going to get semtex into a camp.
But if you don't want to do this, you just put the wire between the populations instead. What you don't do, is let Palestinians freely enter and leave Israel in the middle of a terror war. That is PC madness. And entirely self inflicted.