CLOCK TICKING FOR JEWISH STATE IN TERROR WAR

JERUSALEM.

In the 1967 war, it took six days for Israel to take over not only the West Bank but to liberate Jerusalem and defeat the Egyptian army in the Sinai desert and the Syrian military machine in the Golan Heights.

But now Israel needs at least six weeks to clean out the West Bank of its terrorist infrastructure.

The situation there has changed quite a lot in 35 years.

When Israel defeated the British-trained Jordanian army in 1967, the Palestinians of the West Bank were completely unarmed - because King Hussein wanted it that way.

But in the last seven years, the West Bank has been flooded with all sorts of automatic weapons and explosives.

What Israel is doing in the West Bank is what Yasser Arafat promised to do last June in the Tenet plan - collect illegal weapons and arrest terrorists.

And since Israel cannot use the maximum force it has - by massively bombing terror centers - because of possible risk to civilians, it needs a minimum of six weeks.

But the Israeli forces are working against a diplomatic clock, as the U.S. urges a speedy retreat.

A high-ranking Israeli officer told me, "There was no clock ticking when the U.S. chased al Qaeda out of Afghanistan."

The delicacy of the Israeli task is reflected in Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity, where for the first time in Israeli-Arab clashes, the Palestinians took control of a Christian holy place as a pawn.

Yitzhak Minervi, a brilliant Israeli diplomat and expert on relations with the Vatican, told The Post:

"The Palestinians in the church are keeping the [estimated] 60 priests there as a shield. They are de facto hostages."

Three of Arafat's top lieutenants for Bethlehem are with the 200 Palestinian gunmen inside the church.

The three - who include Arafat's governor for the region and Abu Jihad, his intelligence chief for the area - could have ordered the gunmen to put down their weapons.

"We learned through intelligence surveillance that Arafat's officials in Ramallah - and in one case Arafat himself - ordered them to remain and not give in," an Israeli official told me