[1426] in peace2
Sharon's Year in Power Has Been Israel's Bloodiest in a Generatio
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Felix AuYeung)
Thu Feb 7 09:42:26 2002
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From: Felix AuYeung <FAuYeung@pittsburghfoodbank.org>
To: "'peace-list@mit.edu'" <peace-list@mit.edu>
Date: Thu, 7 Feb 2002 09:44:44 -0500
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NEWS ANALYSIS
Sharon's Year in Power Has Been Israel's Bloodiest in a Generation
Lee Hockstader
Washington Post Service
Thursday, February 7, 2002
http://www.iht.com/articles/47226.html
JERUSALEM Just before he won a landslide victory in Israel's election for
prime minister one year ago Wednesday, Ariel Sharon mused on the future he
imagined for his newborn twin grandsons.
"What kind of life will they have?" he said in a campaign appearance. "If
I'm elected, I will do everything-and a little more-to bring about quiet,
security and peace."
Today, Mr. Sharon has failed to achieve any of those goals. The 73-year-old
former general, who was scheduled to arrive in Washington Thursday for his
fourth meeting with President George W. Bush in a year, has played a key
role in the bloodiest 365 days that Israel has undergone in a generation.
He has forged a close and valuable alliance with the Bush administration,
which has helped him to isolate and delegitimize his nemesis, Yasser Arafat,
the Palestinian leader. He has sealed off Palestinian towns, razed and
rocketed Palestinian buildings and crushed the Palestinian economy. But if
Mr. Sharon has any strategy to achieve peace - and most Israelis say they
doubt that he does - it is clearly not working.
For his domestic audience, he remains nonetheless that rarest of Israeli
figures: a relatively popular premier standing astride a reasonably stable
government.
"I don't believe there is a rational plan here that leads anywhere," said
Avishai Margalit, an Israeli scholar and commentator. But "for most people
there is no alternative. I don't remember ever, including me as a kid during
the independence war during the worst days in Jerusalem, when the future
hung in the air and people were as depressed and dejected as they are now."
Since Mr. Sharon's election, at least 200 Israelis and 515 Palestinians have
died in the violence. He has escalated Israel's campaign of assassinating
Palestinian militants, authorized dozens of army incursions into territory
ceded to the Palestinians in the 1990s and ordered the first Israeli bombing
raids on the West Bank and Gaza Strip since 1967. He has waged his
tit-for-tat military campaign in the name of punishing Palestinian terrorism
and forcing Mr. Arafat and his eight-year-old administration to quell the
16-month-old Palestinian armed uprising.
Eventually, Mr. Sharon's aides say, he hopes to forge a long-term armistice
agreement that would skirt irreconcilable disputes over refugees and
Jerusalem and, perhaps, establish a Palestinian state - albeit one lacking
in contiguous territory, a capital of its own choosing, control of its
borders and other basic facets of modern statehood. They say that by
besieging Mr. Arafat in his West Bank compound and marginalizing him
internationally, Mr. Sharon hopes to encourage a shift in Palestinian
leadership.
Yet there is no sign of movement in that direction. To the contrary, there
is evidence that Mr. Sharon's tactics have further embittered a new
generation of Palestinians.
Security officials on both sides of the conflict warn of a growing and
inexhaustible supply of Palestinians willing to die, including as suicide
bombers, for the cause of evicting Israel from Palestinian territories.
"He feels that if you put enough pressure and weaken" the Palestinians,
"then eventually they will simply bow to the pressure," said Sari Nusseibeh,
a prominent Palestinian scholar and Mr. Arafat's top representative in
Jerusalem. "But my sense is that he will finally come up against a political
mirage.
"He'll find that he has in fact weakened his interlocutor but he won't find
that he's lowered his position."
In a poll published last week in the daily newspaper Ma'ariv, Israelis by a
margin of 2 to 1 said that they thought Mr. Sharon had no plan to end the
violence.
The survey buttressed a long-standing view of Mr. Sharon, who bitterly
opposed the 1993 Oslo peace accords and refused to shake Mr. Arafat's hand
on an occasion in which they met. In this view, Mr. Sharon dismisses any
sweeping resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. He is determined
that Jews must retain as much land in the West Bank and Gaza Strip as
possible, even if it means fighting for it.
"It's a blood feud and it's not future-oriented but always
backward-oriented," said Mr. Margalit. To Mr. Sharon, "you always settle
scores from what happened yesterday, so it's mostly tactics - whom to hit
and when and how."
Still, Mr. Sharon arrives in Washington in some ways as a strong leader. His
support has slipped in the polls recently but still stands at around half
the Israeli public.
The Israeli leader has won unalloyed support from Mr. Bush himself for
freezing out Mr. Arafat. Mr. Bush was angered by an apparent Palestinian
attempt to smuggle a freighter filled with Iranian-supplied weapons into the
Gaza Strip last month.
As he presses his diplomatic advantage against Mr. Arafat, Mr. Sharon
appears to be planning to increase his military edge, as well.
Senior Israeli Army officials speak openly of conducting longer and deeper
incursions into the largest Palestinian cities in response to continuing
Palestinian ambushes, sniper attacks and bombings.
This week, Israeli Army officials said that they were planning to build a
mock Palestinian city, for training purposes, in the southern Israeli
desert. The $8 million facility would be much larger and more realistic than
an existing training "village."
It would allow Israeli troops to simulate raids, roadblocks and other
operations in a variety of "neighborhoods" - the twisting alleyways of an
Arab market, modern apartments in a city center, scattered houses and
orchards at the edge of town.
"The military is prepared to go in with massive forces to Jenin and Nablus"
- major Palestinian cities in the West Bank - "and find, identify and
destroy as much as possible the military infrastructre," said Gerald
Steinberg, an Israeli professor who specializes in security issues.
It is a far cry from the expectations that attended Mr. Sharon's electoral
victory last year.
A pariah following Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon, which he led as
defense minister, Mr. Sharon was widely viewed as too militaristic to be
elected prime minister. Over time, he regained stature and respectability,
and last year engineered one of the more remarkable political comebacks in
Israeli history.
Israeli voters, disgusted with Mr. Arafat and disenchanted with peace
overtures by the former prime minister, Ehud Barak, turned to Mr. Sharon in
droves. Many were convinced by the avuncular image he presented in
television advertising that he would be tough, but also responsible.
Many Israelis regard Sharon as stuck in his present course, incapable of
altering his policy even if he wished. If he launches an all-out war,
reoccupies the Palestinian territories or eliminates Mr. Arafat, the Labor
party would bolt his coalition government. If he opts for negotiations over
the future of Jewish settlements, the hard-liners would quit. Either way his
government would be likely to fall, so all Mr. can do is forge ahead,
analysts say.
