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COMMENTARY
October 6, 2001
Israel's peril
Ariel Sharon has now clinched his position as the biggest liability in the allied war effort against terrorism. But what is worse he is behaving in a way potentially inimical to Israel's own long-term interests. His incredible remarks Thursday comparing the Western search for Arab support while pressuring Israel to the allies' sacrifice of Czechoslovakia at Munich earned an unprecedented public rebuke yesterday from President Bush in Washington. That the rebuke was not first conveyed by telephone but simply released by the president's spokesman compounded rebuke with disdain. Mr. Sharon's astounding faux pas comes at a critical moment one in which Israel is in grave peril and cannot afford to make mistakes. And yet there was a seed not of truth but of plausibility in what Mr. Sharon said. In order to prosecute the vital American interest in Afghanistan and elsewhere the U.S. must pressure Israel -- just as it must try to pressure the Palestinian Authority and is pressuring every other government in the region. At all costs it is seeking an immediate end to the Intifada and whatever resolution of the Palestinian issue can be obtained. It should be obvious to anyone that the explosive force of that conflict on Muslim public opinion endangers every allied move. The U.S. is attempting something in Israel's own long-term interest by committing itself resolutely to the battle against Islamist terror. Nor is the U.S. alliance with Israel in any kind of doubt. But you can't fight a war without tactics -- including sometimes ghastly alliances of convenience -- and the argument for overlooking Israel's most immediate terrorist adversaries in the first campaign was unanswerable. It is worth remembering the central part of that argument. Israel is capable of taking care of itself. If worst comes to worst -- as I fear it will -- Israel has the equipment to defend itself against Hamas Hezbollah the Islamic Jihad the commandos of PLO Fatah and even a conventional foreign invasion. It does not need U.S. messages of approval to act in self-defence. It can endure messages of disapproval when it acts independently of American wishes. And at the point a threat becomes unmanageable the Americans will be there; for Israel itself is not expendable. To doubt this publicly as Mr. Sharon did in his remarks Thursday is to play politics in the midst of danger. That is what was unspeakable: for this is something a reliable ally doesn't do. (The suggestion from some of his supporters and in the U.S. media that he was trying to get a message to President Bush over the head of Colin Powell is ridiculous. He's had Mr. Bush's phone number all along.) Mr. Sharon would not be such a disappointment at least to the Americans had there not been some hope vested in him. It was assumed that he would join in the tradition -- Dayan Weizman Rabin Peres Barak -- of Israeli statesmen who advanced the peace process. Each was a military "hawk" who became convinced there could be no final military solution. Like the late Menachim Begin it was assumed he had the advantage of coming from the right of the Israeli political spectrum and the prestige to carry the right with him. Instead he shows no sign of strategic thinking; and has actually been adding to provocations at a time when quiet in Palestine is crucial to both Israel and the U.S. For instance he is allowing the establishment of three new settlements to go forward tomorrow -- two in the West Bank and one in the Katif Bloc of the Gaza Strip. These will bring to 13 the number under construction since the Israeli defence ministry announced (to American relief) that 15 would be evacuated earlier this year. That they are described not as new settlements but as extensions of old ones fools nobody -- they are located too far away. The pattern shows a long term policy of digging in to more defensible positions. The new settlements cannot be justified by demographic pressures for the number of Israeli settlers willing to brave the West Bank and Gaza is actually in decline. So incidentally is the Palestinian presence. It has become clear from applications to Western embassies that the present Intifada has triggered an unprecedented exodus of Palestinians especially those with marketable qualifications. (Almost all the visa requests referred to the Canadian embassy in Tel Aviv from our own mission in Ramallah are from engineers pharmacists and accountants.) It becomes clearer by the day that the prospects of building a "civil society" within an independent Palestinian state are collapsing; and that Palestinian despair must continue to mount as a threat to every exposed Israeli Jew. In some perfect world it would be possible for Jewish settlements to live at peace in Palestinian surroundings - just as so many Arab settlements live peacefully within Israel's pre-1967 borders. In this real one the settlements issue is the bullet that Israel will have to bite sooner or later for its own security. They are not defensible in the long run either politically or militarily -- as many possibly a majority of Israelis themselves have come to recognize. Those not immediately adjoining the Israeli state cost more to defend than they can possibly be worth. But could an abandonment of the settlements bring peace? Could a surrender of all the remaining lands conquered in 1967 including even eastern Jerusalem win Israel peace? For the foreseeable future we must accept the hard fact that the answer is no. The truth is that just as Mr. Sharon has said the Palestinian leadership has no interest in peace but rather a long-term commitment to a refugee-camp existence. Its power is founded in Palestinian rage. It continues to encourage and even organize the Intifada and to sabotage negotiations with Israel and the U.S. in ham-fisted attempts to enhance its negotiating position even while it is attending them. The Palestinian Authority has helped create and continues to assist in the creation of the conditions for perpetual conflict between Israeli and Arab neighbours. There is no organized "peace faction" within the Palestinian movement to correspond to the Israeli peace faction. There is no room for true moderation within the leaders' ranks. And by now the pressure from below for immoderation has become an irrestible force in its own right. In other words Yasser Arafat is the worst enemy the Palestinian people ever had -- and they are beginning to see it although from the wrong angle. He has established himself as one of history's more spectacular serial bunglers. Last year he passed on an unbelievably generous offer from President Clinton and the former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak that would have gained him a toehold even in Jerusalem. The offer went dangerously to the limit of what the Israeli public might be willing to accept even in exchange for peace. Now he has effectively rejected what was surely his very last chance -- a commitment from the Bush administration to support the establishment of a Palestinian state. In his behaviour since Sept. 11 he has shown no grasp whatever of the opportunities before him to advance legitimate Palestinian interests or even of the possibilities for exploiting the weakness in the relationship between Mr. Sharon and the Bush administration. He may have convinced his allies and adversaries alike that he is personally expendable. I think the last chance for even an effective ceasefire disappeared at Alei Sinai on Tuesday night. This was the terrorist raid on a small Israeli settlement in Gaza in which remarkably only two were killed. In the first instance both Mr. Arafat and Mr. Sharon instinctively called the U.S. state department rather than each other. Given the scale and nature of this suicide raid it was crucial that they immediately sort out what happened. That they could not speak even in an emergency showed the relation beyond any possible repair. But as we look more deeply into the raid itself we get a glimpse of something more ominous. The two raiders supposedly from a Hamas terrorist cell were armed with assault rifles and dozens of grenades. They used the methods of a conventional commando assault something neither Hamas nor Hezbollah are known to train their operatives for. It resembled recent Islamist terrorist hits in Chechnya and Kashmir. The hit was very professionally designed and co-ordinated right down to giving the false impression of a hostage-taking to throw off the Israeli response. Fortunately it was not as professionally executed. At the end the assailants attempted to hole up rather than fleeing; it was clearly their intention to kill as many as they could until they were killed themselves. When Israeli rescue helicopters arrived they were kept at bay by covering mortar fire -- another device for maximizing casualties. Israeli intelligence has recently been warning of prospective terrorist strikes against the Jewish settlements throughout West Bank and Gaza. The raid on Alei Sinai had the markings of a full-dress rehearsal. The idea would be to create the largest possible impact by conducting a number of these hits all at once possibly at a critical moment ideally (for them) before the visible beginning of American action in Afghanistan. The Israeli response likely to be proportional would be another part of the intended effect -- to maximize Palestinian civilian casualties in the provoked retaliation. By the speed with which they fingered Hamas after the Alei Sinai raid the Palestinian police may well have been revealing themselves as part of the game. The scale of training planning and support point instead to direct participation by the Palestinian Authority. In the words of one Israeli intelligence source Hamas does not set up a fire screen of mortar fire; ... neither does it produce crack commando units. That Mr. Arafat has been playing a double game supporting terrorism with the hand behind his back while diplomacy with the one in view has been long suspected and actually observed. That he would seem now to be playing it openly suggests his hands are tied: that he has no choice any longer but to front for combined terrorist operations. It further suggests that his hands may be tied by agents outside his own theatre of operation. That the counterstroke to the American intention of making Afghanistan the initial point of engagement is to make it Israel instead. Israel must clench for some terrible surprises. The worst of it is they are not even surprises. But it must respond within the larger order of battle rather than playing into the terrorists' hands. For the goal is not retribution against the terrorists but the complete destruction of their cause. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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