January 10, 2002	Thursday	Shawwal 25, 1422

AL QUDS: A deadly Palestinian border raid combined with Israel’s seizure of a weapons ship could spell doom for a renewed US peace mission meant to capitalise on a lull in more than 15 months of violence, analysts said. The attack in southern Israel on Wednesday, which killed four Israeli soldiers and also cost two Hamas gunmen their lives, seemed all but certain to provoke a fresh cycle of reprisal and revenge.

Political analysts say Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat will face stepped-up international pressure to crack down on groups behind recent attacks even as Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is given a freer hand to retaliate against him.

Arafat, the longtime embodiment of Palestinian aspirations to statehood, again finds himself walking a political tightrope. If he takes tougher action against fighters who are defying his ceasefire orders, he risks a Palestinian civil war.

But if he fails to act decisively, he could see erosion of international backing for the Palestinian cause and invite further Israeli strikes against symbols of his power. “This puts more pressure on Arafat,” said Palestinian political analyst Ali Jarbawi. “He has to perform a very difficult balancing act.”

The latest violence shattered three weeks of relative calm after Arafat called on December 16 for an end to all attacks on Israel and stepped up his arrests of Palestinian fighters. Hamas responded with a pledge to halt its assaults inside Israel.

Heartened by those developments, US envoy Anthony Zinni — whose first visit was aborted in mid-December during a spasm of bloodletting — returned last week in an effort to nudge the two sides towards a lasting truce.

His four-day mission ended last weekend amid Israeli-Palestinian recriminations over Israel’s seizure of a ship in the Red Sea that it said was smuggling 50 tonnes of weapons to Palestinian-ruled areas on Arafat’s orders.

Arafat’s aides have denied he or his Palestinian Authority were involved and have accused Israel of contriving the incident to undermine Zinni’s mission.

Though Israeli critics said Sharon botched the publicity campaign and the United States said it would not be rushed to judgment, Western diplomats agreed the seizure cast doubt on the Palestinian commitment to end violence. Analysts are now sceptical of whether Zinni, due to return later this month, has any chance of achieving even the seemingly modest goal of bringing the two sides together for truce talks.

Several previous US-brokered truce deals have failed to take root since the outbreak of the Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. “Given that neither side is truly committed to peace, there is no real hope for success (from Zinni’s effort),” said Israeli analyst Joseph Alpher.

He said US commitment to Middle East peacemaking may also have weakened now that Arab support no longer seems vital to the US-led military campaign in Afghanistan following the Sept 11 attacks on the USs.

But he said that could change if the USs made Iraq its next target in its declared “war on terror”. Wednesday’s attack may give Sharon a chance to seize the moral high ground.

As the initial shock of last month’s Palestinian suicide attacks faded, the patience of US and European leaders seemed to be wearing thin over Sharon’s bid to declare Arafat “irrelevant” and unworthy of sharing a place at the peace table. Sharon, who faced little international outcry against Israel’s harsh retaliation for those attacks, was showered with criticism at home and abroad when he barred Arafat from making his annual Christmas pilgrimage to Bethlehem.

Despite the sharp reduction in violence in recent weeks, Israeli analysts largely back their government’s view that Arafat has not done enough to rein in fighters. “All Arafat did was reach a temporary accommodation with Hamas,” Alpher said. “That’s not the same as dismantling the organizations that create terror.”

But Palestinian analysts are just as adamant in casting blame on Sharon, whom they consider unreasonable for insisting on seven days of total calm as a condition for putting in motion a US-brokered truce-to-talks plan.

“That means a single bullet, a single stone, sets the clock right back to the beginning in Sharon’s view,” Jarbawi said.

There was little disagreement, however, on what will come next. Sharon, who took office last year promising to restore security, is expected to unleash retaliatory strikes as he did in early December after a spate of attacks, analysts said.

They predicted he would tighten the blockade on Palestinian areas after easing restrictions last week ahead of Zinni’s visit, and said he may also step up Israel’s internationally-condemned practice of hunting and killing fighters.—Reuters