April 2, 2002	Tuesday	Muharram 18,1423

AL QUDS: Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s reputation as Israel’s Mr Security has gone up in the smoke of a Palestinian suicide bombing campaign.

Faced with one of the most devastating Palestinian suicide attacks in 18 months of violence at the start of the Jewish Passover holiday last week, Sharon has set out to provide outraged Israelis with an answer to the bombings.

But as Israeli troops besiege Palestinian President Yasser Arafat’s headquarters in Ramallah, Sharon must at the same time heed international demands not to provoke a war with ever-expanding military operations.

The start of widespread action to isolate the Palestinian Authority is the latest step in a precarious balancing act which also includes appeasing right-wing calls to exile Arafat and left-wing demands to keep a door open for resuming peace talks.

The offensive has drawn a tide of foreign criticism, including a UN Security Council Resolution unusually supported by the US, Israel’s strongest ally, calling for an Israeli withdrawal from Palestinian cities along with a truce. But Sharon’s action has failed to halt the suicide bombings, the latest of which killed at least 12 people in a busy restaurant in Haifa on Sunday.

Israel and the Palestinians are now closer than ever to all-out war since an uprising against Israeli occupation flared in September 2000 after peace talks broke down.

The call up of some 20,000 Israeli reservists to take part in the latest campaign, the largest mobilisation since the 1991 Gulf War, was a painful reminder of past Arab-Israeli wars — all of which Sharon fought in.

Sharon’s foreign minister, peace architect Shimon Peres, expressed reservations about the government decision on the raids which Israeli media said was a compromise over right-wing calls to expel Arafat.

“The presentation (of the raid plan) was too general. I remember Lebanon when I spoke to (former Prime Minister) Menachem Begin and he said it would last four days and it turned into something else,” Peres told Army Radio. He was referring to the army operation which turned into Israel’s 1982 invasion into Lebanon led by Sharon, who was defence minister at the time.

Opinion polls show Israelis are losing confidence in the 74-year-old leader, whose failure to deliver on an election pledge to bring security to his people was made clear by last Wednesday’s suicide bombing which killed 22 people as they sat down to begin their Passover meal.

“The attack caused great pain in the hearts of many people, maybe because it had the character of a pogrom with more signs of hatred for Jews than of a struggle for independence,” said veteran Israeli commentator Yoel Marcus.

In a column in the Ha’aretz newspaper, Marcus warned Sharon against heading to war without a political horizon for future negotiations. “What has characterized Sharon’s actions more than once is that he always knew how to get things started, but did not know how to conclude them,” he said.

Once his natural ally, rightists are frustrated with what they consider Sharon’s soft policy towards Arafat, who they accuse of making hollow truce promises and vows to arrest Palestinian fighters.

Earlier this month, two ultra-nationalist cabinet ministers resigned after accusing Sharon of not taking tough enough action. The move left him with a pared-down majority in parliament and dependent on support of Peres’s Labour party and Shas to stay in power to the next round of elections in 2003.

Sharon is a veteran of Israeli politics and an Israeli war hero, but is regarded across the Arab world as a warmonger for leading the Lebanon invasion, during which Israel’s Lebanese Christian allies killed hundreds of Palestinians in two refugee camps near Beirut.—Reuters