TEL AVIV: Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has led Israel into a long war of attrition with the Palestinians in a battle of wills that is likely to be resolved only when one side breaks.
Israeli military and political analysts are divided over the effectiveness of Sharon’s strategy, enunciated this week in tough comments promising to inflict so much pain on the Palestinians that they stop fighting and sue for peace.
But short of heavy American pressure or a collapse of Israel’s national unity government, they see little prospect of anything other than a continued, gradual escalation of Israeli military land, air and sea assaults on Palestinian targets.
“I don’t know if anyone thinks beyond tomorrow and I don’t know if those that do know the answer,” said Mark Heller, a political analyst with the Jaffee Centre for Strategic Studies in Tel Aviv.
“There is no ‘next’,” Heller said. “If it doesn’t produce the desired result today, then you just keep on doing it tomorrow and the next day and the next day.”
US Secretary of State Colin Powell weighed in on Wednesday with unusually tough American criticism of Sharon’s approach, questioning the sense of trying to resolve the conflict by “seeing how many Palestinians can be killed”.
However, such remarks were unlikely to have any real impact unless similar criticism of Israel, Washington’s chief ally in the Middle East, began to come from both the White House and Congress, Heller and others said.
“Sharon can maybe say ‘Well, I’m sorry, I’ve been misunderstood’ but it’s not going to affect his military actions,” military analyst Shlomo Gazit said.
Even a Saudi land-for-peace initiative that has won growing international support was unlikely to brake Sharon’s assault, given his insistence that an end to Palestinian violence must precede any negotiations, analysts said.
OFF THE FENCE: Sharon, elected a year ago on a promise to make Israel a safe place to live, has seen his popularity plummet amid dwindling faith in his ability to prevent Palestinian militant attacks that have grown deadlier and more daring by the day.
Torn for weeks between conflicting pressures from the right for a military “killer blow” and from the left for a political settlement, the former general, a veteran of every war Israel has ever fought, came off the fence this week.
Uri Dan, a right-wing commentator and confidant of Sharon, summed up the prime minister’s “shoot first, talk later” thinking this way in a column in the Jerusalem Post:
“Sharon knows that the war has reached the stage in which the issue is ‘us or them’, and he is convinced, of course, that the result will be us.”
This week’s Israeli military escalation has brought virtual round-the-clock strikes on Palestinian security targets in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and an accelerating pattern of raids into refugee camps that Sharon brands “bases of terror”.
Those strikes and Palestinian suicide bombings and shootings have moulded the spiral of reprisal and revenge into an indistinguishable blur of continuous conflict that has pushed international peace efforts to the sidelines.
It has hiked the death toll in more than 17 months to almost 1,300 people, many of them civilians on both sides.
Three-quarters of the casualties have been Palestinians. But Sharon’s nemesis has shown no sign of buckling under the growing military pressure to put the brakes on an uprising against Israeli occupation of the territory his people want for a state.
“If they believe that there is someone in this land who fears their tanks or planes...they are wrong,” Palestinian President Yasser Arafat said in Ramallah, the West Bank city where he has been blockaded by Israeli forces since December.
Marwan al-Barghouthi, a leader of Arafat’s Fatah movement in the West Bank and a driving force in the uprising, put the issue even more bluntly in an interview in which he vowed no let-up in militant attacks on Israeli soldiers and Jewish settlers.
“We have reached the point of no return,” he said.
CONSTRAINTS: Gazit, a former head of Israeli military intelligence, said Israel’s superior might meant there was clearly a point when the Palestinians could take no more.
“There is no doubt that we could bring the Palestinians to, quote unquote, unconditional surrender,” Gazit said.
But he and others said various constraints meant Sharon would favour a gradual intensification of the sort of operations the army is conducting now over more drastic action, such as the re-occupation of land ceded to the Palestinians in the past or the overthrow of Arafat and his Palestinian Authority.—Reuters