Al QUDS: Israel Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, back at work after recovering from a weeklong flu, faced a barrage of criticism Sunday for failing to find a military or diplomatic solution to 17 months of fighting with the Palestinians.
As Israelis buried three soldiers and two teen-agers killed since Friday and Palestinians attempted to carry out a second suicide bombing in less than 24 hours, pundits, politicians and folks on the street angrily demanded a new policy from Sharon.
“Where is Sharon?” asked Tommy Lapid, leader of the opposition Shinui Party in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament. “I demand that Sharon speak to us. Mr Sharon, I know that you won’t come up with a solution, so admit that you don’t have a solution but speak to the Israeli public.”
Instead, Sharon held a lengthy discussion with his security Cabinet, offering no comment when he emerged. Shortly after the meeting broke up, police killed two Palestinians who they said were en route to carrying out a suicide attack on the coastal town of Hadera.
The shootout unfolded on a highway crowded with evening rush hour commuters, after police pulled over a white sedan near a northern Israeli army base because the numbers on its front and back license plates did not match.
One of the two men inside threw a pipe bomb at the officers and opened fire on them, a police spokesman said. He was shot dead, but his companion sped away with officers in hot pursuit. The chase lasted for several minutes, with officers shooting at the fleeing gunman until his car burst into flames on the highway, killing him, the spokesman said. Three officers were injured. Both Palestinians reportedly were strapped with explosive belts, and their car carried pipe bombs and guns.
Commentators praised the police for averting a disaster and lifting morale, which had been seriously battered by three days of emmbarrassing security failures. On Thursday, Palestinian fighters destroyed an Israeli tank and killed three of its crewmembers. On Friday, they killed a soldier at a West Bank roadblock. And on Saturday, a 20-year-old from Kalkilya, in the West Bank, blew himself up in a crowd of Jewish teen-agers in the nearby settlement of Karnei Shomron, killing two 15-year-olds.
In another incident, the commanding officer of an elite undercover army unit died when a wall fell on him during an operation in a West Bank village on Friday. “The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is nearing a situation of a complete loss of control,” wrote analyst Rubik Rosenthal in the daily newspaper Maariv. “Ariel Sharon’s strategy is collapsing. Never in Israel’s history have so many civilians been killed in terror attacks as in the past year. The (Israeli Defence Forces) is protecting itself, and that too is with limitations, but is incapable of protecting the civilians.”
Cracks have begun to appear in Israaeli national unity, which for months appeared nearly monolithic in its response to a perceived existential threat from the Palestinians. A protest movement launched last month by reserve combat soldiers and officers refusing service in the West Bank and Gaza Strip drew the Cabinet’s attention on Sunday, with Defence Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer suggesting that the army should give the dissenters a platform from which to voice their criticisms of its conduct.
Ben-Eliezer suggested opening a dialogue with the men - more than 200 of whom have signed a published letter saying they won’t defend Jewish settlements or carry out orders they consider immoral against Palestinian civilians. Sharon rejected the idea.
The reservists’ public protest continues to stir debate here as no other criticism of the army’s conduct in the conflict has, and it seems to have spurred the dispirited left into action. A coalition of peace groups that has been unable to attract a crowd since peace talks collapsed and violence erupted in September 2000 drew several thousand people to a Tel Aviv square for a rally on Saturday night.
The grass roots protest movement Peace Now launched its new campaign at the rally to “withdraw from the territories and return to ourselves.” What remains unclear is whether the public’s increasing desperation for a solution will lead back to negotiations or to an escalation of attacks on the Palestinian Authority and its leader, Yasser Arafat.
Uzi Landau, the hard-line minister of internal security, urged Cabinet ministers on Sunday to take an uncompromising approach to the ongoing violence. “You have to fight the terror and, like AIDS, you don’t negotiate with it, you win it,” Landau said.
Infrastructure Minister Avigdor Lieberman, leader of the far-right National Union, directed his criticism at Sharon, saying the government’s policy drift is what happens when “you don’t have a clear political destination and your security reactions are confused.” The Palestinians, Lieberman said, “have to pay the price for terror.”—Dawn/LAT-WP News Service (c) Los Angeles Times