This Week
'Z4741;i7. 44'
Israeli Prime
Minister Ariel
Sharon, center,
speaks to the press,
as Israeli Foreign
Minister Shimon
Peres, second left,
listens, during the
weekly cabinet
meeting Feb. 17.
Feeling Of Despair
Israelis ponder the future under an onslaught of terrorism.
DAVID LANDAU
Special to the Jewish News
T
Jerusalem
DE
2/22
2002
22
he new editor of Ma'ariv, Amnon
Dankner, best summed up the mood
of Israelis: "It can't carry on like this,"
was the headline of his front-page piece
on Sunday.
_
Dankner's article ran alongside a gallery of smiling
young faces — the weekend's Israeli death toll as the
Palestinians escalated their terror offensive.
Like the headline on Dankner's story, the paper's
main headline was a cry from the heart. "Israel: This
Is War," it proclaimed — as though anyone could
call it anything else.
As the week wore on, the frequency of attempted
and realized terror attacks intensified. The bomb-
ings, shootings and funerals seemed to blur in a con-
stant catalog of misery. City streets and shopping
malls looked bleak and desolate, despite the spring-
like weather.
Fear stalks the land. And not just fear — but a
growing sense, which pollsters can now quantify,
that the leadership has no solutions to offer.
According to polls published Feb. 15, barely half
of Israelis have a positive view of Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon's performance, a sharp decline from his
approval ratings as little as a month ago.
Yet Sharon, back at work Sunday after a 10-day
bout with the flu, is determined to fight the atmos-
phere of panic and despair, while not acceding to
pressures from his own right wing to launch an all-
out war against the Palestinians.
"What are you proposing?" Sharon asked wither-
ingly of a hard-line Likud Knesset member, Yuval
Steinitz, at a party caucus Monday. "That we go
back into Gaza and run the lives of the people there?
The advice of self-proclaimed experts who have
done nothing and accomplished nothing in this area
— well, I am not going to go back into Gaza."
Politicking
The remark about "self-proclaimed experts" also was
taken as a swipe at Binyamin Netanyahu.
Uninhibited now in his campaign to depose
Sharon as Likud leader — and later as prime minis-
ter — Netanyhau advocates the destruction of Yasser
Arafat's Palestinian Authority, which he considers a
terrorist regime.
Sharon, who heard President Bush's views on this
matter barely two weeks ago, dismisses Netanyahu's
rhetoric as demagoguery. Sources close to Sharon say
the Bush administration thoroughly despises Arafat,
but opposes his removal for fear of the regional tur-
moil that could result — at a time when Washington
needs relative quiet in the Middle East as it appears to be
preparing a campaign against Saddam Hussein of Iraq.
Despite his steady slippage in the polls, therefore,
Sharon in effect is offering the Israeli public more of
the same. "Much more of the same," in the words
of an Israel Television commentator midweek, fol-
lowing a series of top-level consultations between
the prime minister, key ministers and the senior
Israel -Defense Forces command.
That means more retaliatory bombings of PA
installations, more targeted killings of terrorist lead-
ers, more incursions into Palestinian cities, more
violent searches for arms and terror suspects, more
closures and roadblocks in the Palestinian territories
and more beefed-up policing of Israel's own streets.
In addition, as Sharon told his party colleagues,
there also will be more meetings with top Palestinian
officials, like the meeting he held at his home three
weeks ago with three senior Arafat aides.
"Whatever it needs to produce a cease-fire, I will
do it," Sharon declared.
Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, too, will contin-
ue his separate efforts with Karia to develop a cease-
fire plan. The effort has Sharon's consent — though
neither Sharon nor Defense Minister Benjamin Ben-
Eliezer, from Peres' own Labor Party, believe the
plan has much chance of success.
No Escalation?
What there will not be is the kind of stepped-up war-
fare advocated, for instance, by Housing Minister
Natan Sharansky. Sharansky is urging that the army
be ordered to temporarily reoccupy Palestinian cities
to conduct house-to-house searches for, weapons. All
weapons in the West Bank and Gaza would be confis-
cated, under Sharansky's plan. Later, the Palestinian
police would be issued pistols — but nothing more.
Avigdor Lieberman, the minister of infrastructure
and Sharansky's rival for the votes of the Russian
immigrant community, calls for even tougher action.
His ally in the National Union-Israel Our Home
faction, Tourism Minister Binyamin Elon, openly
talks about "transfer" — that is, the physical reloca-
tion of millions of Palestinians to other countries.
The settler leaders in the West Bank and Gaza
openly voice their disillusionment with Sharon, once
their hero, who they believe has "gone soft." Others
believe that, despite his public pronouncements,
Sharon indeed is intent on bringing down Arafat's
regime — but is too diplomatically sensitive, and
patient enough, to do it slowly and carefully.
In any case, Sharon's resistance to right-wing pres-
sure appears to be earning him scant praise on the left.
On Feb. 16, some 10,000 people attended a Peace
Now rally in Tel Aviv. Speakers, among them Sari
Nusseibeh, the Palestinian aristocrat-academic who
represents the Palestinian Authority in Jerusalem, and
Yossi Sand, leader of the opposition Meretz Party,
blasted the Sharon governinent and called for an
Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Gala Strip.
Attendance at the rally was hardly massive, com-
pared to the size of peace rallies in the past. Still, it
was the largest anti-government rally since the
Palestinian intifada (uprising) began 17 months ago.
Sharon said recently that Israel will win this "war"
with the Palestinians
if Israelis remain steadfast.
Yet intelligence officials say cracks in Israeli morale
— such as the recent letter from. some 200 reserve
soldiers and officers who refuse to serve in the West
Bank and Gaza Strip — are emboldening Arafat to
escalate the intifada. More Israeli casualties, Arafat
believes, will quicken the growth of dissent and
ultimately force the Israeli government to accede to
Palestinian demands.
Unilateral Strategy
In fact, the day after the peace rally, the Israeli
daily Hdaretz disclosed that the Council for Peace
and Security, a prominent center-left group of
retired army generals and Mossad and Shin Bet
officers, had endorsed the concept of a unilateral
Israeli withdrawal.
Yet, such unilateralism is spurned by the hard-core
left — the school of Peres and former Justice
Minister Yossi Beilin — as a counsel of despair,
because it is predicated on the conclusion that
efforts to reach a negotiated agreement with the
Palestinians presently are hopeless. Others fear that
withdrawing unilaterally will give the Palestinians
less incentive to negotiate.
The left and center, therefore, continue to be as
fragmented and disoriented as the right — which
only exacerbates the mood of hopelessness sweeping
Israel. ❑