Israel Goes on Offensive Hoping to Send a Message to Friend and Foe

The Israeli army’s surprise raid last week on a pro-Iranian Shia Muslim stronghold in southern Lebanon fits a pattern of recent offensive actions, ranging from small villages on the occupied West Bank all the way to Tunis, according to Israeli and Western analysts.

These actions follow what are viewed here as a series of setbacks, particularly last winter but in some respects dating all the way back to the withdrawal of most Israeli forces from Lebanon in 1985. And the newly aggressive Israeli approach appears to be designed, at least in part, to restore some of the luster to the tarnished image of the Israeli fighter.

That image, the analysts note, is more than just a matter of public relations in this part of the world, where deterrent power is a strategic asset.

Crucial Interests

Israeli leaders also appear eager to send a message to friend and foe alike--and possibly to Israeli voters, as well--that political constraints will no longer prevent the government from defending what it sees as its crucial interests.

“Part of achieving security, to my sorrow, is through uncompromising battle against threat,” Maj. Gen. Yossi Peled, head of the army’s Northern Command, told Israeli military reporters last week after a 48-hour strike into Lebanon that cost the lives of three Israeli soldiers and at least 40 Muslim guerrillas of the Hezbollah (Party of God) movement.

“This battle involves military confrontations, and battles that we initiate,” Peled added. “War is not one-sided.”

A Sense of Siege

Israel has felt itself at war throughout the 40 years of its history, and the sense of being under siege has worsened dramatically since last December and the beginning of a Palestinian uprising in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. The unrest, unprecedented in scope, has touched the lives of many thousands of Israelis for whom the occupation had slipped into the subconscious.

The uprising brings closer to home than it had been in a generation the daily realization that Israelis are still viewed with enmity as outsiders and that the Israeli state’s very reason for being--to provide a place where the Jewish people could be truly secure--remains a dream.

The reasons for this are debatable, but it is clear that the realization has revived a tried and true reaction among the Israeli leadership. Its principle: The best defense is a good offense.

After appearing to flounder in its initial response to the Palestinian unrest, the army has now gone clearly on the offensive in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. No Palestinian village is too small or too remote to be left alone if its residents raise Palestinian flags or declare themselves “liberated.”

After months of playing cat and mouse with Palestinian merchants trying to maintain business hours according to instructions from the uprising’s underground leadership, the army took a new tack last week. It suspended commercial activity throughout the West Bank for three days.

In their latest demonstration of resolve, the authorities served a deportation order Friday on a prominent Palestinian-American activist whose case has been supported by Washington. They accused Mubarak Awad, a Jerusalem-born psychologist who advocates nonviolent resistance to the Israeli occupation, of taking part in activities harmful “to the security of the state and to public order.” On Sunday, the Israeli Supreme Court temporarily delayed the deportation while Awad appeals.

Last month, in an operation remarkable for its daring, efficiency and ruthlessness, agents of the Israeli intelligence service Mossad, backed up by elite army, navy, and air force units, assassinated the Palestine Liberation Organization’s second-ranking official at his home in the capital of Tunisia.

Israeli officials still refuse to comment publicly on responsibility for the death of Khalil Wazir, better known by his nom de guerre, Abu Jihad. But informed Israeli sources have confirmed that the operation was ordered by the so-called Inner Cabinet of senior Israeli ministers, and it is viewed almost universally with pride here as an example of the type of bold strike for which this country was once famous.

Abu Jihad, as head of military operations for the PLO, was responsible for planning many terrorist attacks against civilian targets in Israel as well as for coordinating PLO support for the West Bank and Gaza Strip uprising.

There was a link between the unrest in the territories and a recent increase in probes of Israel’s northern defenses from inside Lebanon. The probes were seen as efforts by Palestinian groups outside to show support for West Bank and Gaza Palestinians.

One of the things that made last week’s Israeli incursion into Lebanon controversial here was the fact that, contrary to initial indications, it was not focused so much on Palestinian infiltrators as on militant Shia Muslims of Hezbollah. And in taking on Hezbollah, the Israeli strike force came uncomfortably close to the Syrian lines in southern Lebanon, raising fears of a broader clash between the region’s two principal powers.

U.N. officials in Lebanon now say that the initial Israeli searches in the eastern sector of its self-proclaimed security zone north of the border were apparently only a diversion for the major attack that began before dawn Wednesday against the Hezbollah stronghold at Maydoun.

Had Avoided Hezbollah

Israel had previously steered clear of any major confrontation with Hezbollah, preferring to allow the rival Lebanese Amal movement to keep the pro-Iranian militants in check.

“The paratrooper raid on the village of Maydoun was made possible only after Defense Minister (Yitzhak) Rabin decided that the most effective way to deal with hostile activity in southern Lebanon is to carry out offensive, initiated actions,” Reuven Pedatzur, military correspondent for the newspaper Haaretz, said in Friday’s issue.

Rabin had argued, in a radio interview, that to protect Israel’s northern settlements from danger, it was not enough to deploy in the security zone, which extends 6 to 10 miles north of the Israeli frontier. Real security, he said, requires “initiated activity against terrorist targets, (even if) deep within Lebanon, (and) certainly in the security zone and adjacent to it.”

‘Must Take Initiative’

Shmuel Segev, defense correspondent for the daily Maariv, wrote: “Israel must continue to take the initiative in fighting terrorism, so as not to let terrorist organizations dictate the pace and operational methods to it. Not only will any slackening in combatting terrorists puncture peace in Galilee (northern Israel), it will also give the PLO a political gain it does not deserve and in the end sabotage the peace process.”

As Segev’s comment indicates, most Israelis do not differentiate among their various Arab enemies. Others see this as a mistake.

A Western military observer said that while Palestinian forces in Lebanon might recoil after a raid such as the one last week, it is likely to inspire Hezbollah to greater anti-Israel efforts and make it more difficult politically for Amal to restrain it.

Whatever the longer-term implications of Wednesday’s attack, the Israeli military appears pleased to be back on the offensive.