Under Pressure, Israelis Pull Out

Under U.S. and European pressure, Israeli armor pulled out of the West Bank town of Beit Jala early today, ending a two-day invasion after Palestinian leaders agreed to stop attacks on a nearby Jewish neighborhood, the army and witnesses said.

Shooting stopped about midnight, and the pullout was completed by dawn, security officials and witnesses said. One Beit Jala family whose house had been taken over by troops said by telephone that the soldiers left about 5 a.m.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his top Cabinet ministers held late-night meetings to agree on the withdrawal after Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat consulted in several phone calls. U.S. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell also conferred with both Peres and Arafat.

Arafat had ordered his gunmen to hold fire Wednesday afternoon, and Peres had promised to order his troops to leave. But fierce shooting resumed around nightfall, throwing the agreement into doubt. Only after the shooting stopped at midnight and held for several hours did the withdrawal proceed.

Israeli officials warned, however, that their forces will stay close to Beit Jala and reenter if attacks on the nearby Jewish community of Gilo resume. U.S. officials expressed hope that this cease-fire agreement will serve as a basis for a future and more general truce.

Sharon’s decision to plant tanks firmly on Palestinian-ruled soil carried risks of wider conflict and greater danger to Israeli soldiers and civilians. But it also sent a broader political message to his besieged people and to the man Sharon calls a liar and terrorist, Arafat.

Invading picturesque Beit Jala this week was part of Sharon’s short-term strategy of ratcheting up retaliation for Palestinian shootings and bombings, aides and analysts say. The plan is to launch incursions that each time go deeper into Palestinian territory and each time last longer. Or to target for killing Palestinian officials of higher and higher rank. Or to use more and more powerful weaponry.

The goal is both to console the Jewish state’s battered population and isolate Arafat, the Palestinian Authority president, forcing him to abandon violence and submit to Israel’s terms.

But in the long term, there’s no clear sign that either Sharon’s strategy, nor much less the Palestinians’ approach of suicide bombings and hit-and-run attacks, offers a clear path toward an end to the 11-month-old conflict.

Initially, the Israeli army’s incursion into Beit Jala, which began Monday, had not succeeded in its goal of ending months of Palestinian attacks on Gilo. In the first 48 hours after paratroopers, tanks and bulldozers rolled through the largely Christian village, people in Gilo were hit by some of the most potentially lethal shooting yet.

Palestinian gunmen, for what appears to be the first time, fired .50-caliber machine guns as well as six mortar shells into the Jewish community between Tuesday night and Wednesday afternoon. Shells slammed into the roof of an apartment building, a kindergarten and a school patio just five days before the start of the school year.

Gilo is built on West Bank land captured by Israel in the 1967 Mideast War and later annexed. Israel considers the community part of Jerusalem, and any attack on Gilo an attack on its capital. The Palestinians consider it an illegal settlement.

The shooting directed at Gilo on Wednesday came not from Beit Jala but from adjacent, more distant Bethlehem and the well-armed Aida refugee camp nearby. Gunmen in Aida were essentially firing over the heads of the occupying soldiers.

In interviews Wednesday, the gunmen vowed to keep up the fight. Bethlehem television broadcast endless pictures of young Palestinians hurling rocks and firebombs at Israeli soldiers. “Aida refugee camp is getting ready for the big battle!” the broadcast declared. “Let Gilo cry if Aida cries!”

Sharon said the shooting from Bethlehem was an attempt by Arafat to entice Israel into invading the storied traditional site of Jesus’ birth.

Israeli forces firing tank shells and Palestinian gunmen battled off and on in the Beit Jala area for most of Wednesday. Palestinians reported 30 injuries, two serious.

Elsewhere, an Israeli truck driver delivering gas in the northern West Bank was slain by Palestinian gunmen. He was the seventh Israeli to be killed in roadway ambushes in four days. Also Wednesday, a Palestinian motorist driving in the West Bank northeast of Jerusalem was shot to death in what Israeli police said was probably an attack by Jewish extremists.

Both Israel and the Palestinians have steadily escalated the forms of punishment they choose to inflict on each other. While the Jewish state chooses targeted killings of militants and military incursions, an array of radical Islamic and other militant groups associated with Arafat have made suicide bombings and sniper shootings a daily threat.

The escalation seems to only poison the air, destroy grounds for eventual detente and push significant peace negotiations far off everyone’s radar screens, locking Israelis and Palestinians in an asphyxiating battle of mutual destruction.

Polls published this week showed overwhelming Israeli public approval for both the incursion into Beit Jala and the assassination Monday by Israeli forces of senior Palestinian official Mustafa Zibri. Polls also showed overwhelming Palestinian public approval for suicide attacks on Israelis.

Sharon appeared at a Cabinet meeting Wednesday for the first time after a week or so of vacation. Reporters said he appeared relaxed. his advisors said at the time that it was too soon to assess the success or failure of the Beit Jala operation.

“You don’t have quick fixes to this kind of war,” Sharon spokesman Raanan Gissin said. Early this morning, Gissin confirmed the cease-fire deal and troop withdrawal, saying it was the result of European and U.S. pressure on Arafat. “This shows pressure does work,” Gissin said.

Yoram Schweitzer, a senior researcher at the Israel-based International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism, said the takeover of parts of Beit Jala was Sharon’s attempt to send the same signal to the Palestinian Authority that he did with the Aug. 10 occupation of Orient House, an office that symbolized the Palestinians’ claim to East Jerusalem. Speaking before the withdrawal, Schweitzer cautioned that the incursion had to be temporary.

“The message is, don’t think that just because we are reluctant to cross into [Palestinian] territory you have immunity and can do whatever you like,” he said. “But I don’t think anybody thinks [the incursion] can be for a long time. It must be temporary.”

The prospect of remaining in Beit Jala for a long period had numerous drawbacks: Troops would be operating amid a hostile population, and the likelihood of hand-to-hand, street-by-street urban combat--largely avoided thus far in this conflict--suddenly became a very real possibility.

Though Israel wants its tougher tactics to sow discord within Palestinian society and force Arafat to retreat, evidence thus far is to the contrary: Palestinian radicalization grows by the day. In Beit Jala, many residents had been quite critical of Palestinian gunmen who used their Christian village as a firing position but now give their support to those gunmen in the face of the Israeli intrusion.

In the first hours of the raid on Beit Jala, Israeli troops took over a Lutheran church compound that included an orphanage where 45 boys became trapped. The Israelis set up firing positions in a compound building. Amid furious protest from the church and criticism from the Bush administration, the troops withdrew from the Lutheran compound early Wednesday.

Sharon’s policies have not yet restored security to frightened Israelis, but he has gained international tolerance for some measures. In May, when he scrambled F-16 warplanes to drop bombs on a Palestinian city--something that hadn’t been done in more than three decades--the outcry from Washington and Europe was swift and loud. The second and third times the jets were used, there was barely a peep.

Nonetheless, the Bush administration on Wednesday turned up the heat on Israel, saying the U.S. opposes any attempt to permanently reoccupy territory previously turned over to the Palestinian Authority after the 1993 Oslo peace accords.

“There is a fundamental issue here, and that’s trying to reverse agreements and understandings that have been made in the past,” said State Department spokesman Richard Boucher.

Although Boucher said he was not talking specifically about the Beit Jala incursion, his remarks clearly were designed to pressure Israel to withdraw from the village.

Analysts here, meanwhile, say Sharon’s approach--making Arafat feel that he is gradually losing control and facing an increasingly serious threat to his own existence--is a risky strategy.

“The main objective,” Amir Oren, analyst for the liberal daily Haaretz, wrote Wednesday, is “to expose Arafat’s weakness. This weakness may impel Arafat to engage in a diplomatic move that leads to a cease-fire with Israel.

“On the other hand, however, it could also impel him to encourage a terror attack so horrific that Israel’s response would renew Arafat’s regional and world standing.”

Arafat’s own room to maneuver is sharply curtailed. The uprising has taken on momentum of its own that he can halt only at his own peril. He appears to have badly miscalculated world interest in his plight and his ability to influence events.

At the same time, Sharon’s actions have hardened the Palestinians’ resolve to resist.

“The more you pressure the Palestinians, the more you push them to acts of despair,” said Hashem Mahameed, an Arab member of the Israeli parliament. By despair, he meant suicide bombings.

Arafat would be hard-pressed to enter into negotiations with the Israeli government without assurances of the kind of political concessions that Sharon almost certainly would never grant. And so the mutual destruction continues.

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Times staff writer Norman Kempster in Washington contributed to this report.