A Seasoned Israeli Warrior Shows Calculated Restraint

“Restraint” is not a word normally associated with Ariel Sharon, the hawkish prime minister of Israel and veteran of its numerous wars.

Long before his landslide election four months ago, Sharon’s history of ironfisted toughness earned him a place of respect with Israel’s hard right, and the undying enmity of Israel’s left and the Arab world.

So his decision--for the moment --not to retaliate militarily for Friday’s suicide bombing outside a Tel Aviv disco has surprised many observers, won praise in Washington and European capitals and thrown the Palestinian leadership off balance.

His closest constituents, including Jewish settlers and several of his government ministers, are furious and vociferously demanding that he act.

By most predictions, they won’t have long to wait. A sense of dread and foreboding has gripped the Israeli and Palestinian sides of this blood-soaked conflict, exacerbated, perhaps, by the fact that Tuesday was the anniversary of the start of the 1967 Middle East War, when Israel captured territory that included the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip.

Everyone is bracing for the next disaster, be it the next terrorist bombing, the failure of Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat to enforce a cease-fire, the ensuing Israeli retaliation or the next escalation.

Sharon made it clear Tuesday night what he thinks of Arafat, using the harshest language since he took office: “He’s a murderer and a pathological liar,” Sharon told Russian television. “He’s not a head of state. There were some people that expected he will behave like a head of state, but he behaves as a head of terrorists and murderers.”

In the aftermath of the Tel Aviv bombing, Sharon tightened Israel’s blockade on Palestinian territories while deferring military punishment, which would have included airstrikes on Arafat’s security forces and Palestinian Authority infrastructure. His moves came after Arafat declared a cease-fire Saturday.

Sharon’s decision to hold off on any military strike was based on an eagerness both to curry international sympathy and support and to maintain domestic solidarity and unity. After more than eight months of horrific but contained violence, he also does not want to be blamed for triggering a wider deterioration that might engulf the region.

Nor does he want to squander the valuable public support gained, sadly, from the bombing, in which 20 young people were killed by a suicide bomber as they queued to go dancing. Israel’s image worldwide is clearly that of victim in the attack, and scrambling warplanes or bombarding Palestinian cities could have blurred the picture.

Enhanced concern from the United States and Europe quickly translated into a new and especially intense wave of international pressure on Arafat, who declared a cease-fire after resisting the move for months. Israel, according to a senior Israeli official, felt that it had succeeded in isolating the Palestinian leader. It also felt vindicated when it appeared, at least initially, that Arafat could in fact rein in the gunmen under his command, something he had previously professed he was unable to do.

“After a long time, the world has taken our side against Arafat,” Foreign Minister Shimon Peres proudly told members of his center-left Labor Party.

Citing “progress” in Arafat’s calling of a cease-fire, President Bush announced Tuesday that he was sending CIA Director George J. Tenet to oversee security meetings between the Israelis and Palestinians. And to the irritation of the Israelis, the European Union began scattering observers in the West Bank, according to witnesses.

In the end, however, this may simply be the lull before the massive firestorm. Palestinians, and many Israelis, believe that Sharon is too old a tiger to change his stripes and that his greatest wish remains the collapse of the Palestinian Authority and the fall of Arafat.

“He changed his tactics, he did not change his essence,” said Mustafa Barghouti, a prominent political activist and doctor who runs a medical relief service in the West Bank. “His core values are the same, and I do not believe he will be able to hide them for long. . . . The man is 73 years old, and his whole history is before you.”

Paradoxically, it is Sharon’s hard-line credentials that give him the ability, at least in the short term, to say no to the many pain-filled Israeli demands for revenge. Restraint, he told the families of those killed and injured in the Friday bombing, is also strength. He won over more extremist members of his Cabinet reportedly by telling them that to strike now was useless because Palestinian security forces had abandoned their posts for fear of retaliation; wait, and more will die.

His pro-peace predecessor, Ehud Barak of the Labor Party, probably would have been excoriated if he had failed to retaliate after an atrocity like the Tel Aviv bombing.

Which is not to say that Sharon was not attacked on the right for his decision, nor that he will forever resist the pressure. There are precious few voices urging restraint within the army--which has made it clear that plans for massive retaliatory strikes are at the ready--and the government.

Lawmaker Shaul Yahalom of the pro-settler National Religious Party said Arafat and Peres were “twirling Sharon on their little fingers.”

“Instead of making his primary priority the absolute destruction of Arafat and all the terrorist organizations, he has an order of priorities headed by kowtowing to the United States and Shimon Peres,” Yahalom charged.

Sharon also faced a barrage of attacks from his Likud Party this week. In a stormy session, several members accused him of betraying the ideals he had espoused as an opposition leader.

He responded that things look different from the prime minister’s chair, where he no longer can ignore international repercussions.

The most antagonistic of the Likud politicians also, not coincidentally, belong to a faction loyal to former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was already staking out the position from which he will challenge Sharon for leadership of the party and nation.

In the first Israeli newspapers published after the Tel Aviv bombing, Netanyahu wrote an essay boasting that he was able to stop terrorism during his 1996-99 government by using the army’s “full force” against the Palestinian Authority “even to the extent of toppling it,” while deftly ignoring international pressure.

It was a not-too-thinly veiled criticism of Sharon’s policies that also took certain liberties with the historical record. It illustrated yet another flank that Sharon will need to protect to preserve his power.

Associates of Sharon say he has learned one lesson from the 1982 war in Lebanon, an ultimately disastrous military campaign that he orchestrated as defense minister. Like U.S. generals assessing Vietnam, Sharon believes that the war was lost because of domestic opposition.

By showing restraint now, the logic goes, he will be able to launch a greater offensive later claiming that he did, after all, try. The left will be less inclined to accuse him of inflexibility and to oppose military escalation. He does not want to march into this new war without a national consensus behind him.

For now, Israeli analysts say, maintaining a united front against an armed Palestinian uprising is the only glue holding Sharon’s “national unity” government together. When it comes time for him to deal with the Palestinians on political issues, his government, the largest and broadest coalition in Israeli history, risks unraveling.

Sharon has no political-diplomatic program that could possibly satisfy the very disparate members of his coalition; the left, especially, will be quick to bolt if he insists on sticking to only the most minimal concessions to the Palestinians, and the right would rebel if he complied with international demands to freeze Jewish settlement expansion in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.