Debate Emerges Over Sharon’s Motives

Its invasion of parts of the West Bank has placed Israel in sharp conflict with its closest ally, the United States, and touched off a spirited debate over whether Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s secret motive is to drive Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat from power.

When launching Israel’s most wide-scale military operation in Palestinian territory in years, Sharon declared that his troops would stay in place until Arafat handed over the killers of an Israeli Cabinet minister and cracked down on terrorism--conditions Arafat is not likely to meet.

Defying the United States, Sharon on Tuesday rejected Washington’s demands to withdraw immediately. “We are acting to arrest terrorists who, to my regret, Arafat does not arrest and to foil terrorist attacks which, to my regret, Arafat doesn’t foil,” Sharon said during an inspection of a road-building project near Israel’s border with the West Bank.

Israeli media reported Tuesday that the Americans were furious at Israel for ignoring their pleas for restraint. “A Hammer on the Head” is how one columnist described Washington’s scolding.

Of at least 34 Palestinians killed so far in the Israeli campaign, several were bystanders as tanks were deployed in or around almost every major Palestinian town, touching off some of the fiercest fighting seen in an already violent year. Israel’s army chief of staff said 20 were “terrorists.”

The latest deaths occurred early today when Israeli troops shot and killed three Palestinians in Tulkarm. Palestinians said the soldiers ambushed the three, but the Israeli military said they were about to open fire when shot.

Increasingly, Israelis and foreign observers are expressing growing concern that Sharon’s real intent may be to get rid of Arafat and his Palestinian Authority, created in the landmark 1993 Oslo peace accords, which also initiated the withdrawal of Israeli troops from West Bank and Gaza Strip lands seized by Israel in the 1967 Middle East War.

Senior Israeli government officials and aides to Sharon denied that they want to crush the Palestinian Authority or expel Arafat, despite demands from Israel’s right-wing and settler movement to do so. A senior advisor said Sharon remains enough of a pragmatist to know that such a plan goes beyond a line he cannot cross politically or diplomatically, and several analysts and diplomats agreed.

The debate itself reflects the once-unimaginable extremes to which the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has plunged. The Oct. 17 assassination of Cabinet minister Rehavam Zeevi, especially, cranked the conflict to a new, perilous level--”the most dangerous moment in a decade,” according to U.N. special envoy Terje Roed-Larsen.

Haim Ramon, a leading member of the center-left Labor Party, Sharon’s principal partner in his governing coalition, is among the many who don’t believe the denials of an ulterior motive.

“I live with the feeling, and almost the knowledge, that Sharon has decided to bring down the Palestinian Authority,” Ramon told a meeting of the Labor Party’s parliamentary caucus earlier this week. Referring to West Bank cities that have been raided, Ramon added: “What does [Zeevi’s] assassination have to do with what we are doing in Jenin? . . . I don’t want to be in a government that goes into the casbah in Nablus.”

In an interview Tuesday, Ramon said he believes that Sharon, “in his deepest heart,” wants Arafat gone. If that happens, he warned, Israel will be sucked into “an anarchy of terrorism,” bogged down in Palestinian towns with mounting casualties.

Whether or not Sharon’s ambition is to topple Arafat, there are already signs that the Palestinian Authority is beginning to teeter. In Bethlehem, site of the fiercest combat, Palestinian militias have the run of the street, ignoring Arafat’s commands to cease fire and battling Israeli tanks at will.

Fears are rising among Palestinians that the militias will grow stronger as Arafat’s grip on power is weakened by the ongoing Israeli presence in Palestinian-controlled territory. For some, there is a sense of deja vu, a return to the anarchy that reigned in Beirut when Arafat’s control over the various factions weakened and militias carried out attacks on targets they chose.

Shlomo Ben-Ami, another Labor politician and former foreign minister, said causing Arafat to fall or flee was “shortsighted to the point of disastrous,” in part because whoever replaces him could be much worse--either a radical Islamic fundamentalist or no one at all, creating a kind of headless chaos.

The Labor Party has threatened to quit the government if Sharon does try to trigger Arafat’s political demise or if the Israeli army doesn’t withdraw soon.

Roni Shaked, who covers Palestinian security for Israel’s largest newspaper, Yediot Aharonot, warned that getting rid of Arafat would not end the fighting or terrorism; both would worsen because Arafat can operate more easily in exile, without any constraints or concern about international legitimacy.

“It is an illusion to dream that if Arafat is driven out of the territories, or if the [Israeli army] causes the collapse of the Palestinian Authority, that . . . the new Palestinian leadership that arises under Israel’s patronage will be waving a white flag,” Shaked noted.

Previous Israeli attempts to foster new Arab leaders have failed. In the 1970s, Israel promoted village councils as an alternative to the Palestine Liberation Organization, and in 1982 it tried to form a puppet regime in Lebanon.

But Sharon hears numerous demands, from within his Cabinet and from the public, to get rid of Arafat. And he must worry about his right-wing constituency, especially as archrival former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu plots a political comeback by appealing to the hard-liners who have been loyal to Sharon.

Israeli officials have sought to equate their battle against Arafat and the Palestinian Authority with the U.S.-led fight against Osama bin Laden and Afghanistan’s Taliban regime. They took great umbrage at the U.S. rebuke, which came from the State Department on Monday.

U.S. officials said the criticism, which also singled out Arafat, came in the wake of Sharon’s statements that he was under no pressure from the U.S. to pull out from the newly reoccupied areas of the West Bank.

“The message we wanted to convey was not being received,” a U.S. official said. The official said the U.S. believes that Sharon, left to his own, might remain in the West Bank indefinitely. “We think he will eventually pull out,” the official said, “but he won’t if we don’t nag him.”

Israeli Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer said the criticism was “out of line.”

Israeli state radio, quoting “senior Jerusalem sources”--which usually means officials in the prime minister’s office--said Washington was trying to assuage its Arab allies. They said the U.S. ambassador to Israel, Daniel C. Kurtzer, had helped to create a “wrong impression” among U.S. officials that Sharon’s government was seeking to destroy the Palestinian Authority.