Sharon Will OK Talks if Unrest Stops

Under pressure not to spoil U.S. efforts to forge a coalition against terrorism, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said Sunday that he will stop a new offensive against the Palestinians and allow truce talks if Yasser Arafat can manage to halt violence by his side for two days.

Sharon’s statement came just hours after the Israeli army staged its most audacious invasion yet of Palestinian territory and announced that it will go ahead with controversial plans to carve out closed military zones--off limits to most Palestinians--inside the West Bank near its border with Israel.

The predawn battle in the Palestinians’ most important city, Ramallah, left one Israeli soldier and one Palestinian security officer dead and many people wounded.

Sharon has rebuffed numerous requests from President Bush and other U.S. officials to allow his foreign minister, Shimon Peres, to meet with Palestinian Authority President Arafat in an urgent effort to end almost a year of Israeli-Palestinian carnage. Peres had hoped to see Arafat on Sunday. But Sharon said he will permit the two to talk only if violence stops for 48 hours.

At the same time, Sharon repeated harsh rhetoric in which he likened Arafat to fugitive terrorist suspect Osama bin Laden.

“The terrorism directed against the citizens of Israel is no different from Bin Laden’s terrorism directed against the citizens of the United States,” Sharon said. “We should remember: The one who legitimized the hijacking of airplanes dozens of years ago was Arafat.”

Sharon spoke at a special session of the Israeli parliament held to express solidarity with America’s new terrorism victims. Opposition leader Yossi Sarid responded that Sharon was risking making Israel the “spoiler” of U.S. coalition-building efforts and warned the hawkish prime minister that he was squandering an opportunity to bring an isolated Arafat into genuine truce negotiations.

And Peres was so furious at Sharon’s restrictions that he reportedly threatened to quit the government.

“When did Arafat become Bin Laden?” Peres said on Israeli radio. “We agreed to meet, and today he’s Bin Laden? The Americans are casting great hopes on this meeting . . . and asking Israel to make a supreme effort to see whether it’s possible to reduce the fire. . . . Why should Israel appear the rejectionist?”

Israeli state radio said Sunday that Israeli diplomats based in Washington had urged Sharon to tone down the Bin Laden comparisons, which were not going over well with U.S. officials.

Arafat, speaking later in Gaza City, expressed a willingness to meet with Peres and said he favored a cease-fire, but he did not specifically announce one. All previous attempts at cease-fires have failed.

Before sunrise Sunday, Israeli armor, combat helicopters and ground troops shot their way into Ramallah in the West Bank. The army said the raid was launched in retaliation for the slaying Saturday night of an Israeli man on the outskirts of Jerusalem.

Israeli forces shelled police posts and apartment buildings, fought gunmen in the crowded Um Sharayat residential neighborhood and withdrew about four hours later after capturing five Palestinians. The men were later described by military sources as members of the Islamic Hamas movement who were planning terrorist attacks during the Jewish New Year, which starts tonight.

A 26-year-old Palestinian intelligence officer and a 23-year-old Israeli soldier were killed in the battle. Another Israeli soldier and dozens of mostly civilian Palestinians were wounded and several apartment buildings badly damaged by missiles, tank shells and automatic gunfire. Ramallah, about 10 miles north of Jerusalem, is the largest city in the West Bank and the Palestinians’ economic, commercial and political center.

The raid was the latest in an escalating series of deeper and deadlier incursions into Palestinian territory, each launched in retaliation for attacks on Israelis. Twenty Palestinians and four Israelis have been killed since Tuesday in a conflict that has claimed about 750 lives--roughly 80% of them Palestinian--over the last year.

The Palestinians accuse Sharon of exploiting the fact that world attention is focused on the U.S. East Coast to unleash an offensive aimed at crushing the Palestinian Authority. Israeli officials deny that but make no bones about enjoying a relative free hand in their operations.

American officials are urging Israel and the Palestinians to quell their raging conflict at a time when the Bush administration must put together a coalition that would include Arab and Muslim states.

Israelis see unmistakable parallels between the dynamics now and the lead-up to the 1991 Persian Gulf War, when Israel was asked to maintain a low profile so as not to alienate Arab states whose support the earlier Bush administration badly needed to cultivate.

Then, Israel stayed on the sidelines and agreed not to retaliate even when Iraq lobbed Scud missiles into Tel Aviv.

Israelis today, however, are much less willing to lie low. Many feel that their previous experience eroded their government’s ability to wield influence over and deter its enemies. Plus, after the Gulf War ended, Israel was obliged to attend the October 1991 Madrid conference, which started a peace process that included recognition of Arafat and his return to Israel’s border.

“The [Gulf War] experience of 1991 is not an experience Israel will repeat,” said Gerald Steinberg, a strategic analyst at conservative Bar Ilan University near Tel Aviv. “Israel cannot adopt a low-profile, nonreactive policy again. It provided the recipe for the Arab world to know how to squeeze Israel.”