As Casualties Mount, Sharon Is Under Fire on Home Front

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon started the week by reassuring Israelis reeling from a string of bloody attacks that they had nothing to fear. “Israel,” the hawkish former general told his Cabinet, “has never lost a war and will win this war as well.”

But between Sunday, when Sharon made that observation, and Wednesday, 10 more Israelis were killed and the prime minister was under attack from across the political spectrum.

On the right, members of Sharon’s Likud Party pronounced his year-old government a dismal failure. They urged him to launch a war to destroy the Palestinian Authority and oust its president, Yasser Arafat, from the West Bank. On the left, growing numbers of Israelis called on the prime minister to dismantle at least some Jewish settlements and unilaterally withdraw from large parts of the West Bank and all of the Gaza Strip immediately.

Instead, Sharon vowed to leave his strategy unchanged. The army, he decided early this week, will “continue to exact the maximum price from the terrorists and those who give them shelter” but stop short of toppling the Palestinian Authority outright.

Afterward, the army launched wide-scale air, sea and ground raids in the West Bank and Gaza after Palestinian militants shot dead six Israeli soldiers at a roadblock outside the West Bank city of Ramallah. The reprisals claimed the lives of 15 Palestinians.

Israeli security officials warned that worse was to come.

But for a growing number of Israelis exhausted by the months of fighting and demoralized by the seemingly endless supply of Palestinian suicide attackers, retaliation is increasingly unsatisfactory.

“We can now openly say that we are losing the present round that began in September 2000,” Amnon Dankner, editor of the daily newspaper Maariv, wrote in a front-page editorial Wednesday.

“Lying on the side of the road we have traveled this year, rusting like junked cars, are not only Sharon’s promises for peace and security, but even statements that were very acceptable until a short while ago,” Dankner wrote. The public no longer believes government promises that Arafat’s rule is about to collapse or that the Palestinians “are on the verge of giving up,” he wrote.

“How many blows of the type we have taken during this last week will we be able to continue to take before the public rises up and the morale of the army reaches a dangerous low?” Dankner asked.

Hatzofe, the newspaper of the religious right, that once lionized Sharon, suggested Wednesday that the prime minister has failed to declare war on the Palestinians because he is still traumatized by his role in Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon.

As defense minister, Sharon was the architect of a war that brought Israeli tanks into Beirut. He was forced to resign after a government-appointed commission held him indirectly responsible for the massacre of hundreds of Palestinian refugees in Beirut camps by Israel’s Lebanese Christian allies.

“It is inconceivable that Israel should pay this price of blood without a fitting, very painful response, just because the prime minister emerged wounded from . . . the Lebanon war,” the newspaper wrote in an unsigned editorial. “It seems likely that the good of the country demands that he give up his post because he is psychologically limited and unable to do what needs to be done.”

In the eye of the growing political storm over the government’s strategy, Sharon huddled again Wednesday with his security chiefs, then with his security Cabinet.

A meeting originally planned as a strategic discussion of how best to approach the conflict with the Palestinians became an operational debate about how best to hit back. In the end, Sharon decided again to broaden and deepen retaliatory attacks without changing strategy.

Born into the Arab-Jewish conflict more than 70 years ago, Sharon--as a general and, later, as a leader of the right-wing Likud in opposition--often boasted to Labor Party prime ministers that he would know how to snuff out Palestinian terrorism if given the chance.

Now he counsels Israelis to be patient as they cope with a national life dominated by the macabre parade of seemingly endless attacks, counterattacks and funerals.

What do you tell Israelis who are too scared to drive from their homes to their offices for fear that they will encounter a suicide bomber en route, a reporter asked Sharon on Monday. “The citizens have greater endurance than those who write about them,” was his terse reply.

But experts here disagree with the prime minister. Israelis, they say, are longing for a clear-cut solution to the conflict and sickened by the carnage that has claimed the lives of more than 1,000 Palestinians and Israelis in the last 17 months.

“We are getting very, very close to the boiling point,” said Shlomo Gazit, a retired general and former director of military intelligence. Sharon, he said in an interview hours before the six Israeli soldiers were gunned down at the West Bank roadblock, “has been lucky,” because none of the recent attacks produced large numbers of casualties.

Reflecting a widely held belief here that Sharon hasn’t opted to reoccupy the West Bank and Gaza Strip for fear of rupturing relations with the United States, Gazit said the prime minister may have no choice.

“Mr. Sharon will have to say to the Americans: ‘I’m sorry, I can’t go on like this,’ ” Gazit said. “The people won’t let him go on like this. No people in the world can accept such a rate of terrorist attacks without doing something about it, and what we are doing about it--blowing up empty offices and houses--is ridiculous.”