Sharon’s Onslaught Seen as a High-Stakes Gamble

Israel’s broadest military offensive against the Palestinians in more than 17 months of fighting is a high-stakes gamble by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon that he can deliver a blow so devastating it will force Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat to seek peace.

After pounding the Gaza Strip on Wednesday, the army attacked targets in Gaza and the West Bank early today in a furious assault that had begun Tuesday night after Palestinians for the first time hit an Israeli town with a Kassam-2 missile, injuring a year-old child. Palestinians reported that 11 people were killed Wednesday, including three naval policemen and three Palestinians trying to place a bomb on a road to the Jewish settlement of Netzarim in Gaza. Two Israeli soldiers were killed, one possibly by “friendly fire,” the Israeli army spokesman said.

Palestinians said two Palestinians were killed this morning when troops entered the West Bank town of Tulkarm. Helicopter missiles were fired there and in the biblical West Bank town of Bethlehem, where offices of Arafat’s presidential guard were hit. There were no immediate reports of casualties in Bethlehem.

On Wednesday, Israeli attack helicopters fired missiles into a Palestinian security compound in Gaza City, badly damaging it and Arafat’s unoccupied home next to it. A nearby school for the blind also was badly damaged.

Late Wednesday, Palestinians reported that at least two missiles were fired into the compound housing Arafat’s Ramallah headquarters in the West Bank, hitting a storage building. Arafat was meeting with European Union envoy Miguel Angel Moratinos at the time. The two were unhurt.

The government launched its intensified campaign of airstrikes, assassinations of Palestinian militants and incursions into Palestinian-controlled areas after a bloody weekend of Palestinian attacks that claimed the lives of more than 20 Israelis.

It promised that this offensive will take such a high toll of Palestinian lives and damage so much Palestinian Authority security infrastructure that Arafat will have no choice but to seek a cease-fire.

But so far, the Palestinians seem more interested in carrying out revenge attacks than in surrendering. Few outside the Israeli Cabinet and the army seem convinced that the latest offensive will come any closer to changing Arafat’s policies than any previous campaign has.

Snubbing Saudi Initiative

Sharon has declared that the time has come to no longer speak of diplomacy, only of restoring security. On Monday, the day the current campaign got underway, he criticized a much-touted peace initiative by Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah.

“There is no diplomatic horizon,” Sharon told reporters, “only a security horizon.”

The tentative Saudi peace plan, which would offer Israel normalization of relations with the Arab world in return for withdrawal from all the lands Israel seized during the 1967 Middle East War, has been welcomed in Washington and in European capitals and has sparked enormous interest in the region.

But Sharon said it would be a “big mistake” to allow the initiative to replace U.N. Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338 as the basis for Middle East peace, because those resolutions, in Israel’s view, do not require total withdrawal.

Polls and growing criticism here of Sharon’s leadership indicate that the former general may pay a heavy political price if this latest military campaign fails to produce a breakthrough.

A majority of Israelis now say that Sharon is doing a poor job and that they don’t believe that using more force will change the situation. The center-left Labor Party is threatening to pull out of his coalition government, and some commentators have demanded that he resign.

“You bunch of impotent fools, we are tired of you,” Sever Plotzker wrote to the Cabinet ministers in a front-page editorial Wednesday in Yediot Aharonot, the nation’s largest daily newspaper. “Pack your bags, gather up your papers, return the keys and leave the government. . . . In a democratic country that is fighting for its life, failing governments do not stay in power.”

Military analyst Alex Fishman, also writing in the paper, said that if the current operations fail to sway the Palestinians, the next step will be to recapture large parts of the West Bank ceded to them under the 1993 Oslo peace accords. He warned that such a move would require a call-up of reservists that could spark regional war if Arab states perceived the mobilization as a threat.

Palestinians are calling for immediate international intervention to protect them from the new onslaught, even as Palestinian officials are applauding recent attacks on Israeli soldiers at checkpoints and other assaults. Jibril Rajoub, the Palestinian Authority’s West Bank security chief, said he won’t arrest Palestinians who are fighting Israel.

“Sharon’s crazy policy is pushing us into a corner,” said Hussein Sheik, the leader of Arafat’s Fatah movement in the West Bank. “He can reoccupy us, but we won’t wave the white flag. He cannot defeat us.”

Amin Hindi, the Palestinian Authority’s intelligence chief in Gaza, accused Israel of trying to kill top-level Palestinian security officials in an airstrike Wednesday. A helicopter fired a missile into a Gaza City security compound seconds before a dozen officers were due to convene a meeting, Hindi said. The building was destroyed, but no one was killed.

In addition to the deaths in Gaza on Wednesday, three Palestinians were killed in the West Bank. Soldiers shot and killed a Palestinian who the army said was carrying a bomb at one checkpoint, and another Palestinian was shot dead at a second checkpoint after he allegedly hurled Molotov cocktails at troops staffing it. A third militant with the radical Islamic movement Hamas was killed in the northern West Bank city of Jenin under unclear circumstances.

The Israeli government says it has no choice but to resort to massive military force because Arafat cannot or will not stop militants.

But the risks of carrying out large-scale operations in heavily populated areas became evident the first day of the offensive, when troops fired a tank shell at a car that the army said it thought was carrying a Hamas militant in Ramallah. He was not in the car, but his wife and three children were, and they were all killed, as were two children riding in a car behind them.

Israeli civilians also may pay a high price. Security forces across Israel are on high alert as the offensive continues, bracing for revenge attacks at the end of a week that has seen at least 67 Palestinians and 31 Israelis killed, the most since the current conflict began in September 2000.

Funeral Notices

News broadcasts on state-run Voice of Israel radio sound more like “Voice of Hevra Kadisha [burial society], like announcements from a particularly busy cemetery,” wrote Chemi Shalev, senior political analyst for the Maariv newspaper. “From morning till night, we are notified of the departure times of funerals. In the little time left over, there are reports of new terror attacks, fresh victims, whose funeral times we will be notified of tomorrow.”

Sharon’s strongest support is coming from right-wing Cabinet ministers and Jewish settlers, who hope that the government will soon cross its self-imposed “red lines,” destroy the Palestinian Authority and oust Arafat from the West Bank.

Infrastructure Minister Avigdor Lieberman argued in a Cabinet session Monday that the army should bomb Palestinian commercial centers, gas stations and banks, and cut electricity and phone lines to Arafat’s Ramallah office and keep visitors from reaching him.

Faced with such measures, Lieberman predicted, the Palestinians would within three days “cry gevalt, and they’ll beg to speak with us.”

Sharon is being pushed not only from within the Cabinet, but also from outside it. Political archrival Benjamin Netanyahu, a former prime minister who is hugely popular within Sharon’s Likud Party, is advocating the Palestinian Authority’s destruction as he tours the nation and appears on news shows.

The former prime minister is widely believed to be positioning himself to wrest leadership of the party from Sharon. The political threat he poses is seen as forcing Sharon farther away from the political center and closer to the far right.

But growing numbers of Israelis--although still a minority--would support an Israeli-Palestinian initiative aimed at stopping the violence, or even back international intervention, according to a poll by Tel Aviv University’s Tami Steinmetz Center for Peace Research. The center conducted the telephone poll among 582 people Feb. 26-28 as part of its ongoing Peace Index Project.

Only 26.5% of Israelis believe that greater military force will change the security situation, the poll indicated, down from 41% in August. About 27% of Israelis said they want to see an Israeli-Palestinian initiative to stop the violence--a 2 percentage point increase in support since August. The number of Israelis who said they support international intervention to stop the conflict jumped from 8% in August to 17%.

Sharon and his Cabinet have correctly interpreted the public’s desire to see Palestinians punished and to see Israelis’ sense of personal security restored, said professor Ephraim Yaar, one of the directors of the Peace Index Project. The political mistake, Yaar said, lies in the government’s unwillingness to couple harsh military action with a diplomatic initiative.

“Deep in their hearts, Israelis know that military actions by themselves will not be effective,” Yaar said. “The preferred option is negotiations with the Palestinians--that is why we see a large majority in our polls supporting the resumption of talks. But at the same time, an even larger majority don’t believe talks can be resumed or will lead to tangible results. This is the psychological predicament of the Israelis.”