|
|
|
|
|
|
IS PEACE IN PALESTINE A PIPEDREAM OF THE
REPRESSED???
Sharon's strangulation strategy
Israel is using economic pressure to force the Palestinians to cry uncle.
But will a humanitarian crisis in the occupied territories spoil the plan?
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Aluf Benn
July 30, 2002 | Gen. Moshe ("Bogy") Ya'alon is the new chief of staff of
the Israeli military, in charge of the country's war against the
Palestinians. Upon taking command on July 9, the former special-operations
officer pledged "not to allow the Palestinians any sense of achievement"
from using terror. Determined to outdo his hawkish predecessor, Gen. Shaul
Mofaz, "Bogy" moved quickly to escalate the fight. But his initiative
backfired, and taught the general a hard lesson about the political
constraints on waging war in the region.
Following an attack on a bus near the West Bank settlement of Immanuel, on
July 16, which killed nine Israelis, the army detained 21 family members of
the alleged planners of the attack, planning to expel them to Gaza. Israeli
security authorities have long claimed that the only way to deter future
Palestinian suicide bombers is by punishing their families by expulsion. The
idea of expelling families of terrorists has been floated several times
during the latest conflict, now 22 months old, but never implemented.
(Israel has expelled many Palestinian activists in the past, but
discontinued the policy after the Rabin government deported 400 Hamas
leaders to Lebanon for a year in late 1992.) This time, after the military
had difficulty catching the perpetrators of the bus attack after a two-day
chase, Ya'alon launched his forces against the families. Their homes were
demolished -- a tactic frequently used by the IDF against the families of
Palestinian militants -- and they were held waiting for expulsion. But
Israel's attorney general, Elyakim Rubinstein, ruled that only relatives who
had knowledge of or took part in the bombing could be expelled, and that
they had the right to appeal. This, of course, stopped the measure -- since
if Israel had evidence against them, they could be tried in a regular
judicial proceeding, and the whole idea was to quickly expel as many family
members as possible. Enthusiasm for the measure petered out and died after
the P.R. disaster of the Shehada strike, and the military quietly released
some of those detained.
A few days later, Israel sent an F-16 to drop a one-ton bomb on the Gaza
house of Saleh Shehada, the leader of the military wing of Hamas, the
Islamic terror organization that has been Israel's bitterest enemy for over
a decade. Shehada was killed, all right, but so was another Hamas operative
and 16 civilians, including 10 children, most of them in adjoining buildings
destroyed by the enormous blast. More than 150 civilians in the crowded
neighborhood were also wounded. Shehada had long been at the top of Israel's
assassinations list, and no fewer than eight hits had been planned, but
again and again Israel postponed killing him because he was surrounded by
civilians and family members. But on Monday, July 22, Prime Minister Ariel
Sharon authorized the operation, and the pilot dropped his deadly bomb on
the Gaza neighborhood. Sharon initially hailed the attack as a "most
successful operation," but the political firestorm that followed forced him
to backtrack. Sharon and Defense Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer were quick to
blame the military and intelligence for the civilian deaths. Ya'alon, for
his part, also directed the responsibility downward, at the anonymous air
force officers who planned the bombing and recommended the heavy weapon.
These expressions of regret and buck passing, however, convinced few
Israelis: Dropping a 2,000-pound bomb in a teeming Gaza neighborhood was
guaranteed to produce heavy civilian casualties, intelligence reports or no
intelligence reports. Israel's leading commentator on military affairs,
Ze'ev Schiff, wrote in Ha'aretz that what drove the IDF to abandon its
minimize-civilian-casualties policy was rage and frustration at the
constraints imposed on it.
"Anyone who decides to drop a one-ton bomb in the heart of a
densely-populated area in order to kill one murderer is undoubtedly very
angry at the attacks carried out on Israeli civilians and very frustrated
because of the way in which the war is being conducted," Schiff wrote. "And,
indeed, the Israel Defense Forces is angry in a way that it has never been
angry before -- in any previous war. The result is that when the location of
the head of the military wing of Hamas becomes known, the decision not to
let him slip away is made, whatever the consequences."
With help from the White House, Israel was able to ride out the wave of
international criticism that followed the Gaza bombing. Nevertheless, the
events of the past three weeks have showed the Israeli leadership that there
are no shortcuts to winning the war.
Sharon and Ya'alon are aiming for a decisive victory over their Palestinian
adversaries. Two weeks ago, the prime minister set out his terms for ending
the war in a four-page letter to Secretary of State Colin Powell and other
world leaders. In the letter, Sharon made clear that Israel would not settle
for a cease-fire, as it did last year, but is demanding that Palestinian
leader Yasser Arafat be ousted and "his armed gangs" turned into a new
security force that would fight terror in earnest. Until such a force takes
control, Israel will keep its forces in the West Bank cities it recaptured
last month. Officials in Sharon's office said this week that these demands
remain unchanged.
Israel's strategic weapon in this war is economic pressure, exercised
through sieges, roadblocks and curfews. It is not a new concept in prolonged
wars. The blockade of Germany won World War I for the Allies, after four
years of indecisive, bloody attrition in the trenches. In the
Israeli-Palestinian context, the economic siege is meant to break the
Palestinians' will to fight and cause them to turn their anger on their
leader, Arafat, who cannot provide them with food and work, let alone
political independence. In a statement issued on Sunday, Sharon said:
"Israel is sorry for the distress brought on the Palestinian people due to
their corrupt and irresponsible leadership. We will seek every possible way,
under security constraints, to ease the life of Palestinians not involved in
terrorism." The two words "security constraints" tell the whole story.
From the Israeli viewpoint, the combined pressure of reoccupation, economic
hardship and American calls to replace Arafat is slowly working. Cracks are
appearing in the Palestinian front, and there is a growing effort to call a
cease-fire by the main fighting organizations, Tanzim and Hamas, mediated by
the European Union's security representative in the West Bank, the Briton
Alistair Crook. Another effort involves talks between the P.A. leaders and
the different Palestinian factions. The Tanzim leadership was supposed to
publish such a call, but it was halted by the Gaza bombing last week.
Nevertheless, these efforts have continued despite the Israeli attack.
The reports of an imminent cease-fire were largely dismissed by the Israeli
side as both premature and insufficient. "All this talking has nothing to do
with us, and our sources say it's not serious. And even if they succeeded,
and talks led to a cease-fire announcement, it would not come close to our
demands," a senior official at the prime minister's office told me. His view
is widely shared throughout the Israeli government and the military. Even
Shimon Peres' foreign ministry accepts it. A senior official there told me
that Israel could not accept deals between the P.A. and the terror groups
that would allow them to keep their weapons and build up forces for the next
stage of confrontation. "We must insist on a single armed force under the
P.A., and on dismantling Hamas and its likes," the foreign ministry official
said. Seeing the other side's weakness, the Israelis are trying to hold to
their positions and force the Palestinians to surrender.
Sharon's strategy, however, is far from being risk-free. Indeed, it has
three major weaknesses. First, it risks causing a severe humanitarian crisis
in the Palestinian territories, which could bring about strong international
pressure on Israel to back off. Second, it is deliberately obscure on the
"day after" question: What would happen if the Palestinians surrendered,
fired their leader and arrested all the terror activists, as Israel demands?
And last, the Israeli government itself is living on borrowed time,
threatened by a growing economic and social crisis and political discontent.
The humanitarian issue is the most pressing. Alarmed by reports on
malnutrition, massive poverty and collapsing health services in the
territories, the Bush administration pressured Sharon to do something.
Despite its strong backing for Sharon's policies, the White House does not
want to share the blame with its ally for Palestinian hunger or disease. The
fate of the Palestinian population has been a constant Bush talking point
with Sharon since last year, but the Israeli leader has always managed to
brush the issue aside. This time, however, the Americans lost patience.
Last Monday, hours before the fatal Gaza bombing, three of Sharon's closest
confidants came to Washington to meet with Powell and National Security
Advisor Condoleezza Rice. According to Israeli sources, the Americans
promised to maintain their Arafat-must-go line. But when the conversation
turned to the humanitarian issue, the tone changed. Powell and Rice told
their interlocutors: "We are fed up with your promises, and want to see some
movement." Israel was asked to ease restrictions on the movement of
Palestinian people and supplies, to improve access to health services and,
most crucially, to transfer frozen Palestinian tax funds to the new P.A.
finance minister, Salem Fayed.
The money issue has been the most contentious. Under the Oslo agreements,
Israel collects indirect taxes and tariffs for the P.A. After the intifada
broke out in 2000, however, the Israeli government stopped the payments,
pledging "not to pay the enemy" and "not to fund terrorism." Despite
recurring requests by various parties to pay the Palestinians their money,
Israel balked, and has accumulated 2.1 billion shekels (about $440 million),
according to Israeli treasury data.
As the U.S. embraced the Israeli idea of "reforming" the Palestinian
Authority, and Arafat promptly appointed Fayed -- an economist with long
experience in international organizations -- as his new finance minister,
Daniel Kurtzer, the American ambassador in Tel Aviv, came up with an idea:
Israel would transfer 10 percent of the frozen money to Fayed, to help him
promote reform. For his part, the new minister presented an ambitious plan
to fix the P.A.'s accounting problems. He pledged to maintain a single bank
account, and personally authorize incoming and outgoing payments. There
would be no more handwritten notes from Arafat to pay this or that
operative.
Sharon balked. He demanded an American-supervised "mechanism" to ensure that
the money would not end up in terrorists' pockets. Israeli intelligence
reports say that Fayed has good intentions, but Arafat and his cronies keep
him in the dark and won't tell him about their secret funds. After the Gaza
P.R. debacle, however, Sharon was in a weaker position with the U.S., and
was forced to trim his sails. He quickly authorized the treasury to give
Fayed 210 million shekels (about $40 million) in three payments, the first
payment of which was made Monday. Responding to another American request, he
appointed Peres as the Israeli coordinator of humanitarian and other
assistance to the Palestinians.
"We must work to prevent a humanitarian disaster," Ambassador Kurtzer told a
meeting of international and Israeli officials, headed by Peres, last
Thursday. The American envoy proposed that Israel take steps "to improve the
atmosphere," such as freezing construction in the settlements and removing
illegal "outposts" in the West Bank. Sharon ignored these proposals, but on
Sunday he granted Kurtzer a rare meeting, and presented him with a list of
Israeli "relief measures" for impoverished Palestinians. Some of them are
mainly for show: Sharon agreed to issue 5,000 more work permits for
Palestinians in Israel, raising the total number to 12,000. The problem is
that these quotas remain unfulfilled due to "security limitations" and thus
serve mostly as a P.R. tool.
Sharon is clearly trying to get the Americans off his back while making as
few concessions as possible. Will his tightrope act succeed? "We have to
walk a very fine line," a military official told me. "While there is no
hunger in the territories, there is serious economic distress, which speeds
the progress toward a cease-fire and the marginalizing of Arafat, who was
not involved in the recent internal discussions between the factions. At the
same time, if the situation grows worse, it might lead to international
pressure on us and bring Arafat back to the picture."
And what if the Israeli pressure succeeds, and the Palestinians sign on
Sharon's surrender terms? Bush's Mideast speech of June 24 is the common
agenda of everybody involved. It calls for creation of a Palestinian state
within three years in two stages, provisional and final. Sharon accepted,
somewhat grudgingly, the principles laid out in the speech. He has refrained
from talking about a Palestinian state, which is a dirty word in his Likud
Party vocabulary. His aides prefer to promise economic relief in return for
better security. Peres, on the other hand, believes that Israel must make
some concessions to the other side. But the foreign minister likes his job,
and is not going to challenge Sharon over policy. He keeps whatever
criticism and frustration he has to well-guarded off-the-record remarks.
Peres is content with his narrow mandate: to talk with P.A. officials and
make occasional foreign trips to explain Sharon's policies. On Thursday he
visits Washington, a few days ahead of a Palestinian delegation.
The prime minister's worries are on other political fronts. The Labor Party,
his hitherto docile coalition partner, is showing growing signs of
disintegration. Its leader, Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, is a very
efficient political operator, but he lacks public stance as a leader. As a
result, he is finding it hard to fill cabinet posts left open by resigning
ministers. Pressures on Labor to leave the coalition are increasing, as
Fuad's Labor adversaries take aim at his weakest ideological point, his
"sticking to the minister's chair."
As in America, the key month in the Israeli political calendar is November.
That's when Ben-Eliezer will face Haim Ramon in the labor primaries, and
Sharon will face Binyamin Netanyahu's challenge at the Likud conference.
Until then, and as long as there are no major terror attacks, the political
debate will focus on the crumbling economy. The treasury presented a deeply
cut budget for 2003, which will be debated at the cabinet and Knesset until
December. Growing unemployment and weakened welfare services have made the
public more aware than before of the economic cost of the war. Last year,
the government claimed that the conflict was but one factor in the Israeli
economy's woes, along with the global downturn and the high-tech collapse.
But these excuses no longer work, and despite Sharon's overall high approval
rating, he receives very poor marks on his economic leadership.
David Levy, one of Israel's veteran politicians who has zigzagged between
both political camps in recent years, joined Sharon's cabinet in the spring,
when Israel launched its West Bank offensive. He submitted his resignation
on Sunday, citing criticism of Sharon's economic policy and saying he had
been left out of decision making. In the past, Levy's resignations were a
reliable sign of the current prime minister's imminent downfall. This time,
Sharon managed to contain the damage, and the media presented Levy as a
has-been.
As it now appears, Sharon will be able to hold onto power. Despite its
economic problems, Israel is still far more prosperous than its rivals, and
can withstand a downturn for a longer period. On the other hand, Israelis
want prosperity. And the younger generation, which is being forced to bear
the burden of the war effort as conscripts and combat reservists, sees
little hope in the future. Sharon, therefore, does not have unlimited time.
Like Ya'alon, he needs to win the war before economic and political trouble
sinks him.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
About the writer
Aluf Benn is diplomatic correspondent of the Israeli daily Ha'aretz.
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2002/07/30/economic/print.html
- - - - - - - - - - - -
An extract from Islami_Foundation
| |
|
|
|
|
|