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March 8, 2002
Time for stronger action
Editorial
According to the Voice of Palestine‚ the terrorist who detonated
himself in a crowd of women and babies outside a synagogue in Jerusalem
on Saturday night carried out "an operation of heroic martyrdom."
Israel is not helpless in the face of this barbarism, but acting
helplessly will surely cause terror to continue and to escalate.
It is ironic - and dangerous - that Israel under Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon has come to symbolize helplessness in the face of terrorism.
If there were anything that Israel stood for in the mind of the
world, it was a scrappy little country that would take no guff.
Israel would go anywhere and do anything to fight terrorism and
rescue Jews.
In the past, with the raid on Entebbe, the strike on Iraq's Osirak
reactor, and the crushing of the PLO mini-state in Lebanon, Israel
muscularly rejected the notion that international law protected
terrorists and tyrants.
At those times, other western nations, including the United States,
clucked in disapproval. Now the tables have turned. It is the United
States that has boldly rejected the right of dangerous regimes to
plot their next atrocity with impunity, and has begun, in Secretary
of Defence Donald Rumsfeld's phrase, to "lean forward"
in defending itself.
While Israel does not have to reclaim the lead in the war on terrorism
from the United States, it cannot afford to fall behind. The cardinal
rule of the post-Sept. 11 world order being established by U.S.
President George W. Bush is that the price of supporting terrorism
is regime change. In the case of Yasser Arafat, Sharon and Bush
hoped they could make a temporary exception, in order to go after
an even bigger fish - Saddam Hussein. But maintaining a pre-Sept.
11 enclave of tolerance for terrorism, even temporarily, does not
contribute to this larger fight and, in fact, could threaten it.
At the moment, Israel's media are rife with speculation that the
Israel Defence Force's operations in two Palestinian refugee camps
"caused" a resumption of suicide attacks in Israel and
firing on the Jerusalem neighborhood of Gilo. But the question is
not what Palestinian escalation is arbitrarily tied to what Israeli
action, but why the Palestinians feel such freedom to escalate in
the first place.
The dirty little secret of Israel's war on terrorism is that Israel
is not systematically threatening what matters most to Yasser Arafat:
the illegal army that maintains his control. Israel has hesitated
because this army (called "police") has participated in
terrorism only on a freelance basis and Israel still hopes that
someday it will be used to disarm Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
It is understandable that Israel has been very reluctant to truly
engage the Palestinian forces that have generally stayed out of
attacks on Israelis. This quiet bargain, however, is no longer tenable.
Israel must present Arafat and the more "moderate" commanders
under him with a "use it or lose it" dilemma: Either they
use their forces to end terrorism or they will come under attack.
If the Palestinian side believes that the forces that are the backbone
of the Palestinian Authority and Arafat personally are threatened,
there will be a sudden Palestinian interest in a real ceasefire
with Israel.
The many voices claiming that there is no military solution are
dead wrong. The opposite is much closer to the truth. The non-military
solution has another name: it is called surrender. Surrender - or
as Yossi Sarid puts it, "only ending the occupation will end
terrorism" - will not bring peace.
Fleeing the territories as Israel fled Lebanon will only bring an
even more intractable war. The only way we can safely leave some
of the disputed territories is by agreement - after defeating those
who are attacking us. Defeating our attackers means proving that
they have no military solution and that their only alternative is
an arrangement compatible with Israel's security.
All of this was true before Sept. 11, but it is even more so afterward.
In the first few weeks after the attack on America, Israelis were
appalled when it seemed that our conflict might be treated as an
exception to the ban on regimes that harbor terrorism. Bush has
since made it clear that there is no such exception, but Israel's
actions say otherwise. Sharon must say to Bush that he did his best
to refrain from threatening Arafat's power, but granting immunity
to Arafat's regime has backfired. The longer Arafat is treated as
an exception to the new world order, the harder it will be establish
that order, and the greater the threat to both Israel and the United
States.
- Jerusalem Post
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