Lebanon-style dissent and despondency returns

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Background / Lebanon-style dissent and despondency returns

The Israeli death toll in the war with the Palestinians this week passed 600, the figure at which the casualties incurred in then defense minister Ariel Sharon's Lebanon war proved too much for his prime minister, Menachem Begin, to bear.

For Israelis, a blitz of terror attacks, and, in their wake, a long march of funerals and memorial tributes, has focused mounting pressure on Sharon and Defense Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer to find some way - any way - to staunch the violence and extricate the country from the quicksand of another endless war, a conflict that has convinced some former generals that the time has come to separate physically from the Palestinians.

Reserve brigadier general Danny Rothschild dismissed a statement Sunday by Ben-Eliezer claiming that the security forces, currently re-occupying the major cities of the West Bank, were making progress in battling terror.

"Whoever thinks that sitting in Nablus and Jenin and Ramallah will solve the problem - we sat there for 35 years and the problem wasn't solved," said Rothschild, a former Israeli military policy chief for the territories. "The assumption was wrong then, and it's wrong today."

Even avowed government supporters who had pledged to stand by Sharon, said Monday that the prime minister had failed to crush terror, and that Israel was headed for more of the same.

In contrast to Begin, for whom the burden of 600 Israeli dead in Lebanon caused him to flee the public eye until the end of his days, "Ariel Sharon, the man who sprinkled empty promises during the [2000] election campaign that he would restore security to our homes, our streets, our leisure spots and the buses we ride... continues on as usual," wrote Amnon Dankner, who became editor of Ma'ariv in part in expectation that the paper would take a pro-government line.

"What country would allow its citizens to be slaughtered every place they walk or sit, year after year, month after month, day after day?" Dankner demanded, making clear that he believed that Sharon's failure to push the building of a long-planned security fence along the border of the West Bank had cost the lives of Israelis killed by suicide bombers who crossed the open frontier with impunity.

Indeed, the fence project, strongly endorsed by police and army commanders, seemed stalled in its tracks. Dani Atar, the chairman of a group of officials of towns and villages along the Green Line border with the West Bank said Monday that after three months of ostensible work, only 40 meters of the fence had gone up. Both Atar and Dankner pointed the finger of blame at the government for allowing rightists to affect the speed of the construction and the planning of the fence, which hawks fear could become a permanent border with a future independent Palestinian state.

"No one is deluding himself that temporarily staying in the cities of the territories will end terror," remarks Ha'aretz military commentator Amos Harel. "For years, the political echelon has ducked the issue of putting up the fence." As for new and untried ways to combat violence, the results of a closely-watched overnight powwow between Ben-Eliezer and the heads of the IDF and Shin Bet showed "there aren't many new ideas left."

Referring to plans to demolish the family homes and exile the relatives of suicide bombers, reserve major general Danny Yatom, a former overall commander of the West Bank and prime ministerial advisor, said "These measures can help, to a very limited extent. I took thses steps when I was OC Central Command, we demolished homes, uprooted tress, and even in a few cases, exiled family members from one side of the West Bank to the other."

But he added that the effect on terror would not be major. "It will not be effective unless there are diplomatic steps in parallel, and one of the steps is unilateral separation from the Palestinians."

Mourners across Israel could take little comfort from the announcement that IDF forces had seized the Hamas handler that ordered a suicide bomber to his death Sunday, killing nine people and wounding scores. Nor were there many Israelis with high expectations of a sudden travel ban on Arabs in the northern West Bank.

There were some, in fact, who found more chilling than reassuring a disclosure by the notoriously gregarious defense minister that the security forces had intercepted and now held some 140 men and women suicide bombers.

The sudden cyclical throttlehold of violence dramatically demonstrated why the conflict has defied all efforts to end it.

Two weeks ago, amid rumors of back-channel peace talks, Sharon and Ben-Eliezer unleashed an F-16 warplane attack on a Gaza safe house sheltering Salah Shehadeh, commander of the military wing of the Islamic Hamas, which has sworn to see the Jewish state through to the embattled nation's demise.

Shehadeh and a deputy were killed in the air raid, but the 1,000-pound bomb also killed 11 children and a number of adult non-combatants. Hamas pledged to avenge the killing many fold, and, as in a number of past Israeli assassinations, the unbending militant group was as good as its word.

Since then, no fewer than 27 people have been killed in countless attacks, 13 of them in five attacks Sunday and the predawn hours of Monday.

Asked if there was a tie between the Shehadeh assassination and a subsequent increase in terror attacks - a pattern often seen in the past - "senior Shin Bet and IDF officials maintain that there is no connection between the two, that the motivation of terror organizations is sky-high in any case, so attacks always were and will be, no matter who is 'liquidated' and 'taken out of the game'", Harel says.

"But if you examine a number of past cases, in practice, in all of the cases we have seen a massive increase in the number of terror alerts and in the number of attacks themselves. This cannot be ignored, even if the army, the political echelon, and the Shin Bet tend to deny the issue."

In any case, Rothschild, head of the Council for Peace and Security, a group of former generals and other security brass, said a spate of recent ambush killings in the West Bank proved that building a fence alone would not be enough. "We must put up the fence, but we must also dismantle some of the isolated settlements, otherwise we are exposing those [Israelis] on the other side of the fence to murderous terror attacks.

As Israel began the process of recovering from the wave of attacks, and as it braced for more, Army Radio, long one of the surest barometers of the country's mood, played songs of melancholy and nostalgia.

In an echo of the fierce ambivalence that characterized the war in Lebanon and the Israelis that fought in the 18-year conflict, the radio played a song written and performed by army sergeant Omri Goldin, 20, commended by his unit as an outstanding soldier and by admirers as a member of a heavy metal band. Goldin was killed Sunday as he rode the bus from his Galilee village to his base in Safed.

"Charred corpses lie everyplace, the fire that is burning has taken over the masses," Goldin sang.

"The streets are deserted, there's horror on every corner, the day the nation was razed to ruins.

"The stage is suddenly painted red, no one ever expected the awful day, the religious preachers hadn't the time to say a prayer, the day the nation was razed to ruins."

_{By Bradley Burston, Ha'aretz Correspondent}

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