Thursday, Jul 24, 2008
A hard-hitting new book by two mainstream Israeli journalists blames both Sharon and Arafat for the bloody stalemate that grips the Holy Land.
Oct 6, 2004 | True to their violent form, Palestinians and Israelis marked the fourth anniversary of their stalemated war with a fresh round of fighting, this time in the Gaza area. As they await the implementation of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's plan to withdraw forces and settlements from the Gaza Strip, scheduled for next year, both sides are trying to improve their military stance. The Palestinians have been relentlessly firing homemade Qassam rockets into the Israeli border town of Sderot, killing two small children last Wednesday. Israeli reaction was fierce: Tanks and infantry captured the northern outskirts of Gaza, aiming to drive the rocket launchers out of their effective five-mile range. They killed at least 75 Palestinians, mostly suspected militants but also a number of children and unarmed people, and destroyed many houses in the process.
The real battle is to frame the way the proposed Israeli "disengagement" is seen. Sharon has vowed not to evacuate the settlements "under fire," knowing that a failure to stop the rain of rockets could derail his plan and strengthen the settler opposition. After all, what's the point in withdrawing if the threat from Gaza remains? Therefore, he demanded a stronger military response in order to "change the situation in Gaza." Spending the Jewish Sukkot holiday in his farm close to the war zone, Sharon could hear the sounds of battle while talking to his chiefs of security and intelligence. Their plan has a catch in it, however. In order to drive the Qassam rockets out of range, Israel would have to occupy a "security zone" in Gaza, contrary to its withdrawal plans. This inherent paradox has yet to be resolved.
The Palestinians, for their part, are determined to show that Israel lost the battle in Gaza and ran away. This could prove a major achievement for their four-year-old intifada, or uprising, which so far has brought mostly misery, poverty and death to the embattled inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza. An Israeli flight would undoubtedly boost the morale on the Palestinian side. Sharon will try to prevent his enemy from celebrating.
After the first four years, there is still a strong consensus on both sides to keep the war going. Peaceful alternatives have long been forgotten. America, sunk deep in the Iraq quagmire, has given up even a pretense of interest and all but waived its nominal support for a Palestinian state. Both Sharon and Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader, are fighting for political survival, rather than seeking a way out of the mess.
But has this catastrophe been inevitable? A new book (in Hebrew), "The Seventh War: How We Won and Why We Lost the War With the Palestinians," depicts the crisis as a tragedy of mutual miscalculations, lost opportunities and overreacting. The authors, Amos Harel, the military correspondent of Haaretz newspaper (full disclosure: Harel is a friend and colleague), and Avi Isacharoff, the Arab affairs correspondent of Israel's state-owned radio network, have covered the conflict from its first day, when Sharon, then the opposition leader, visited the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, the holiest, most contested site in the embattled land, prompting widespread Palestinian demonstrations. For the book, they interviewed a wide range of ministers, commanders and warriors on both sides, including jailed Palestinian ringleaders who had sent suicide bombers on their murderous missions. However, rich as it is with details and analyses of what went wrong, their book offers no clue to what could have been done to lead the duelers out of their self-created morass.
Harel and Isacharoff blame both sides. They reject the official Israeli narrative, which charges Arafat with planning and launching the intifada after rejecting Israel's "generous offer" at the failed Camp David summit of summer 2000. They write that Israel failed to produce "convincing evidence" that Arafat "gave instructions to pour fuel on the fire," or evidence linking him directly to suicide attacks on Israelis. But they have few positive words for the Palestinian leader. "When Sharon came atop the Temple Mount and the riots erupted, the Rais [Arafat] seized the opportunity. He made no effort to halt the violence, and quickly contributed to its spreading. In later stages, he lost control over the terror offensive, but it hasn't bothered him, as long as the blame could be put on Israel, and as long as no unreasonable concessions, in his view, were imposed upon him."
Several weeks into the conflict, the lines of battle were drawn, while negotiations and high-level talks went on in the background. The turning point, which led to ever growing escalation, came in early 2001. Israelis elected Sharon, the old warrior, to crush the intifada. Their rivals responded with a wave of suicide attacks across the "Green Line," that is, inside pre-1967 Israel. In hindsight, Harel and Isacharoff write, this was the Palestinians' major blunder. "Had they focused their struggle in the [occupied] territories -- hitting at soldiers and settlers there -- there might have been a chance to achieve their hope of turning the West Bank and Gaza quickly into a second Lebanon, showing the casualties as the price of occupation and prompting a deep debate in Israel over the need and ability to hold the territories." When the Palestinians hit at the Israeli cities, Israelis were convinced that this was a war of existence and gave wide support for the Sharon government's tough counterterrorism measures.
Using exaggerated force has been the Israelis' largest sin, according to "The Seventh War." Time and again, Israel relied upon its military might and ignored opportunities to calm the fighting, while failing to win a decisive victory over the Palestinians.
The IDF, Israel's military, prepared itself thoroughly for the violent contest. Scarred by two humiliating experiences -- the "tunnel incidents" in 1996, when Palestinian policemen used their weapons against Israelis, and the unilateral withdrawal from South Lebanon in May 2000 -- the IDF command, led by generals Shaul Mofaz (first as chief of staff and, later, defense minister) and Moshe Yaalon (currently the chief of staff), vowed to win the next round. The preparations were incomplete, however, as the military anticipated shooting exchanges in the West Bank and Gaza, rather than suicide attacks on the Israeli rear. Mofaz trained his officers to emerge victorious from every encounter with the other side. Since the political directive in the first days banned the IDF from capturing Palestinian-ruled areas, the army had to rely on heavy fire, rather than on maneuvering in enemy territory. The outcome was the killing of many Palestinians. "Fire was used widely, and not always wisely," Harel and Isacharoff write. Had the military preparations turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy, fueling the conflict rather than suppressing it? The authors quote ex-general Zvika Fogel, formerly No. 2 in the IDF Southern Command, who said, "We created such high expectations and such a low threshold for response among the soldiers, until it appears as if we were waiting for an excuse." According to Fogel, the IDF exaggerated the Palestinian threat, and its actions encouraged the other side's violent actions.
Among many scoops in their book, Harel and Isacharoff disclose that Sharon and Arafat maintained a back channel through their aides, even before the 2001 Israeli elections. Sharon's confidant, Dov Weisglass, watched the exit polls together with Muhammad Rashid, Arafat's financier and close advisor. After Sharon's victory, the aides worked out a plan to resume negotiations, including a first meeting of the leaders. According to a senior Palestinian source, it was Arafat who put off the proposed summit, believing that meeting Sharon would harm his stance among his Arab counterparts.
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