Death grip

"The Seventh War" portrays Sharon as a master tactician who never had a serious strategy to end the war. Caught up in his old days as a battalion and regional commander, it took him a while to get used to modern military lingo and operations. But just as he did when he wore a uniform, Sharon as national leader has always relied on force to achieve his goals.

If the Palestinians' weapon of choice was suicide bombers -- blowing themselves up in Israeli buses, cafes, shopping malls and hotels, killing scores of civilians -- the Israelis' was "targeted assassinations" of suspected terrorists and terrorist leaders, mostly from the air. The authors quote an Israeli minister who took part in the decision making as saying, "Sharon saw himself as the greatest warrior against terror, and viewed the 'eliminations' as the embodiment of the war." They add: "Sharon begged the IDF and the Shabak [Israel's security service] to step up the pace of assassinations. Since in his old age he had trouble falling asleep, his aides got used to receiving calls at 3 a.m. from his house: 'I'm hearing the sound of helicopters above the farm. Does it mean that good news from Gaza can be expected?'"

The authors argue that assassinations are not wrong in principle and may sometimes achieve tactical results such as intercepting experienced bomb makers and disrupting the command structure of terrorist groups like Hamas. However, they believe that Israel under Sharon has overused this method without assessing its consequences properly, and sometimes without regard for civilian lives. Harel and Isacharoff quote senior military officers who got the impression that their political masters often ordered assassinations after Palestinian attacks in order to please an angry public. Moreover, once a Palestinian operative has entered the Israeli hit list, his killing becomes a matter of operational opportunity, rather than a serious calculation of pros and cons.

The worst example of ill-timed, ill-thought assassination was the killing of Raed Karmi, a Fatah leader in the West Bank town of Tul Karm, in January 2002. The 28-year-old Karmi was indisputably a terrorist, a charismatic rising star of the intifada, whose group killed 12 Israeli soldiers and civilians. Tracking him down became an obsession with IDF and Shabak commanders, who followed him to his weakest point: a daily visit to one of his lovers, a married woman. An explosive charge was hidden in a cemetery wall on the route Karmi took to see her and detonated as he passed, killing Karmi on the spot. After his assassination, widely seen today as a tragic mistake, all hell broke loose. The Palestinians ended a fragile cease-fire, launching a wave of suicide attacks into Israel. The Fatah, Arafat's mainstream organization, joined the Islamic groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad in attacks inside Israel. The Palestinian offensive prompted Israel to launch its reoccupation campaign in the West Bank, in spring 2002, which effectively ended the shaky rule of Arafat's Palestinian Authority, only stopping short of expelling the old leader, who has been confined ever since to his ruined headquarters in Ramallah.

The other significant outcome of the 2002 suicide offensive was the creation of the Israeli "security barrier" -- also called, depending on one's political position, a fence or an "apartheid wall" -- in the West Bank. Here again, the authors criticize Sharon's decision making. They accuse him of responding too late to a public demand to build a life-saving project, and then pushing the barrier too deep into the West Bank, ignoring the needs of the Palestinian population and raising severe international and judicial criticism. According to the book, Sharon personally drew the barrier's route, relying on his intimate knowledge of the West Bank terrain, together with the army colonel who heads the project's design, thus bypassing the entire chain of command between them. But despite its failures, the barrier succeeded in drastically reducing terror attacks along its built-up parts.

The worst Israeli folly, according to "The Seventh War," came in summer 2003, when Sharon's timidity and hesitation contributed to the failure of Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), the short-term Palestinian premier. Abu Mazen, an open critic of Arafat and the violent intifada, offered great hope for a change: He was backed by the Bush administration and recognized as a partner even by Sharon. It's true that he was undermined by Arafat, but the Sharon government did not lend him a helping hand either. The Israeli leader did not offer him even a shred of the settlement-removal plan he is now offering unilaterally in his disengagement plan. Had he done so then, the entire political dynamic could have shifted. Now, Sharon's Gaza plan is seen by the Palestinians as a ruse, designed to ensure that Israel maintains permanent control over its settlements in the larger and more important West Bank.

"Both sides appear to suffer from a similar blindness," Harel and Isacharoff write. "They watch the adversary's actions far more meticulously than their own. Israel sees its actions as necessary responses for terror, but ignores their damage -- the killed civilians, the travel restrictions, the spread of settlements. The Palestinians interpret any Israeli move as a scheme to dispossess them from their land, without recognizing the influence of terror, viewing their actions as mere response and defense against the occupation."

The authors devote a special chapter to Israeli war abuses, especially in killing innocent civilians. They depict a widespread disregard for Palestinian lives in the ranks of the IDF. The Israeli military and police still have no useful non-lethal means to dispel demonstrators; instead they use assault rifles, sniper rifles and even tanks, with deadly outcomes. The IDF largely refrains from investigating the deaths of Palestinians, and the high command has little control over the lower echelons in the field. Every few months, the Israeli media reports about an abuse of innocent Palestinians. The military asserts that these are exceptions, but according to "The Seventh War," it is a common phenomenon. "Soldiers view violence against Palestinians as almost obvious," they write. A research by an IDF field psychologist found that "soldiers' violence against Palestinians is a normative phenomenon that should be recognized and understood ... The army refrains from dealing with it."

The authors' most wrenching interview was with "K," a recently released infantry conscript, who served two and a half years in Gaza, lost two close friends, and killed several Palestinians, one of them a civilian. "I will carry it with me for years. The service changed me, made me nervous and restless," he told them. "When I meet friends from my company we talk about everything but what it did to us. Every day we were hit by shooting, bombs and mortars. I did what I did to defend Israeli civilians who needed protection there [the settlers]. Now everybody talks about withdrawal. Where were you three years ago? It drives me crazy. What were we looking for in Gaza even then?"

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