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Jewish World Review Oct. 15, 2002 / 9 Mar-Cheshvan, 5763
JERUSALEM DIARIST
United State
http://www.jewishworldreview.com |
About 18 months ago, when Israeli soldiers entered the village of Beit Hanoun, several hundred meters over
the Gaza border, the Bush administration forced them towithdraw in disgrace within 24 hours. But last
week, in pulling back several hundred meters from Yasser Arafat's devastated Ramallah compound after 10
days of siege, Ariel Sharon won praise not only from George Bush but from Vladimir Putin and even the UN's
Middle East envoy, Terje Roed-Larsen. The distance between Beit Hanoun and Ramallah is a measure of how
far Israel has come - and how far it's willing to go - in its war against terror.
Few here are denying that the siege was a fiasco. Arafat was able to once again play the role of survivor,
while Israel was forced to rescind its "non-negotiable" demand for the surrender of terrorists hiding in his
headquarters. The decision to besiege Arafat and ignore America's diplomatic needs resulted from a rare
relapse into recklessness by Sharon and a less rare display of cowardice by Labor Party ministers afraid to
challenge the prime minister even when they suspect he's wrong. But it also resulted from a more positive
impulse: a growing determination by the army to win the war against terrorism.
During the first Intifada, in the late '80s, then-Chief of Staff Dan Shomron established what became the
IDF's military doctrine: A politically divided Israel cannot win against a popular Palestinian uprising. That
conclusion was partly responsible for the decision by the army's general staff to endorse the Oslo peace
process and even participate in quasi-political negotiations with the Palestinians.
Now though, a relatively united Israel is confronting not a popular Palestinian uprising but a terrorist war.
And the army is challenging Israelis to back its new agenda: victory. The army doesn't define "victory" in purely
military terms. While there have been unmistakable successes - the rate of terrorist attacks have substantially
dropped since the first reoccupation of the territories six months ago, and the army now claims there are more
explosives belts available than suicide bombers -none of the senior commanders believe it's possible to
end all attacks by military means. Even Sharon acknowledged, in an interview this month with the Jerusalem
Post, that there can be no ultimate military victory against the Palestinians, only a political solution. Instead, the
army has come to see victory in terms of shaping that political solution - convincing the Palestinians, through
military pressure, that Israeli society can't be defeated or coerced and that terror will produce no tangible
gains.
"There is no knockout blow, but there is an accumulation of small military victories that can create the
conditions for a political victory," says Dan Schueftan, a Middle East expert close to the military establishment.
"The end goal is Palestinian acknowledgment that they've endured all this suffering for absolutely nothing. The
interim goal is to make the terrorists realize that there is nowhere to hide."
The IDF's new chief of staff, Moshe "Boogie" Ya'alon, who assumed command three months ago, defines
the process as a battle for the restoration of Israeli deterrence, which has been gradually eroded over the last
two decades by a series of Israeli military stalemates and defeats. Ya'alon has declared war on the "spider
web" theory - the notion, propounded by Hizbollah's secretary-general Sheikh Hassan Nassrallah, that Israel,
like a spider web, appears sturdy but is in fact fragile because its people have lost the will to
fight.Ya'alon warns that failure to defeat that perception, encouraged by Israel's flight from southern
Lebanon two years ago, will expose the Jewish state to ongoing terrorist blackmail and endless Palestinian
demands and make peace impossible.
Restoring deterrence, he argues, depends on strengthening Israeli resolve against the temptation of easy
solutions, such as unilateral withdrawal from the territories. And so rather than leave public opinion to the
politicians, Ya'alon has thrust himself into a political debate that until now had been off-limits to generals. In a
series of media appearances, he has warned that uprooting settlements under fire - a position supported by part
of the Labor Party and the parties to its left --would prolong the terrorist war by convincing Palestinians
that Israelis are on the run. Ya'alon, a kibbutznik who grew up in the Labor Zionist movement, has also
attacked the left's impatience for peace as a defeatist threat to Israeli security. "'Nowism' is the mother of all
sins," he recently told the liberal newspaper, Ha'aretz."And it makes no difference whether to the word
'now' is added 'messiah' [as in the Lubavitcher Hasidic slogan, 'messiah now'] or something else" -
as in the left-wing "Peace Now."
Not surprisingly, Ya'alon has been denounced by leftist politicians and op-ed writers for politicizing the IDF
-one of the most serious accusations that can be leveled against the chief of staff of a people's army. But
Ya'alon's critics fail to understand the army's new thinking: The staying power of Israeli society is no longer just
a political issue but a strategic one as well - indeed, as Ya'alon insists, the strategic issue.
It's a sign of the new post-Oslo sobriety that most Israelis have accepted his critique: In ordinary
times, there might have been calls for removing a chief of staff who dared to attack a legitimate political
movement like Peace Now. But today, not only have there been no demands for Ya'alon's removal; he has
actually found support in the peace camp. "At first I felt I was alone in a corner," says Ha'aretz journalist Ari
Shavit, whose powerful op-eds have demanded that Israeli liberals defend their society against mortal threat
rather than continuing to invoke a failed peace process. "But now this war is seen even by many on the left as
existential. And it's no disgrace to say that an existential war has to be won." Indeed, lamented left-wing op-ed
writer Rafi Mann in Ma'ariv, "I've discovered to my surprise that many of my friends on the left have been
taken in by the charm of Chief of Staff Ya'alon, and warmly embrace his dubious approach." Those new
left-wing hawks insist that victory over terrorism is now a prerequisite for an eventual Israeli withdrawal. Meir
Pa'il. Who for decades defined the far-left fringe of the peace camp and is now associated with the left-wing
Meretz Party, has gone so far as to urge a complete reoccupation of the territories - including Gaza - to be
immediately followed by an Israeli offer of total withdrawal in exchange for an end to Palestinian terror and the
demand for refugee return to pre-1967 Israel. "It's the only way I can think of to outmaneuver our enemies and
motivate them to come to the table," he says.
So far, the first part of Ya'alon's strategy - firming up Israeli resolve - appears to be working. The new
fortitude has been particularly evident since the Passover eve massacre last March, when the national mood
abruptly shifted from despair to defiance.According to a Haifa University study, 63 percent of reservists
two years ago said they would serve even if the draft were abolished; this March, that number rose to 88
percent. At the beginning of 2002, Israelis were becoming a nation of shut-ins. But during the Sukkos (Tabernacles)
holiday, many thousands ignored warnings of imminent terrorist attacks and went on a pilgrimage to the
Western Wall, strolled through downtown Jerusalem and crowded the wine, olive-picking and music festivals
around the country.
While Israelis' faith in every national institution from the Knesset to the police has declined, their faith in the
army has risen. Israelis are hardly convinced the army is winning right now, but when asked last month by
another Haifa University study whether they believe the army is capable of winning the war, 90 percent
answered yes. No less telling is that 84 percent - compared to 78 percent two years ago - believe Israel can
meet all its future challenges, both military and civil. While the increase is relatively small, it's astonishing given
the escalation of violence over that period. "In unequivocal terms, the public today believes in Israel's ability to
withstand problems more than it did at the beginning of the Intifada," concludes Haifa University researcher
Eran Zaidise.
When it comes to the second component of the army's strategy -convincing Palestinians that
terrorism is backfiring - the evidence is mixed. On the one hand, leading Palestinians - such as possible Arafat
successor Abu Mazen and former West Bank head of preventive security Jibril Rajoub -now publicly
admit that resorting to terrorism, at least within pre-1967 Israel, has been a strategic mistake. Former
Palestinian Cabinet Minister Nabil Amer went further, publishing an open letter to Arafat in a Palestinian
newspaper that denounced him for rejecting the Camp David offer of statehood. That Palestinians are openly
doubting the efficacy of suicide bombs and telling Arafat he should have taken what was offered to him at
Camp David in July 2000, represents a potentially dramatic change. Still, polls show that a majority of
Palestinians continue to support the suicide bombers and believe violence has helped the Palestinian cause.
Sharon's disastrous Ramallah siege has probably reinforced that perception - though, based
onprecedent,Arafat's renewed public support will quickly dissipate, and the image that will likely
linger among Palestinians will not be of Arafat emerging triumphant from the ruins but of the ruins themselves.
More worryingly, Israel's failure to foresee the negative American reaction that the siege produced could
embolden the Israeli left to oppose the army's activism and threaten the unity government by encouraging a
revolt within the Labor Party against further cooperation with Sharon.
But the siege was a failure of policy, not of Israeli resolve to beat the terrorist threat. Indeed, the day after
the Israeli pullback, the army laid siege to a house in Ramallah and extracted a terrorist suspect who had fled
there from Arafat's headquarters. The message: Despite humiliating setback, the victory process - which six
months ago didn't even exist -is still on track.
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JWR contributor Yossi Klein Halevi is the Israel correspondent for the New Republic, from where this column is reprinted, and a senior writer for the Jerusalem Report. He is the author of "Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist (Little, Brown) and, most recently, of "At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden: A Jew's Search for G-d with Christians and Muslims in the Holy
Land."
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