Sharon launches the endgame?

TNI

Graham Usher

Julio 2005

Sharon launches the endgame?
Graham Usher - Author of the TNI Book Palestine in Crisis
Middle East International Online, April 2002

At dawn on 29 March Israeli soldiers, accompanied by tanks, made the first breaches into the outer walls of Yaser Arafat’s presidential headquarters in Ramallah. By nightfall they had conquered it, save for a couple of rooms. These now house the
Palestinian leader and the several dozen aides and guards that remain by his side.

The conquest of the rest of Ramallah was equally swift. Hundreds of soldiers - conveyed by tanks and armoured personnel carriers, covered by helicopters - went house-to-house in pursuit of fighters, shelled office blocks, raided hospitals and crushed cars. Medical staff were routinely denied access to the wounded. Some, including the West Bank head of the Palestine Red Crescent Society, were arrested.

Carnage in Ramallah

By late on 2 April, when the curfew was lifted temporarily, some 30 Palestinians had been killed, according to local sources, including five policemen shot in the head while hiding in a building that hosts the British Council. The army said it was returning
fire. The Palestinians said it was an execution. The dead were hastily buried in a mass grave in the hospital car park.

At least 60 were wounded, said the PRCS, including seven foreign nationals who voluntarily performed the roles of shield, witness and crier that should have been the due of the "international community".

Over 700 Palestinian men - aged 14 to 45 - had been detained, dumped in an army base on the outskirts of the city. Of these, eight were "fugitives" from Fatah, Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, announced the army victoriously.

And 100,000 Palestinians remained interned in their homes by the most lethal of curfews, with food running low, electricity sporadically knocked out and children fearing that each rattle of gunfire they hear will be the last.

Like their leader. During the siege he has sometimes tended wounded guards in his room, phoned world leaders by candle-light and has never been without a machine gun at his arm. He has rarely been so popular. He has perhaps never been so defiant: "They want to either kill me or capture me or expel me. But I will tell them ‘No!’ I will be a martyr, a martyr, a martyr."

On 20 March, Rifaat Abu Diyak, a 20-year-old from Jenin, detonated himself near a junction outside the Palestinian town of Um al-Fahm in Galilee, killing seven Israelis, including four soldiers. The attack was claimed by Islamic Jihad. The next day, Muhammad Hashayika of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade performed the third suicide bombing inside Israel in five days, wounding more than 60 Israelis outside a toy shop on West Jerusalem’s King George Street.

Israel’s response was to sweep Palestinian-controlled areas of the West Bank in an ostensible search for Palestinian gunmen. Hundreds were arrested.

Suicide bomb in Netanya

The lethal endgame, when it began, had been on the cards for months. The timing of its initiation, while Arab leaders were gathered in Beirut to offer the Israelis normalization in exchange for Palestinian independence, was dictated by a suicide attack in Netanya on 27 March. A 24-year-old Palestinian, "dressed as a woman", walked into the Park Hotel restaurant and detonated himself. Twenty-two Israeli civilians were killed and over 100 wounded. It was the worst Palestinian atrocity inside Israel since the uprising began.

Tanks immediately began to encircle Ramallah. Palestinians in their towns, villages and refugee camps stocked up and hunkered down, awaiting the onslaught. Other Palestinians acted to sharpen its teeth: a Palestinian from Hamas shot dead four settlers in Elon Moreh settlement near Nablus. Another from Islamic Jihad stabbed two settlers to death in Gaza’s Netzarim settlement.

Ariel Sharon held a cabinet meeting and the army called up 20,000 reservists, mobilized to execute "Operation Defensive Wall". Its task in the weeks ahead will be to "eliminate the terrorist infrastructure", Palestinian area by Palestinian area. As for Arafat, he "is an enemy and at this stage will be isolated".

Nobody quite knows what this means. During the cabinet meeting Sharon made it clear he wanted the Palestinian leader expelled from the Territories. In a telephone conversation on 31 March he reportedly told Colin Powell that he could not ensure Arafat’s physical safety should "the terror attacks continue".

They continued. Aside from Netanya, suicide-bombers blew up restaurants, supermarkets and cars in West Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Haifa on consecutive days, leaving 16 dead and about 100 wounded.

Fatah’s al-Aqsa Brigades militia claimed responsibility for the Tel Aviv and West Jerusalem bombings; Hamas for those in Netanya and Haifa.

But such factional identities no longer mean much. Hamas’ leader in Gaza, Aziz Rantisi, vowed that the "martyrdom attacks" would continue as long as the army was in Ramallah and "Yaser Arafat remained under siege". Fatah supporters in Jenin gave out sweets after the bombing in Haifa.

Sharon’s window of time

The aim of these assaults - in the words of a Fatah leader now underground in Bethlehem - is to "destroy Sharon". The point is to "convince Israeli opinion there is no solution to this conflict other than independence". And the means is to respond to every Israeli attack on Palestinian lands and people with "resistance" inside Israel and "mayhem from Cairo to the Galilee".

Is this Arafat’s preferred strategy? It no longer matters. It is what is happening. As long as it is happening - and he survives - "Arafat believes he becomes stronger and Sharon weaker," says an aide.

This is almost certainly Sharon’s reading, which is why he wants to wrap the "defensive wall" around Arafat in whatever window of time the Americans have granted him. By 1 April, army tanks had reconquered Qalqiliya and Tulkarm; by the following day they had reoccupied Bethlehem and begun moving into Jenin and Salfit, carrying out the same kind of operations Ramallah had been subjected to.

In Bethlehem, the bodies of four Palestinian gunmen killed in a firefight beside the Church of the Nativity on 2 April lay where they fell overnight, with rescue services unable to attend to them or anyone else until the following morning. Up to 120 armed Palestinians, including a number of injured, remained holed-up inside the church as MEI went to press.

"Leaving aside all the political and military calculations, this war has an almost metaphysical aspect. In order to exist, one has to make the other disappear," wrote Lebanese journalist Salim Nassib in Beirut in August 1982. It is the same war in Ramallah in March 2002, fought between the same leaders, with the same goals of "disappearance".

But it cannot be reduced to the personalities of Sharon and Arafat. It is explained better as a conflict between a colonial power that refuses to surrender its conquests and a nation - 20 years on - that still refuses not to be free.