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Not by Force Alone
David Horovitz
At the start of "Operation Defensive Shield," the Chief of Staff, Lt. Gen. Shaul Mofaz, presented it as a cure-all. Give us a few weeks, he said, and Palestinian terror would be defeated. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, indeed, made "uprooting the terrorist infrastructure" in the West Bank the explicit objective of the unprecedented incursions. But then, more than two weeks into the operation, with 29 soldiers and an estimated 200 Palestinians killed, with Israel�s image battered anew by unjustified massacre claims, with the suicide bombers still striking and their dispatchers overwhelmed by waves of volunteers, Maj. Gen. Aharon Ze�evi, the head of Military Intelligence, declared that the offensive could not possibly put an end to terror. There might be a temporary lull, he said, but sooner or later, we�d be facing suicide bombers with the same grisly frequency that we�d become accustomed to.
There may not be a cure-all for terrorism, Gen. Mofaz, but neither need we resign ourselves, Gen. Ze�evi, to a, frankly, intolerable continuation of this year�s reality -- bleak terrified lifestyles where every day for every Israeli everywhere in the country carries the threat of violent death. There are ways to bolster the Defensive Shield.
So long as the Palestinians allow themselves to be led by a regime that encourages them to kill themselves in the vicious effort to force us out of this region, there seems little choice but to send in troops when necessary to thwart the bombers and seize their explosives. But those incursions, and the less-public intelligence activities, need to backed by better protective measures -- the physical barriers that Sharon talks about so much but budgets so little for.
We also need to work more effectively to win support for the measures we take to protect ourselves, and thus to redirect world pressure where it belongs -- on Arafat and his successors -- with the confidence of a nation that is immeasurably more sinned against than sinning. In this life-or-death struggle, which has grave implications too for Jews around the world (as this issue�s cover story underlines), we cannot afford the kind of shambling amateurism that sees the Army Spokesman publicly acknowledging that troops have killed more people than actually died during the fighting in Jenin, that sees inexperienced diplomats dispatched by the Foreign Ministry to debate skilled Palestinian officials on Arabic-language TV channels, and that is about to unleash a poor English-speaker as spokeswoman for the Israeli Embassy in London, alongside an ambassador with no real command of the language either.
In an international climate that -- appalling, but true -- has largely legitimized the suicide-bombings as a justified response to occupation, we need not just Benjamin Netanyahu smooth-talking his way around Capitol Hill, but his less-polished successor Ehud Barak permanently on the front line as well, dispelling the prevalent myth that he never offered Yasser Arafat a workable deal.
We need -- and must demand -- fair treatment from the international media, rather than the ongoing double standard that sees Palestinian spokespeople treated with undue deference and Israeli spokespeople subjected to undue interrogation. Foreign correspondents should do enough research to be able to spot at least the more outrageous Palestinian lies, such as this gem advanced by Leila Shahid, the PLO�s delegate to France, on CNN on April 8: There were "no terrorist acts" when Yitzhak Rabin was prime minister, she asserted serenely, her point being that, when partnered by a reasonable Israeli leader, Arafat kept his house in perfect order. Remember central Tel Aviv, on October 19, 1994; 22 dead? Or Beit Lid junction, January 22, 1995; 21 dead? Presenter Jim Clancy didn�t. He let Shahid get away with it.
We need -- and have the right to expect -- fair treatment, too, from Europe, not the shameful approach that sees the EU funding Arafat without a complaint, even as he diverts European taxpayers� money to finance the bombers, but threatening trade sanctions against us when we try and thwart attacks.
And we need fair and mutually productive treatment, most of all, from our vital allies, the Americans. Since President Bush has now publicly acknowledged that Arafat "betrayed" the Palestinian people, "missed his opportunities" to forge a permanent peace with a Jewish state that yearns for nothing else, and was thus "largely responsible" for the siege under which Sharon placed him in early April, it was foolish and counterproductive for the administration, in the shape of Colin Powell, to rehabilitate him on the strength of a meaningless printed denunciation of terrorism. The administration is, stupefyingly, repeating its post-September 11 mistake, when it accepted Arafat�s condemnation of terror at face value, failed to extract a genuine commitment from him to thwart the bombings, and set the scene for the subsequent wave of attacks.
Finally, and no less crucially, our government must offer our hostile neighbors what is elegantly being termed "a political horizon" -- a reason to believe that, if they were to stop killing themselves and us, their lives could be worth living. Tens of thousands of reservists reported without hesitation for emergency duty in April, convinced that they were being called to the moral use of arms in defense of our nation. Three-quarters of Israelis, polled by Ma�ariv at the height of Operation Defensive Shield, expressed their support for it, even though only 41 percent, preempting Gen. Ze�evi, said they believed it would lead to a decline in terrorism. But in that same poll, a majority of Israelis -- 52 percent to 42 percent -- said they backed the Saudi peace initiative, which envisages a complete withdrawal from territory captured in the 1967 war -- Gaza, the West Bank, the Golan Heights, East Jerusalem, the Old City -- in return for "normal ties" with the Arab world. If a majority is already willing to accept that opening, maximalist demand, think how much higher a proportion would back the kind of improved terms a skilled prime ministerial negotiator could obtain.
l (May 6, 2002)
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