A Deadly Passover ... and a State of Siege
Newsweek, April 8 issue
http://a799.ms.akamai.net/3/799/388/fe9e31261c7ecf/www.msnbc.com/news/1436030.jpg
Attack Aftermath:
Bodies lie on the floor of the Netanya hotel restaurant attacked by
a suicide bomber during the first night of the Jewish Passover holiday
A Deadly Passover ... and a State of Siege
It’s come to this. As suicide bombings and Sharon’s tanks trap Arafat in his own compound, the world wonders whether there’s an endgame or any hope for peace
By Christopher Dickey and Joshua Hammer
NEWSWEEK
April 8 issue — Darkness fell inside Yasir Arafat’s offices. Dozens of his guards, his cronies and members of his Palestinian government-that-used-to-be lit candles and scrounged for cigarettes, listening to Israeli guns and bulldozers demolishing the buildings around them. Often their faces were lit by the dim glow of cell-phone screens. Arafat himself gave a stream of interviews, saying he was ready to die a martyr. But as the day and the night thundered on, it was clear Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had another fate in mind for the man he’s fought so bitterly for so long. Months ago Sharon declared Arafat “irrelevant” and confined him to his Ramallah headquarters surrounded by tanks. Now, in the aftermath of another horrific suicide bombing that killed 22 civilians celebrating Passover, Sharon declared Arafat “an enemy” and vowed to “isolate” him, possibly even “expel” him. Certainly, he would humiliate him, as if the 74-year-old Sharon thought a martyr’s death was too good for the watery-eyed, quivering, 72-year-old chairman of the Palestinian Authority.
SUCH IS THEIR blood feud. Despite more than 10 years of negotiations
between successive Israeli governments and Arafat, Sharon never could accept
him as a partner in peace, never could bring himself to shake the Palestinian’s
hand. Now the two are squared off in a battle so intense and so personal
it threatens the future of all Israelis and Palestinians. The leaders of
the Arab world are watching the scene, too, torn between sinister admiration
for Arafat’s people striking fear into the heart of Israel, and desperation
at the prospect that the showdown will shake their own increasingly decrepit
regimes. They’re hoping, or perhaps dreaming, that a joint peace proposal
made at a summit in Beirut last week will open the way to new diplomatic
initiatives at the United Nations. The Bush administration, which tried
for a year to steer clear of this thankless feud, wanted its post-September
11 war to be fought on other battlegrounds. But it finds itself, now, dragged
into the middle of the Arafat-Sharon showdown.
Slowly the screens
of the cell phones faded to black as the batteries died. The tremulous
anger of Arafat’s voice fell silent on the satellite channels. But while
Arafat languished in the dark, others paid the ultimate price in this confrontation.
As Israeli tanks rumbled into Ramallah, shops were shuttered and residents
deserted the streets. In the blocks surrounding the compound, Palestinian
militiamen staged a last stand. As one fighter tried to take out an Israeli
sniper, his cell phone rang incessantly. He refused to answer, afraid it
was his mother and she’d be worried. Minutes later he was dead, his neck
pierced by the sniper’s bullet. At Ramallah Hospital, the bloody corpses
of a 21-year-old woman and an old man lay on slabs in the mortuary alongside
two young fighters. By late Saturday, rumors circulated—and were denied—that
the Israelis planned to rush Arafat and his armed men inside the compound.
COINTINUING TERROR
And yet the suicide bombings did
not stop. Within hours of the Israeli assault an 18-year-old girl blew
herself up, killing two and injuring 20 others in a crowded south Jerusalem
neighborhood. On Saturday, another bomber set himself off in a Tel Aviv
cafe, wounding at least 29 people. As Washington called on Arafat to bring
an end to the violence from his besieged rooms in a crumbling building,
there was little reason to believe he could, even if he would.
“It’s like living in a Greek
tragedy where the worst becomes inevitable,” said Nabil Shaath, one of
the Palestinian Authority’s most articulate and moderate voices. “It’s
almost as if it’s destiny. America can stop all of that—and only America
can stop all of that.” But how? After trying to avoid the Mideast morass,
the Bush administration waded in only when it was clear that its goal of
removing Saddam Hussein—with at least the private support of Arab regimes—was
endangered by Arab anger at the Palestinians’ plight. Last week the administration
sent conflicting signals. Midweek, Secretary of State Colin Powell blamed
“terrorism” for bringing peace talks to a halt. Then in the predawn hours
on Saturday, Washington supported a U.N. resolution demanding that Israel
pull out of Palestinian areas—hours before Bush said from his Crawford,
Texas, ranch that Arafat “can do a lot more” to prevent attacks against
Israelis. Clearly, Bush has yet to find a workable balance between the
old adversaries. And his challenge couldn’t be greater.
It’s hard to imagine two
figures more hellbent on confrontation than Sharon and Arafat. The bluff
Sharon was a general known for lightning action against Arab troops on
the battlefield for three decades; he was held indirectly responsible by
an Israeli investigation into the 1982 massacre of more than 800 Palestinian
civilians in Beirut. Arafat, the wily, stubble-faced guerrilla, was the
best-known face of international terror in the 1970s and 1980s. He sent
operatives to carry notorious attacks, including the murder of Israeli
athletes at the Munich Olympics. Both men are quick to present their people
as victims and themselves as victors. Today Arafat blames Sharon for starting
the last year and a half of violence with a provocative visit to the holiest
Muslim site in Jerusalem. Sharon claims Arafat planned all along to walk
away from the peace table and launch a new guerrilla war.
A TEST OF ENDURANCE
If so, Arafat might just believe
he’s winning, even from the remains of his Ramallah headquarters. Throughout
the Arab world, there’s an impression that Sharon’s the man who’s cornered;
that Israel has been frightened as never before by these suicide attacks.
Continuing his tradition of alternating between talk of peace when it suits
his agenda—which includes staying in power at the very top—and resorting
to violence, Arafat is supporting a new organization, the Al Aqsa Martyrs
Brigades, that is carrying out many of the bombings. Only now the test
of wills between the Palestinian leader and Sharon has become a test of
endurance and fear between their peoples, between their cultures. “The
Palestinian people are launching the war of Arab destiny,” said Arafat
associate Farouk Qaddoumi, itemizing the way Israel “lost stability and
security; psychological problems spread, and unemployment and emigration
rose.”
In a few horrible days the world
saw how quickly the duel between Arafat and Sharon can move from farce
to hope to tragedy. Arab leaders were meeting in Beirut to endorse a Saudi
peace plan. If Israel would withdraw from the territories occupied in 1967,
negotiate the return or compensation of Palestinian refugees and live side
by side with a Palestinian state that had Jerusalem as its capital, then
every Arab country promised peace and “normal relations.” The initiative
offered a glimmer of hope, and an implicit threat. “The Israeli people
have a right to live in peace if they respond to conditions of peace,”
said Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal. But Sharon wouldn’t let Arafat
attend the summit. If Arafat left the West Bank, he made clear, the Palestinian
leader might not be allowed to return.
Meanwhile, U.S. envoy Anthony
Zinni scrambled to patch together a ceasefire that might halt—for days
or weeks at least—the ongoing carnage. Zinni offered a document bridging
Arafat’s proposals and Sharon’s. NEWSWEEK has learned it was “one sentence
away” from being signed: a sentence the Palestinians demanded linking the
truce to future political negotiations. But Sharon wouldn’t accept any
language that seemed to put a price on the end of suicide bombings, and
in the end neither would Washington.
That evening, at the coastal
town of Netanya, as guests gathered to eat the Seder meal, a man with a
suitcase walked past a guard, ran into the midst of the crowd—and detonated.
The radical Islamic movement Hamas claimed responsibility, and it has a
long history of opposing Arafat. But Sharon blamed his old enemy. Arafat
issued a pro forma condemnation of the atrocity, and called quickly for
a unilateral ceasefire. But Sharon was ready to make his move—and had been
for a long time.
A REPLAY OF 1982?
Many Israelis and Palestinians
see a parallel with events 20 years ago. Then, Arafat and his fighters
were holed up among hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees in southern
Lebanon and Beirut. Another group, under the radical leader Abu Nidal,
attempted to assassinate the Israeli ambassador in London. Never mind that
Abu Nidal was a sworn enemy of Arafat’s. Sharon, then Israel’s Defense
minister, set out to eliminate Arafat and his men. He launched an invasion
of Lebanon and laid siege to Beirut. The United States and the international
community intervened to let Arafat and his fighters sail away to Tunisia.
During the Israeli occupation of Lebanon, Christian militias allied with
Israel slaughtered civilians in the camps of Sabra and Shatila. “After
that, [Sharon] was hounded out of Israeli politics for 18 years,” says
Shaath. “But Arafat survived to come back to Palestine ... Many times it
seems Sharon is still fighting the 1982 war.”
It’s a common refrain. “Hasn’t
the time come for you to do to Arafat what you wanted to do during the
1982 Lebanon war?” the daily Maariv asked Sharon early last week. “Why
don’t you eliminate him now?” Sharon didn’t hesitate. He would “expel him”
this time, he said. “There is no choice.” Sharon told the daily Yediot
Ahronot “there was one commitment I took on myself which was a mistake—the
commitment not to harm Arafat. There was not a single meeting with U.S.
President George W. Bush—from the very first one we had—that the Americans
didn’t raise the question. We weren’t talking about physical harm—but [Arafat’s]
packing a suitcase and getting out of here. Perhaps I should have told
the American at some point that this was a commitment I could no longer
keep.”
Ever one to telegraph his
punches, the Israeli prime minister bragged about the way he’d been able
to increase pressure on the Palestinian leader by moving into the territory,
Area A, that earlier agreements had put under Arafat’s control. “You forget
what things were like at the beginning,” Sharon told Yediot. “When we went
300 meters into Area A, the whole world was shocked. Imagine what would
have happened had we done then what we are doing now.” Last month Sharon
moved 20,000 troops into Area A, supposedly to clean out terrorist infrastructure.
“I got the whole world used to these incursions,” said Sharon. “Everyone
understands us.”
‘WHAT’S THE POINT OF IT?’
Sharon says this new operation
in Ramallah is something less than war. The stated aim is to take the steps
against suspects that Arafat would not take, then withdraw at some undefined
time when that job is done. But for Israeli soldiers in the field, the
tightened siege of Arafat is the only clear goal. “No real decisions have
been made, no targets defined,” one senior officer told NEWSWEEK. “I don’t
even know myself what to tell my soldiers. Short term, yes. But long term?
What am I supposed to tell them? What’s the point of it?”
From a hotel rooftop on
the outskirts of the city early Friday morning, NEWSWEEK watched as a long
column of Israeli tanks, armored personnel carriers and bulldozers rumbled
through the deserted streets to Arafat’s compound. Throughout the day the
only sounds in the city were bursts of automatic-weapons fire, mortar blasts
and the sirens of Red Crescent ambulances. At a crossroads guarded by a
Merkava tank, a man cried out through the bars of a ground-floor window,
begging for bread to feed his trapped family. Seven people died, including
one of Arafat’s bodyguards, and dozens more were injured in fierce fighting
inside the headquarters and in the surrounding neighborhood. By last Saturday
Israel was expanding the occupation, arresting and questioning thousands
of male Palestinians between 15 and 45. Defense Ministry spokesman Yarden
Vatikai said that his government wanted to negotiate peace, but that the
Army’s actions were necessary. “We don’t think there is a solution by military
means,” he said. “But we have to protect our own people and lower the flames.”
The immediate impact is
the opposite. At the Duheishe refugee camp in Bethlehem, scores of mourners
gathered Friday evening in the tenement apartment where Ayat Akhras, 18,
had quietly prepared for martyrdom. Before she blew herself up at a Jerusalem
supermarket that morning, Akhras had been preparing to graduate with honors
from a Bethlehem high school and was engaged to be married in June. But
several of her relatives had been killed in Gaza during the intifada; and
Akhras became visibly shaken, her brother says, after a neighbor and close
friend was shot dead while playing in his living room with his daughter
during Israel’s invasion of the camp last month. Sometime during the last
two weeks, relatives believe, she was recruited for her suicide mission
by militants from the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades. Trembling as he clutched
a studio photograph of his daughter, Samir Akhras appeared at a loss to
comprehend her final act. “There was no reason for her to do this. I supplied
her with everything possible to give her a decent life,” he said.
But a cousin said that Duheishe
camp had become a breeding ground for would-be suicide bombers—and predicted
that they would be unleashed if any harm came to Arafat. And even if it
doesn’t, Sharon’s cornering of his old nemesis is unlikely to lead to security
for Israel. The Palestinians are exploiting suicide bombers to bloodier
effect than ever. “Our only weapons against Sharon are our blood and our
bodies,” said Akhras’s cousin. And there is every sign that thousands of
young Palestinians will be willing to use them until Israel withdraws from
the territories, no matter how harsh the crackdown. That presents a formidable
quandary for Israel, but also for its American allies, its Arab adversaries,
and anyone else interested in achieving a ceasefire—and a lasting peace.
Yet as the first video was
smuggled out of Arafat’s besieged offices, it showed the flashlit face
of the old guerrilla looking remarkably relaxed. Sharon, too, appeared
confident before the press. The mantle of peacemaker never sat easily on
either man’s shoulders. The old general ordering his tanks into action,
the old guerrilla holed up under siege, are back in a world they know.
With Joanna Chen in Jerusalem
© 2002 Newsweek, Inc.