OK, who won the bet on how long it would take Arik to use the words WAR???
here they are;
Thursday, October 18, 2001 Cheshvan 1, 5762 Israel Time: 00:52 (GMT+2)
haaretzdaily.com
Background / Ze'evi's death puts pressure on Sharon to act
By Bradley Burston, Ha'aretz Correspondent
With Israel rocked by the first Arab assassination of a cabinet minister in its history, both Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat now face fateful - perhaps impossible - tests of leadership.
"Everything has changed" Sharon told an emergency meeting of senior ministers after Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine gunmen mortally wounded Israel's iconic arch-hawk Rehavam Ze'evi in a Jerusalem hotel on the fringes of Palestinian-controlled West Bank territory.
In a conscious echo of President George W. Bush's remarks following the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, Sharon told the ministers that a new period had begun, in which "The situation is different today, and will not again be like it was yesterday."
Perhaps the clearest indication that the assassination might be later seen as a watershed in the bloodsoaked Israeli-Palestinian conflict was given by Ze'evi's political foe Shimon Peres, whom Ze'evi attacked Monday as the de facto director of the government's foreign policy. In what was viewed as an indirect warning to the Palestinian Authority, Peres was widely quoted as telling British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw in a telephone conversation soon after the shooting "If Arafat doesn't take the matters in hand, everything will go up in flames."
An emotional Sharon was more direct, as he eulogized his longtime comrade-in-arms in a Knesset memorial session, using Ze'evi's nom de guerre in recalling "Gandhi, may the Almighty avenge his blood." Sharon placed the blame for the assassination squarely at Arafat's door. "The responsibility is his alone," Sharon told the Knesset."We want peace with the Palestinian people, but compromise with terrorism will not happen - it will not be ... We will wage a war to the death with the terrorists, and those who aid and send them."
The assassination followed the resumption this week of Israel's policy of "targeted killings" of suspected Palestinian militants, operations which have drawn severe American and world criticism.
The killing immediately ratcheted up rightist pressure on Sharon to heed their calls to declare war on the Palestinian Authority and its senior leadership, and to raise the sights of Israel's "hit list" to include officials long considered immune because of their senior positions.
Ze'evi and Avigdor Lieberman, co-leaders of the far-right National Union-Yisrael Beiteinu party, announced Monday that they were quitting a government they said was too soft on Arafat. Just before the resignation deadline Wednesday, Lieberman announced that the party would delay the measure at least until after the one-week mourning period, thus temporarily easing fears that the Sharon government was about to unravel.
But during a period of rare friction between Israel and its patron ally Washington - anxious to keep intifada-linked violence at a minimum as it wages war in Afghanistan - it was unclear how much latitude Sharon could expect in ordering a military reprisal for the killing. Sharon and his ministers were keeping close to the vest the steps they might take to raise the stakes in response to the killing.
Arafat, meanwhile, also faces a probable lack of room to maneuver. A long year of conflict has eroded Palestinian support for peacemaking, and Arab anger over the scores of killings that Palestinians have condemned as Israeli assassinations is likely to limit the scope of any crackdown that Arafat can order in response to the death of Ze'evi.
Arafat's response may also be mitigated by Ze'evi's longtime status as one of the Israelis most reviled by Palestinians. Ze'evi first came to prominence when he was elected to the Knesset 13 years ago as the foremost proponent of mass "transfer" of Palestinians out of the West Bank and Gaza.
However, if Arafat in the past had looked to the Israeli left for understanding and a measure of leeway, he could little expect it this time. "The murder of Rehavam Ze'evi places a grave test before the Palestinian Authority," opposition leader Yossi Sarid of the dovish Meretz party, told the Knesset after Sharon left the rostrum. "It will have to institute especially tough measures to suppress the murderers - no more ducking the job, no more stealthiness."
Cabinet minister Tzippi Livni indicated that Israel would try to bring international leverage on Arafat, of late the subject of diplomatic courtship by U.S. and British officials keen to gain tacit or active Palestinian backing for their attacks against targets in Afghanistan.
"Today a message has gone out from the state of Israel to the international community, stating that the situation now demands that the international community - which has hugged Arafat in recent days - take unequivocal action and send clear, clean-cut, unqualitfied messages to Arafat - telling him, enforcing this - that he will have no place in the free world which is today fighting terrorism, if he does not once and for all do his duty."
Meanwhile, for the second time since the 1995 assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, another of Ze'evi's army comrades, the Shin Bet security service's VIP bodyguard unit was under pressure as having missed clues to an impending killing.
According to Ha'aretz commentator Danny Rubinstein, just last week senior PFLP officials publicly vowed to avenge Israel's August killing of the group's leader Abu Ali Mustafa, by targeting senior Israeli officials. The new PFLP head, Ahmed Sadat, is known to be one of the more radical members of the organization.
Moreover, Rubinstein writes, the hotel offered the killers a number of advantages as a murder site. "The Hyatt hotel is known as an important meeting place for Arabs in East Jerusalem. The hotel is situated near Jerusalem's northern entrance" [to Palestinian-controlled areas of the West Bank].
"The hotel is easily accessible, and it is not a problem to flee from it, either. Most of the hotel's staff is Arab, including several members of the management. Therefore, there was no real difficulty for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine to carry out the assassination. Arabs entering the hotel do not draw attention." |
