The Limits of Force
The New York Times
March 30, 2002
Who can blame the Israelis
for wanting to lash out?
With funerals filling their land
from scores of Palestinian terror
attacks, Prime Minister Ariel
Sharon sent tanks to Ramallah
yesterday and called up
thousands of soldiers. We share
Israel's rage. Our reservations are
not over the impulse to respond
militarily but over the long-range
effectiveness of policies that rely
heavily on the use of force. It is a lot to ask, but Israel
must look beyond its current fury to find a political
solution to this conflict. It must realize that no matter how
many tanks it sends to the West Bank, only a
commitment to withdraw from occupied lands and permit
the building of a Palestinian state, in return for normal
relations with its Arab neighbors, offers a way out.
The Israeli government says that Palestinian authorities
are no longer policing terrorist groups, so it will send
troops into houses where explosives are being readied and
arrest the engineers making the belts for suicide
bombers. By invading Yasir Arafat's compound in
Ramallah, Israel is trying to humiliate the Palestinian
leader and cut him off from the terrorist network.
That may sound reasonable, but if anything has been
learned in 18 blood-soaked months, it is that military
responses have caused only minimal interruption to the
Palestinian terrorist infrastructure while fanning the
flames of anger and resolve.
Israel needs security, Palestinians need a state. The West
Bank, which would serve as the heartland of a Palestinian
state, is currently the greatest threat to Israel's security.
Israel cannot seal its border against suicide bombers from
the West Bank because there is no border. This is because
200,000 Israeli settlers live in the West Bank, and they
need access to Israel proper. Israel's decisions, in the
years after the 1967 war, to build those settlements - as
well as those in the Gaza Strip - and then pour billions
into protecting and defending them, has been one of the
biggest obstacles to reaching a workable, two-state
solution.
At its Beirut summit meeting this week, the Arab League
offered normal relations to Israel in exchange for a return
of land captured in 1967. That was also the basis of
American and Israeli proposals at the failed Camp David
summit talks in the summer of 2000. It remains the only
viable long-term option.
The Palestinians will not talk about a cease-fire without
political commitments, and Israel refuses to discuss
politics without a cease-fire. We do not blame the Israelis
for not wanting to reward terror, but there are larger
principles and interests at stake here. Israel must make
clear that it recognizes the need to relinquish the bulk of
the territories it took in 1967. There is no guarantee that
a retreat from the West Bank and Gaza Strip and the
construction of a secure border will end Palestinian terror.
But it will greatly reduce it and give the Palestinians a
reason to control their own terror groups.
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