It's Working
by Jonathan Chait
Only at TNR Online | Post date 04.05.02
There is a virtual consensus in the American media that Israel's military operation in the West Bank will invariably fail. "Even as Israeli officials flooded the airwaves Friday to cast the military operation in Ramallah as a defense against future terrorist attacks," reports Time, "a 16-year-old Palestinian girl blew herself up outside a Jerusalem supermarket, killing two Israelis." An editorial in today's Washington Post condemns "Ariel Sharon's futile attempt to end terrorist attacks with a military invasion and confinement of Yasser Arafat."
A funny thing, though--everybody was so busy talking about the futility of the Israeli operation that nobody has noticed its one, unambiguous success: a sharp decline in the suicide bombings. There hasn't been a suicide bombing since Monday, and that one injured one person and killed nobody. This suggests that the assumption underlying all the coverage of the West Bank--that Sharon's operation is bound to fail--may be entirely wrong. Indeed, if the Israeli campaign can substantially reduce suicide bombings, the entire moral calculus underlying it changes.
The predominant theory about suicide bombing is the "cycle of violence": The more aggressive Israel acts, the more Palestinians will blow themselves up in retaliation. This theory, as many pro-Israel commentators have pointed out, has always contained a flaw. Palestinian violence against Israel predates the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and the current suicide campaign began after Israel offered generous territorial concessions at Camp David. But recent events have confounded the cycle-of-violence explanation even further. After all, if suicide bombings are a response to Israeli intransigence, then they should have increased this last week. Instead they've come to a temporary halt.
Why is this? Almost certainly it's not because Palestinians have decided to take a break from suicide bombing; indeed, they're probably trying as hard as ever. The answer must be that something is stopping them. And that something must be the Israeli military, which is breaking up terror cells, seizing militants and their weaponry, and blockading Palestinians from entering Israel. While this can't stop all suicide bombings forever, it seems likely to curtail them substantially.
Media coverage has ignored this possibility, instead focusing on what The New York Times called "a seemingly limitless supply of suicide bombers." The supply may be limitless, but the means to carry out those attacks is not. In addition to willing bodies, suicide bombers need high-caliber explosives and access to Israel. By seizing stores of the former (for which Palestinians seem to reply upon imports from countries like Iran) and cutting off the latter, the Israeli army can constrict bombers' opportunities.
The effectiveness of cutting off Palestinians from Israel has been confirmed by none other than the Palestinians themselves. Explaining the dearth of suicide attacks from the Gaza strip, which is more heavily enclosed than the West Bank, a Palestinian told The New York Times last Wednesday, "It's like a jail here. We can't get out."
This is probably why Palestinians have come to rely upon female suicide bombers. The Palestinian culture is hardly feminist. Most likely, they are recruiting women only because Palestinian men can't get through Israeli checkpoints. But now that they're alerted to this tactic, Israelis can apply more scrutiny to Palestinian women as well. (I predict that female suicide bombings will soon become far less prevalent.) The media have interpreted the rise of female suicide bombers as more evidence of the hopelessness of stopping bombings--it supposedly shows the supply to be even more inexhaustible than we thought--when it could well be evidence of the opposite.
What about the political effects of Sharon's operation? Time suggests it could "backfire by boosting popular sympathy for Arafat." But when Israel would pressure Arafat to reign in militants, you may recall, pundits fretted that this would backfire by making Palestinians less sympathetic to Arafat and more sympathetic to more radical Palestinian groups. The cause of peace may be furthered either by boosting Arafat's popularity or by dragging it down, but not by both.
The more serious worry is that Sharon's offensive may kill off any chance for peace with the Palestinians. I happen to disagree--I think Arafat has proved himself useless as a peace partner, and Israel must ultimately isolate and divest itself from the West Bank unilaterally--but that's beside the point. If you accept the premise that the current operation can reduce (please note that I have not said completely eliminate) suicide bombings, how can Israel be expected to pull back? Doing so would essentially ask Israel to permit its civilians to be murdered and terrorized in the short run in the vague hope that it would bring benefits in the long run. No nation would accept a calculus like that, nor should we ask Israel to do so.
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