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To: Mephisto who wrote (3613)	4/15/2002 6:29:23 PM
From: Mephisto	Respond to of 15516

Why Deterrence Failed in the West The New York Times Bank April 15, 2002 By DAVID K. SHIPLER CHEVY CHASE, Md. -- In 1953, after Arab terrorists in Jordan stole across the border for an attack in Israel, the Jordanians got a dramatic lesson from a young Israeli colonel named Ariel Sharon, commander of Unit 101. He led his commandos on a reprisal raid against the Jordanian border town of Qibya, blowing up 45 houses and killing 69 Arab villagers. He said later that he had thought the houses were empty. Many Israelis are ashamed of that ruthless piece of history, but it characterizes the crude brand of mutual deterrence that governed the Israeli-Arab conflict for decades before peace talks and peace treaties and Nobel Peace Prizes. More recently, it was also supposed to restrain the emerging Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, whose leaders were expected to know from long experience that if they permitted attacks, they would be hit hard and would risk their coming independence. Israel's strategy - to hold its Arab neighbors accountable for the use of their territory as a staging ground for terrorism - eventually succeeded in bringing calm to most border areas for long periods between spasms of warfare. The Israeli-Syrian frontier has been quiet for nearly three decades, even without a peace treaty. After the 1973 war, Egypt and Jordan substantially curtailed infiltrations even before they signed treaties with Israel in 1979 and 1994, respectively. However, this miniature cold war has kept the peace only where the opponent has been a strong, stable state. The two notable failures of this approach involve Arab lands without governmental power, and in both cases Mr. Sharon has tried ineptly to reshape Arab politics by applying military force. One is southern Lebanon, which disintegrated as the government lost control during the civil war. The chaotic area became home to Palestinian guerrillas, international mercenaries and militias backed by Syria and Iran. As defense minister in 1982, Mr. Sharon invaded in a futile attempt to install a pro-Western regime in Beirut that could pacify the border region. The other failure of deterrence is the West Bank and Gaza, where the Oslo accords never gave Palestinians enough autonomy to outweigh Israeli occupation. What progress there was did not strike most Palestinians as worth preserving - not Yasir Arafat's inchoate government, not the Israeli withdrawals that produced disconnected enclaves of Palestinian authority, not the Israeli promise that good behavior would bring statehood. There, too, Mr. Sharon has had grandiose political visions beyond the immediate military goals. "Peace can only be attained if, once we evacuate the territories, we find a responsible Palestinian leadership," he told the Israeli Parliament last week. Twenty years after failing in Lebanon, he still thinks the Israelis can pick Arab leaders. Yet his military assault against the suicide bombings that have terrorized Israel is actually restoring Mr. Arafat's popularity and further radicalizing the Palestinian population. The first step toward relative peace has to be a standoff that implies an equal power relationship. Throughout the Oslo process, mutual deterrence was undermined by mutual misperception. Israel thought that it was granting Palestinians a stake in something worth defending, and Palestinians thought they had nothing to defend. As Israelis watched their leaders offer nearly complete pullouts from Palestinian land, Palestinians watched Jewish settlements and bypass roads expand - signs of indefinite Israeli presence. Israelis felt generous, and Palestinians felt deceived and humiliated. The result has been the collapse of a strategic axiom that has guided liberal and moderate Israeli thinking. Israel's peace camp argued for years that withdrawing from the West Bank and Gaza would not put Israel at risk. First, Palestinian leaders would not want to jeopardize their gains. Second, Israel's superior army could reoccupy if necessary. Neither assumption has proved correct. Palestinians have sacrificed their gains, and Israel's military assault has provoked pressure from Cairo and Paris to Washington. Israel has learned that ceded territory cannot be retaken without a high political cost. Those lessons do not encourage future withdrawals. Yet 59 percent of Israelis still supported the establishment of a Palestinian state, at least just before the string of bombings in the last week of March, according to a poll by Tel Aviv University. A slim majority of 52 percent thought that terrorism would be reduced or eliminated after statehood. In other words, the Palestinians need to have something to lose, and Israel has to give it to them. Otherwise, there will be many more Qibyas on both sides. David K. Shipler won a Pulitzer Prize in 1987 for ``Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land,'' now in a revised edition. nytimes.com

To: Mephisto who wrote (3613)	4/18/2002 10:04:13 PM
From: Mephisto	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 15516

Sharon Wears Oppressor's Cloak The Los Angeles Times April 16, 2002 E-mail story Robert Scheer: What is the fundamental difference between Slobodan Milosevic and Ariel Sharon? The former is on trial for war crimes, while the latter still leads an occupying army. For those already loosing angry e-mails from their quivers, I ask you to take a few minutes to consider the comparison before rushing to defend Sharon's scorched-earth march through the West Bank as a necessary response to the terrorists that Yasser Arafat either condones or has been too gutless to stop. Milosevic, like Sharon, cited the terror tactics of neighboring peoples--Croatians, Bosnians and ethnic Albanians who stood in the way of his vision of a secure Yugoslavia--as a rationale for preemptive use of massive military force against them. An occupied people can get ugly in their resistance, unless a near-saint such as Mohandas Gandhi or Nelson Mandela leads the movement away from mayhem while winning political victories. Arafat is anything but a saint, and there is much blood on his hands. But it is always the occupier, with the big guns and control of the real estate, that holds the real keys to reconciliation. Rarely does such an occupation end voluntarily; land is exchanged for peace only when the occupiers feel there is no other choice. Both the plan laid out by former U.S. Sen. George Mitchell and the recent Saudi-inspired Arab League peace proposal offered such an option, but Sharon would not accept it anymore than Milosevic would the compromises presented to him up to the end of the Yugoslavia wars. Instead, both have sought to destroy any momentum toward peace by waging war. Sharon has humiliated President Bush, not only by ignoring his demand for a withdrawal but by co-opting the president's war-on-terrorism code phrases as cover for his drive to prevent--forever, if possible--a Palestinian state. How simple it would be if only the "axis of evil" targeted civilians, but from Saddam Hussein to Hamas to Sharon, nobody in the Mideast conflagration has a monopoly on such cruelty. By blasting through West Bank towns, possibly burying children in their wake, the once-proud Israel Defense Forces is heading down toward the moral level of suicide bombers. Whatever is ultimately discovered about the carnage committed by Israel's forces, enough is known to implicate Sharon for a form of ethnic cleansing--purposefully destroying the Palestinians' ability to govern themselves. The systematic destruction of the signposts of nascent Palestinian statehood--statistics bureaus, education ministries, electricity and water supplies--is aimed at further uprooting a refugee population. Despite stereotypes, Serbs did not start out as oppressive occupiers any more than did Israelis; both their peoples suffered terribly during World War II and sought peace within secure borders. However, the historical insecurity of both peoples has led them into the role of oppressor, feeding a cycle of resistance and repression. This is the opposite of what the idealistic Zionists who founded Israel had in mind. They always knew that the ultimate test of the new state would not be merely its ability to survive but rather its ability to survive with democratic values intact. Almost 70% of Israel's officer corps in the 1967 Six-Day War had been raised in the idealism of the kibbutz movement. They deemed justice a universal right--even for Palestinians. Of course, an Arab world that long refused to accept and guarantee Israel's right to exist did much to kill that idealism. Yet Israel's decision to keep the captured territories has ultimately boomeranged, drastically undermining its democracy and stability. "If Israel does not find the way to disengage from the Palestinians, its future might resemble the experience of Belfast or Bosnia--two communities bleeding each other to death for generations," said former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak this week in an op-ed article. "Alternatively, if we do not disengage from the Palestinians, Israel might drift toward an apartheid state." Unfortunately, under the heavy hand of Barak's successor Israel already is an apartheid state. This may be what Sharon and Arafat prefer to the Camp David compromise, but it represents the deepest betrayal of the interests of both the Palestinians and Jews. If you want other stories on this topic, search the Archives at latimes.com/archives. Click here for article licensing and reprint options latimes.com