Fighting terror not enough
After three years of the intifada,
Israelis are increasingly questioning both the wisdom and the morality of the way Ariel Sharon’s government is handling the conflict with the Palestinians, writes
BY ERIC SILVER
Yoel Marcus, a columnist in the liberal daily Ha’aretz, denounced Sharon this week as a failed leader. “He is a Prime Minister with no vision, no plan, no horizon,” he wrote. Avraham Burg, a Labour MP and former parliamentary Speaker, lamented in the same paper: “We are increasingly coming to resemble our enemies. We are losing the feeling and sensitivity that were our conscience.”
<font color=red>The criticism is no longer restricted to the Left-wing Opposition. Four former chiefs of the Shin Bet internal security service, no knee-jerk peaceniks, joined forces last week to warn the government that it is leading Israel to disaster.
Between them, the quartet – Avraham Shalom, Ya’akov Peri, Carmi Gillon and Ami Ayalon – commanded the war on terror for two decades. Now they, like the army chief of staff Moshe Ya’alon before them, insist that fighting terror is not enough. <font color=black>
In a briefing for political commentators in late October, Lieutenant-General Ya’alon complained that closures and curfews were increasing hatred and strengthening the terrorist organisations. As a consequence, there was “no hope, no expectations for the Palestinians.” In its tactical decisions, he contended, Israel was “acting contrary to our strategic interest.”
<font color=red>In their stark and unprecedented joint interview with the mass-circulation Yediot Aharonot, the four spymasters demanded that Sharon acknowledge Palestinian humanity, present an even-handed peace plan and stop the West Bank and Gaza settlers dictating the national agenda.<font color=black>
“However you look at it,” said Peri, “whether the economic, political, security or social aspect, we are going in the direction of decline, nearly a catastrophe. If something doesn’t happen here, we will continue to live by the sword, we will continue to wallow in the mud and we will continue to destroy ourselves.”
Ayalon, who commanded the Israeli navy before taking over the Shin Bet, added: “We are taking sure and measured steps to a point where the state of Israel will not be a democracy or a home for the Jewish people.” The old sailor added: “When the captain doesn’t know where he’s heading, no wind in the world will get him there.”
Gillon concurred. “I am very concerned about the future,” he said. “I look at my daughters, who are still young, and it is clear to me that we are heading for a crash. I would like coming generations to live in a Jewish and democratic state the way my parents wanted.”
Like other Israelis, the spymasters were worried that Israel-Palestine would become a de facto binational state, with an Arab majority between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea. Israel would either have to impose its will by force, or cease to be the Jewish state of the Zionist dream.
<font color=red>Shalom, the veteran of the four, turned the focus on the Palestinians: “We must, once and for all, admit that there is another side, that it has feelings and that it is suffering, and that we are behaving disgracefully.”<font color=black>
Asked what he meant by “disgracefully”, he replied: “We debase the Palestinian as an individual. And nobody can take that. We too would not take it if it were done to us. And neither do they take it. Yet we are incapable of taking even a small step to correct this.”
When one of the others called the preoccupation with preventing terror a “mistake”, Shalom retorted: “It is not a mistake. It is an excuse, an excuse for doing nothing.”
All four endorsed a statement of principles for a two-state solution drafted by Ayalon and a Palestinian professor, Sari Nusseibeh, which has been signed by 1,00,000 Israelis and 60,000 Palestinians. Part of the package is the evacuation of all the settlements.
The quartet recognised that this would not be easy, that it might even drag Israel to the brink of civil war, but they insisted that the elected leaders would have to assert their authority.
“I don’t think there is any way to avoid a clash,” said Peri. “There will always be some groups, or some individuals, for whom the Land of Israel nestles among the hills of Nablus and inside Hebron, and we will have to confront them.”
Peri estimated that 85-90 per cent of the settlers would leave voluntarily if they were offered an economic resettlement plan inside the pre-1967 border. Recent surveys bear this out.
Shalom, who left the service in 1986 with a controversial presidential pardon after his men beat two Palestinian prisoners to death, urged the government to treat the die-hards “as if they were Arabs.”
He suggested putting 15 of them under administrative detention, “and see how all the rest do nothing.” Shalom proposed that the remaining zealots be left to look after themselves under Palestinian rule. “Are they willing to be killed?” he asked. “When we leave them out there alone,” he prophesied, “they’ll come. And how they’ll come.”
With Israel still expanding settlements and building a “protective” wall that divides the West Bank from the West Bank, rather than Israel from the West Bank, that’s unlikely to be tested very soon.
(The author is The Statesman’s Jerusalem-based West Asia Correspondent.)
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