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>From http://www.dailystar.com.lb/27_04_02/art4.asp
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Back to the future: Sharon and the lessons unlearned
Ghosts of past conflicts haunt present
Israel�s fight against a Palestinian state evokes memories of costly defeats
Ed Blanche
Special to The Daily Star
In 1946, Admiral Thierry d�Argenlieu was appointed by President Charles de Gaulle
as France�s high commissioner in Vietnam, as Ho Chi Minh was launching the
independence war against the French. D�Argenlieu was a part-time Carmelite monk
who was considered so reactionary that a member of his staff described him as
having �the most brilliant mind of the 12th century.� The result, as they say, is
history.
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon may not be so time-warped as the unfortunate
d�Argenlieu, but his objectives grabbing all of historical Palestine for Israel and his
methods using brute force to obliterate the Palestinians as a people and a nation
bear a more than passing resemblance to the mindset that ultimately lost France its
colonial empire in Indochina, and later Algeria. The Americans, in their turn, failed
to
learn the lessons of these conflicts and suffered their greatest military defeat when
they followed the French.
Sharon�s recent incursion into the West Bank appears to be yet another example of
a military power seeking to resolve a political problem through force, but without a
clear strategy or a well- defined political goal. Israel has claimed that �Operation
Rampart,� launched on March 29, was a success, saying it uprooted the Palestinians�
�terrorist infrastructure.�
It marked the end of whatever restraint Sharon had shown since he became prime
minister in February 2001. Pressured by the right wing to unleash the military, Israeli
Army commanders had also been complaining that they were not being allowed to do
their job and that Sharon had ordered high-profile missions to seize militant leaders
or cells that were public relations successes but achieved little in solving the
security
problem.
Rampart�s gains are likely to be short-lived if no meaningful political agenda is
formulated to convince the Palestinians that negotiations could produce an end to
three-and-a-half decades of Israeli occupation and the viable independent state in
the West Bank and Gaza Strip to which they aspire. Because it is for this which they
have been fighting for the last 19 months, despite Israel�s insistence that it faces an
existential threat from suicide bombers.
�This battle is a battle for the survival of the Jewish people, for the survival of the
state of Israel,� Sharon proclaimed on April 9.
Indeed, if the massive Israeli military operation, which was largely wound down by
mid-April, proved anything it was the lack of any political vision by the Sharon
government beyond snuffing out any prospect of a Palestinian state, a rerun of his
disastrous invasion of Lebanon 20 years ago. The Israeli Army may have captured
the charismatic militant leader Marwan Barghouti, considered by many to be the
operational brains of the intifada, his West Bank commander Nasser Awayes and
150 or so other wanted Palestinians, and killed a lot of activists during Rampart, but
a political solution is probably more distant now than ever.
Indeed, the Israelis deliberately and systematically destroyed the Palestinian
Authority�s infrastructure, seizing filing systems and computerized records while
dynamiting at least four ministries and wrecking Yasser Arafat�s security apparatus
and bringing what remained of the fragile Palestinian economy to a standstill. In
short, this was scorched-earth tactics, which Palestinian leaders say was intended to
wreck their state-in-the-making.
But far from proving how �irrelevant� Arafat was, a virtual prisoner in his
shell-blasted
Ramallah headquarters since mid-December, the Israeli juggernaut boosted the
popularity of a defiant Arafat to new heights, the complete opposite of what Sharon
had intended. The operation turned out to be a propaganda nightmare for Israel,
bringing it unprecedented international opprobrium that it will find extremely
difficult
to shake off, particularly as the bodies of Palestinian civilians are dug out of the
rubble amid allegations of massacres stirring echoes of the hundreds of Palestinians
and Lebanese who were slaughtered in Beirut�s Sabra and Shatila refugee camps by
Maronite militiamen under Sharon�s command in September 1982.
In regional terms, Arab anger against Israel and the United States has reached an
intensity rarely seen in recent years, leaving the region in a state of brittle
uncertainty,
fearful of a wider conflict. Reports this week of some 8,000 Saudi Arabian troops
deployed along the Jordanian border, ostensibly for routine exercises, following
increased Israeli air activity in the region did little to dispel concerns that the
Middle
East was once again on a knife-edge.
The violence has diverted President George W. Bush from turning his attention to
Iraq, impeding his war against global terrorism. That probably suits Saddam Hussein
just fine. Secretary of State Colin Powell�s futile efforts to mediate a cease-fire in
mid-April, with Sharon defiantly rebuffing Bush�s demands for an immediate
withdrawal from the West Bank, left the US administration grasping at straws and
looking impotent in bringing Sharon to heel.
Domestically, the Bush administration has come under increasing pressure to allow
Sharon to continue his operations. Bush, by his reluctance to get involved in Middle
East peacemaking, had encouraged Sharon to use massive force. This gravely
threatened the stability of the United States� client regimes in the Arab world,
forcing
to Bush to relent.
But by then, Powell�s mission and his leisurely trip to Israel via Spain and Morocco
that gave Sharon a week�s grace to continue his military operations, using US-
supplied weapons was doomed, with the Americans looking more blatantly pro-Israeli
than ever.
Rampart may have curbed Palestinian attacks, but it has not eliminated the threat.
There were only two or three successful suicide bombings throughout the operation.
But even with the arrest of Barghouti and others, the intifada will go on although
perhaps not with the intensity it reached before the army moved in. Security,
Sharon�s primary concern, will remain as elusive as ever.
The battle in and around the refugee camp in Jenin, scene of the fiercest fighting,
underlined that. Palestinian fighters from all the militant groups, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs
Brigades, Hamas and others, joined forces to resist the Israelis� armor-led forces.
According to the Israeli Army, they were led by Mahmud Tawalbeh, Islamic Jihad�s
chief in Jenin who was released from the town�s prison by armed men when the
Israeli Army smashed its way in with Merkava tanks and began bombarding and
bulldozing the shantytown into rubble. He and Hamas� regional commander, Ibrahim
Jaber, were both reported killed in the fierce house-to- house fighting.
Scores of fighters perished, along with an unknown number of civilians who died in
their homes when they were flattened by armored bulldozers. Twenty-three Israeli
soldiers were also killed the average annual Israeli death toll in south Lebanon
before the Israeli Army�s withdrawal in May 2000. A young Israeli officer, awed by the
ferocity of the resistance, said after the killing was over that Jenin was the
Palestinians� Masada, the Dead Sea fortress where Jewish rebels fighting the power
of Rome made their last suicidal stand in 71 AD.
Uri Avnery, co-founder of Israel�s Gush Shalom (Peace Coalition) and a long-time
campaigner for Palestinian rights, noted that once the smoke clears and the truth
about what happened in Jenin and other places in the West Bank is known �two
possible versions may emerge: Jenin as a story of massacre, a second Sabra and
Shatila; and Jenin, the Palestinian Stalingrad, a story of immortal heroism. The
second will surely prevail.�
Those Palestinian militants who survived the fighting in the West Bank are reported
to be regrouping and preparing to go underground to fight on, no doubt with a far
greater degree of coordination between the various factions that hitherto seen. It is
not yet clear how badly the Palestinian militants have been hurt, but the indications
are that some 150 were killed and possibly several hundred arrested.
The PA�s security forces, increasingly involved in the intifada, have seen their
infrastructure smashed, but this has only radicalized them to a degree that may soon
become apparent. Hamas says it emerged relatively unscathed, while its weapons
have increased in quantity and quality over recent months, with arms and
ammunition smuggled into Gaza through underground tunnels from Egypt. Fresh
suicide bombings should be expected.
UN envoy Terje Roed-Larsen, a key figure in the secret negotiations that produced
the 1993 Oslo Accords, noted: �Israel�s operation may have dismantled the physical
infrastructure of terrorism, but this is easily rebuilt. Meanwhile, the mental
infrastructure of terrorism is building up the mentality of hate and confrontation and
this is very difficult to undo.�
Even Israeli officials concede that the counter-insurgency operation is not going to
stop attacks without some sort of political accommodation with the Palestinians. But
Sharon is showing no sign of genuinely seeking that and the Palestinians are in no
mood for talking.
The result will be that the Israelis will have to keep going back into towns and
villages
time after time, a campaign of attrition that, as the Americans, the French and others
found out before them, is an impossible task in the face of determined resistance.
End<{{{
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