Mid-East Realitieswww.middleeast.org

ARAFAT'S TRAVEL NOW RESTRICTED - MAYBE ON PURPOSE?

April 23, 2001

"THERE IS NO NEW SHARON"

MID-EAST REALITIES © - www.MiddleEast.Org - Washington - 4/23: THE front-page Washington Post article over the weekend about what the Israelis are up to helps reveal what the new General in charge of the Israeli Army, Ariel Sharon, is attempting to accomplish. There is a style and tactics here that go way back with Sharon. It is the same style and tactic that in the past suppressed the Palestinians for awhile, only for the conflict to reerupt in the future more virulent than ever.

Meanwhile, isn't it interesting that during the very weeks when the Israelis are attacking Gaza more than ever Yasser Arafat is spending his time away from Gaza in Ramallah. Of course it's not just Arafat that's involved, but such people as Nabil Shaath, Abu Mazen, and key Arafat aides and entourage, who also are maybe mostly out of Gaza these days? How convenient if that is in fact the case, which we do not know for sure but hope those who do will let us know. Could it be a crafty way for the Israelis and Americans to be protecting Arafat and entourage while at the same time putting their boot to him?

No doubt about it, General Sharon is a crafty fellow. No doubt about it, General Sharon's racism, brutality, and thuggary have in fact had considerable impact over the years. But this time, Sharon's history may fail him; and he may yet ignite a firestorm that even his rampant militarism will not be able to extinguish and which in the end will engulf him and those who started it all.

ISRAEL KEPT ARAFAT PLANE FROM RETURNING TO GAZA

[MIDDLE EAST NEWSLINE - Ramallah - April 20, 2001 Israel has attempted to keep Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat from returning to Gaza from a brief visit to Cairo, PA sources said.

The sources said Arafat's jet was prevented from entering Gaza air space on late Tuesday amid the Israeli invasion of Palestinian areas of Gaza. They said Arafat was forced to fly to Amman instead.

In Amman, the sources said, Arafat appealed to Jordan's King Abdullah to press Israel to allow the PA chairman to return to the Palestinian areas. Hours later, Arafat flew into Ramallah.

The sources said Israel has launched a new policy meant to disrupt Arafat's movements and particularly to prevent him from returning to the West Bank and Gaza Strip from abroad. They said the new policy requires specific permission for Arafat's plane to land in Gaza's Rafah airport. In the past, such approval was granted immediately...

Arafat has not been in Gaza since the Arab League summit in Amman on March 27. Instead, he has been based in Ramallah and has traveled abroad and returned on a Jordanian military helicopter.

The PA chairman is expected to travel to Damascus at the end of the month for his first official meetings in Damascus. The London-based Al Hayat daily said Syrian and Palestinian officials are drafting a joint communique.

Egypt has not pressed Israel regarding restrictions on Arafat, a PA source said. The source said Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak is dismayed by Arafat's refusal to reduce the mini-war against Israel to enable implementation of an Egyptian-Jordanian plan meant to resume peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians.

OLD TACTICS GET NEW LIFE UNDER SHARON

By Daniel Williams

[Washington Post - Page 1 - JERUSALEM, April 20] In a recent newspaper interview, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon went out of his way to assure readers that "there is no new Sharon." A few days later, he set out to prove it.

Reviving a signature tactic from the days of Israel's full occupation of the Gaza Strip, Sharon ordered army bulldozers to clear swaths of Palestinian-run territory, knocking down trees and buildings to create free-fire zones to deter Palestinian mortar launchers and riflemen. Immediate U.S. criticism cut short the incursion, regarded as an assault on the 1993 Oslo peace accords that transferred 20 percent of the West Bank and two-thirds of the Gaza Strip to Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority.

But Tuesday's 24-hour reoccupation was just one facet of a consistent escalation that has taken place since Sharon took office six weeks ago, designed to pressure the Palestinians into ending their almost seven-month-old revolt against Israeli forces in Gaza and the West Bank. Despite the expression of U.S. concern, the escalation policy will not be abandoned, aides to Sharon said, because the veteran Israeli warrior believes it is the best way to deal with the Palestinians and protect Israeli civilians from attack.

"I am tired of always hearing people say that Israel uses excessive force," Sharon told the French newspaper Le Figaro, referring to language used Tuesday by U.S. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell. The Israeli leader added that foreign criticisms only "encourage Arafat to start shooting at Israeli civilians again."

Since taking over from Ehud Barak on March 7, Sharon has redefined many of the reference points in Israel's conflict with the Palestinians. After eight years of peacemaking in which Arafat was a negotiating partner and the goal was ending a half-century of war, Israel has reverted to calling Arafat a terrorist. And Sharon's government -- dismissing final peace as impractical for now -- has set out to show the Palestinians with military force that they must submit to continued Israeli occupation in the Gaza Strip and West Bank.

Sharon, 73, has made no secret of his desire to fulfill a lifelong goal of keeping hold of the West Bank and Gaza, which were captured in 1967, and maintaining the settlements there that now dot the landscape and house nearly 200,000 Israelis. It is an objective that is also vintage Sharon, part and parcel of the ideology of the Likud Party he heads. Asked if he would ever abandon any settlements, he told the newspaper Haaretz, "No.. Absolutely not."

Sharon has insisted he still wants to negotiate with Arafat. But he wants the discussion to center on "interim agreements" that essentially would keep the present map in place, with Israeli troops and settlements remaining in place, too. That is a far cry from the final peace accord, with a Palestinian state in most of Gaza and the West Bank, that was under discussion during Barak's tenure. Palestinian leaders say it is a recipe for no talks -- and no peace -- at all.

At the same time, Sharon and his aides have repeatedly blamed Arafat and his administration for tolerating, and even directing, attacks against Israeli troops and civilians. They have accused him time and again of running an administration that promotes "terror" against Israelis, a revival of vocabulary that skips back to the 1980s.

Action has matched the words. Sharon has increased the use of tanks, helicopters and heavy automatic rifle fire against Palestinian civilians and military targets. In recent weeks, Israel has begun to use surface-to-surface missiles to bombard Gaza. Shelling of Bethlehem on Wednesday, in retaliation for gunfire on roads used by settlers traveling from the West Bank into Jerusalem, lasted at least two hours. It was the most persistent attack on a Palestinian town since the latest round of Israeli-Palestinian conflicts erupted last September.

Target selection in Bethlehem also represented an escalation. Not only was a stone cutting factory severely damaged, but Israeli tanks bombarded a new conference center on the southern end of the city. Both facilities symbolize major Bethlehem industries: stone working and tourism.

The military strategy, according to government officials, does not merely reflect Sharon's career-long reputation for an iron fist. Rather, it combines classic elements of anti-guerrilla strategy with limited warfare, a miniature version of tactics dating back to the Vietnam War: sending messages through destruction and killing.

Through carrot-and-stick methods -- bombing and bulldozing houses on the one hand, and on the other, pledging to ease travel and let more workers get jobs in Israel -- Sharon hopes to drive a wedge between civilians and the Arafat administration, his aides say. In effect, Sharon wants to poison the sea in which Palestinian armed groups operate.

"The tactic is out of the past, but we think it can work here. We believe the majority of Palestinians are ready to end this violence," said Raanan Gissin, an adviser and spokesman for Sharon.

Attacks on Palestinian Authority security facilities and efforts to assassinate activists in the Fatah movement, the main part of Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization, have a similar, more focused goal. They are designed to fix blame on Arafat's forces and to sap the morale of his armed agencies by showing that they are vulnerable.

"Arafat will understand he can't provide security to his own people," Gissin said.

In execution of that strategy, Palestinians in recent weeks have been punished by the destruction of dozens of homes on the edges of the Khan Younis and Rafah refugee camps in Gaza, the source of gunfire and mortar attacks on nearby Israeli troops and settlements. The tin-roofed, one-story Palestinian houses are not suitable as launching pads for mortar fire; most were in positions from where snipers had no line of fire onto Israeli military positions or settlements. But hundreds of Palestinians were left homeless, and the message was sent.

Shells and missile fire into the Gaza Strip were also aimed at a police station, offices of the Preventive Security forces and military posts near the territory's frontiers with Israel. "If the Palestinians want to complain, they should complain to Arafat," remarked an Israeli military official.

Sharon has described his tactics as a means of "unbalancing" the Palestinians "so that they will be busy protecting themselves."

The other side of the policy, easing conditions on civilians, came in the form of permission for about 3,000 workers to cross from Gaza into Israel to return to jobs. Blockades along roads in the West Bank and Gaza were also lifted.

Sharon came under intense criticism in the Israeli press for invading Gaza, and for then pulling back, evidently under U.S. pressure. Commentators noted that mortar attacks on Israeli farms near the Gaza border and on military posts in the Gaza Strip did not stop, suggesting the decision managed only to provoke U.S. criticism.

"Now Sharon knows where the limits of Israel's might are . . . they pass through the White House lawn," wrote the Yedioth Aharonoth newspaper.

Labor Party members in the governing coalition seized on the controversy to offer their own plan for ending the confrontations. Transportation Minister Ephraim Sneh proposed opening talks with the Palestinians on "concrete measures" to end violence and offering a freeze on settlement construction and means to revive the prostrate Palestinian economy. Talks on a final settlement would begin after "a few months of quiet," he said.

"Military action is not enough. The events of this week and the . . . hasty withdrawal from the Gaza Strip showed us the limits of force and the thin tissue of international support for Israel," he said.

Nonetheless, Sharon has decided to continue attacks into Palestinian-ruled territories, albeit with smaller numbers of troops and without threats to reoccupy Palestinian land for an extended period. The day after the Gaza incursion, tanks and bulldozers briefly crossed into southern Gaza to knock down a police post and uproot trees.

The controversial assassination policy begun under Barak remains. Israeli undercover units will continue to enter Palestinian territory to pursue leaders of armed groups, government officials said.

"Israel will do what's necessary to protect its towns and cities," said Dore Gold, an adviser to Sharon. "What is important is the principle: This government will not negotiate under fire."

Despite the harsh tone from the Bush administration, Sharon is satisfied that the United States puts primary blame on the Palestinians and has "not confused the arsonist with the fireman," Gold said.

One departure from the Sharon of old is sensitivity to political and international opinion, Israeli observers said. As head of a coalition government, he needs to balance an urge to punish the Palestinians with the preference of such partners as Sneh to negotiate. If the government falls, Sharon will face a challenge in his own party from former prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who is waiting to run in the next elections.

"Twenty years ago, Sharon would have dismissed the American complaints and stayed in Gaza," said Gerald Steinberg, a political analyst at Bar-Ilan University. "He now understands the problem of image. He doesn't want to be seen as the Sharon of Lebanon," Steinberg continued, referring to the 1982 invasion led by Sharon, who was defense minister at the time. "The Gaza business revived the image of invasion, occupation and aggressiveness. He doesn't want to project that image."
Mid-East Realitieswww.middleeast.org

Source: http://www.middleeast.org/articles/2001/4/169.htm