JERUSALEM, May 20 (AFP) - Israeli Defence Minister Binyamin Ben Eliezer revealed Sunday that Israel had planned to stop Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat from going to Egypt this weekend for the meeting of the Arab League's follow-up committee. "We did effectively plan to stop him leaving, as Yasser Arafat is waging a total war against us, using to that end all the services under him," Ben Eliezer told Israeli television.

"He is also a leader who is leading his own people to chaos. But at the end of the day, we let him leave," Ben Eliezer added. Asked about the possibility of Israel stopping Arafat leaving the Palestinian territories or coming back, the defence minister remained vague. "I will do everything to convince Yasser Arafat that he can gain nothing from violence," said the minister.

Israel has kept total control of the border posts into Jordan and Egypt, as well as the air space, so Arafat can not go abroad or come home without the green light of the Israeli authorities.

Israel's use of warplanes against a Palestinian target Friday marks the biggest escalation since the Six Day War of 1967

[The Christian Science Monitor - NABLUS, WEST BANK - 21 May] Hawla Ghafar, the awestruck expression on her face accentuated by a tightly wrapped head scarf, stood across the street from the Police Special Forces headquarters here to take in what the Israeli F-16s had done.

A semicircular swath 50 yards wide had turned to dust and rubble, as if a giant had stamped his heel on the building. "What are the Israelis going to do next, now that they have used jet fighters?" wondered Ms. Hawla, a schoolteacher who lives in a refugee camp. Nearly eight months of Israeli-Palestinian strife, she added, were beginning to feel "like a war." "Weekend of war," echoed Maariv, an Israeli daily, in its coverage of the events of Friday and Saturday. The logo appeared on nearly every page of the tabloid's Sunday news section.

Reuven Rivlin, Israel's communications minister, describes Israel's escalating attacks against the Palestinians as a "war against terrorism." Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat says "the decisive battle for Palestine" has come.

But it seems that no one is willing to declare outright that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has become a war. Armed groups are fighting each other, but they lack the motives and perhaps the level of organization that war demands. For now, anyway.

"War" means two sides clashing with some objective in mind; the Israelis and the Palestinians don't have any grand strategies. "War" also suggests a balance of power more even than the staggering imbalance that exists between the Israelis and Palestinians.

In most of their rhetoric, the partisans of the two sides cling to the articulation of their rights rather than uttering words of war. The Palestinians defend their "right to resist" Israel's occupation of their lands - by any means necessary. The Israelis resist any infringement on their "right to defend" themselves from Palestinian attacks, and that often means attacking the Palestinians first and with overwhelming force.

Israeli philosopher Avishai Margalit has a different take: The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a blood feud, two sides bent on revenge, fighting to the end. "A feud is not about future prospects," he says, something that war often is. "It's settling scores from the past."

The possibility exists that Arab states will involve themselves in this conflict, and that would indeed mean war, as it has repeatedly over the past half-century. After Israel's use of US-made F-16 fighter jets to attack Palestinian targets on Friday, that possibility is arguably one step closer.

It was the first time such sophisticated weaponry had been used over the West Bank and Gaza Strip since 1967 - the war in which Israel seized those territories from Jordan and Egypt. On Saturday, Arab League foreign ministers meeting in Cairo called upon the organization's 22 members to cut all political ties with Israel.

That move fell short of Egypt and Jordan severing their diplomatic ties with the Jewish state, but it may have killed an Egyptian-Jordanian peace initiative. It has also brought relations in the region to a low point not seen in decades.

The Arab League meeting capped some of the bloodiest days of the intifada. On Friday, a Palestinian suicide bomber killed himself and five Israelis in a grisly explosion in the seaside Israeli town of Netanya. Palestinian Attackers later shot to death an Israeli officer in the West Bank.

Israeli reprisals occurred in the late afternoon: F-16 jets and Apache helicopter strikes killed 12 Palestinians. A bomb discovered in a Jerusalem bar was detonated by Israeli police at 3 a.m. Saturday.

Saturday also brought more Israeli raids and a massive public funeral in Nablus, the main Palestinian town in the northern part of the West Bank, for policemen killed at the Police Special Forces headquarters. As thousands of mourners filled the central square of the old part of this ancient town, Palestinian gunmen emptied clip after clip into the air.

The gunfire served to illustrate both Palestinians' rage and the futility of their position, since they have little more than small arms to defend themselves against the most powerful military in the Middle East. Israeli security forces killed three Palestinians in clashes Saturday. So far 553 people have died in this conflict, including 469 on the Palestinian side and 84 on the Israeli side.

While all this violence adds up to something, it is not quite war. The formulation used by the Israel Defense Forces is "an armed conflict short of war," but international humanitarian law has only two categories: war and non-war.

Calling a conflict "war" gives military forces leeway and liberties to use violence that a state of non-war does not allow, says Kim Gordon-Bates, spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross in Jerusalem. That might be a boon for the IDF, which has drawn global condemnation for using excessive force in dealing with the Palestinian unrest, but it would amount to a declaration of war. Although Israelis generally support their hard-line prime minister, Ariel Sharon, the majority of the population does not want to give up on the longheld dream of peaceful coexistence with Israel's Arab neighbors.

The problem for the IDF is that international humanitarian law specifies much higher standards of protection for civilians when a military is operating in a state of non-war. So Israel is trying to define a third, in-between path, in part to absolve itself of having to account for the hundreds of civilians its forces have killed since the intifada began last year.

The Palestinians, too, dream of peace, but their unwillingness to adopt the language of war is also a matter of practical reality: Israel would crush them. It's hard to destroy F-16s with automatic rifles.

It is true that some of the circumstances of this conflict are present in situations of war. Hostilities are, of course, taking place. Organizations capable of conducting war are involved. (One subtlety: While Israel's forces are under a unified organizational command, it is by no means clear that the militants on the Palestinian side are.)

The main complexity is motive. Israel would have no reason to battle and conquer the Palestinians; the whole point of years of negotiations has been to try to extricate Israel from its occupation of Palestinian territories. Palestinians might want to capture parts or all of Israel, but they simply do not have the means. Nor, incidentally, do the Arab states, as a series of Arab-Israeli wars has shown.

Mr. Margalit, a Hebrew University professor who laid out his feud analysis in a recent edition of The New York Review of Books, says the only way out is the intervention of a third party - in this case, the United States. "The two sides can't get out of it themselves."

"The use of such hi-tech weaponry can cause serious damage to Israel on the second front that the country is fighting: the battle for world public opinion."

"Within eight months the Intifada [uprising] has gone from M-16 rifles to F-16s...newspaper. In military terms the F-16s achieved rather negligible results but, in terms of diplomacy and PR, Israel bombed itself in the knee.

[The Telegraph (U.K.) - May 21, 2001] THE Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, yesterday brushed aside mounting criticism of his use of American-supplied F-16 warplanes to bomb a Palestinian city, saying he would use "everything at our disposal to protect the citizens of Israel".

The US vice-president, Dick Cheney, called on Israel to stop using the fighter-bombers against Palestinians, saying the tactic amounted to an escalation of a "very delicate situation". "Both sides should stop and think about where they are headed here and recognise that down this road lies disaster," Mr Cheney said.

The country was on high alert amid reports that 24 suicide bombers were ready to strike as Israel began marking Jerusalem Day, which celebrates re-unification of the city after Israel's conquest of the eastern part in 1967. Marchers with blue and white Israeli flags paraded along the main streets of Jerusalem, handing a basket of fruit grown by West Bank Jewish settlers to the prime minister, who was on a highly protected platform.

In a change from the routine of evening gunfire, fireworks exploded over the western part of the city as the authorities tried to keep up a semblance of normal life. As sporadic violence continued, an Israeli tank shell hit the home of Jibril Rajoub, one of the key lieutenants of the Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, during an exchange of fire on the outskirts of the town of Ramallah.

Mr Rajoub was not at home at the time but three of his guards were injured. An Israeli army spokesman said: "There was no intention to kill Rajoub. The house was caught in the crossfire." The death of Mr Rajoub would have prompted a further explosion of anger from a populace already enraged by Israel's first use of F-16s, its front-line aircraft, during the seven months of violence.

Friday's air raid came in response to a Palestinian suicide bombing of a shopping mall in the resort of Netanya, which killed five Israelis and caused outrage throughout the country. Twelve Palestinians were killed in the air raid but the target - a commander of the military wing of Hamas, the Islamic extremist organisation - escaped with only a minor injury.

Yesterday, at funerals for Palestinians killed over the weekend, suicide bomber recruits, clad in white shrouds, proclaimed their readiness to blow themselves up to attack the "Zionist enemy". Mr Arafat immediately repeated his calls for a multi-national protection force for Palestinians, in the same way as the international community mobilised to protect the Kosovar Albanians last year.

But Mr Sharon was defiant. "We will do what it takes and use everything at our disposal to protect the citizens of Israel," he told the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth. The lives of Israeli citizens will not be forfeit." Mr Sharon said he would not "fold in the face of terror attacks" and would never make any concessions on security.

Arab foreign ministers, meeting in Cairo on Saturday, responded with a call for the 22-member Arab League to break off all contacts with Israel until it ended its "aggression" and "siege" of the Palestinian territories. The Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak, said he feared the situation "might reach a point of no return".

Robin Cook, the Foreign Secretary, said he had commiserated with the Israeli foreign minister, Shimon Peres, over the five Israeli deaths in the suicide attack, but called on Israel to achieve security by negotiation and not "revenge". "The situation is grim and getting grimmer," Mr Cook said in a television interview.

The army played down the significance of the use of the air force. Maj Gen Giora Eiland, head of planning, insisted at a news conference yesterday that the decision to use the F-16 was "tactical" and aircraft would not be used "very often".

"The targets selected were so strong that attack helicopters would not have been powerful enough to penetrate them," Gen Eiland said. "This does not mean we are entering a new phase. We are under no illusion that retaliation will stop the violence. We are not so naive. We have to show that we are doing everything to protect our people and that there is a cost to sponsoring terrorism."

Israeli commentators and some retired military men were united in condemning the use of the air force. "Within eight months the Intifada [uprising] has gone from M-16 rifles to F-16s," wrote Hemi Shalev in the popular Maariv newspaper. "In military terms the F-16s achieved rather negligible results but, in terms of diplomacy and PR, Israel bombed itself in the knee."

Even the Jerusalem Post, which is usually sympathetic to the prime minister, said the mission was wrong. "The use of such hi-tech weaponry can cause serious damage to Israel on the second front that the country is fighting: the battle for world public opinion," it said. Eitan Ben-Eliyahu, a retired air force commander, said he would not have sent F-16s to attack the Palestinians "because the consequences of such a step could be very harsh".

The Israeli government agreed yesterday on an increased defence budget "due to security problems", a spokesman for Mr Sharon said. The boost was approved by 15 ministers to 11. The increased expenditure will be compensated for by cuts on various other ministries and social funds, a statement said.

During the budget meeting Mr Sharon said: "We are facing a tough battle which has been imposed on us. The people of Israel have shown great mental strength and we need to give our security forces the necessary budgets." The death toll since the start of the Palestinian uprising last September stands at 559, including 458 Palestinians and 85 Israelis.

Mid-East Realities

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Source: http://www.middleeast.org/articles/2001/5/215.htm