Nor should it be forgotten Ariel Sharon and George Bush are friends and allies, and that both the Pentagon and CIA have very close and intimate ties to their counterparts in Israel. As the "War on Terrorism" heats up, and as counter-reactions of unforeseen kinds can be expected, there's no telling what this modern-day crusade could lead to and very little reason at the moment to be hopeful about what the foreseeable future now holds.

[The Guardian - 22 February]: Israel's prime minister, Ariel Sharon, offered up the least inspiring of messages to a public exhausted by a 17-month uprising and badly shaken by a spate of military fiascos last night: You must be patient, he said.

Mr Sharon's pep talk to the nation, delivered in a rare televised address, offered no new strategies for quelling the intifada beyond a vague promise to build buffer zones between Israel and the Palestinians.

Instead, the defensive prime minister lashed out at his critics and chided an increasingly restive public which has accused Mr Sharon of lacking an exit plan from the uprising.

"Some members of the public are criticising during these days when we have to be quiet," he said. "We have to be restrained, we have to remain cool about issues of peace and war. We must not be hasty.

He added: "There are no miracle solutions and no one should be misled by miracle solutions proposed by various commentators."

But the argument failed to sway Israeli television commentators, or Mr Sharon's leftwing opponents, who said he had betrayed Israelis by failing to offer an alternative vision.

"In an address like this you have to give answers to a people who are very worried," said Yossi Sarid, the leader of the leftwing Meretz party. "People are sitting at home, and they are waiting for answers. Will it be safe to leave my house in the next two weeks? Will it be safe for my children?"

The idea of a buffer zone has been in circulation for years, and apart from this sop to an increasingly impatient public, Mr Sharon's performance last night did little to shake the impression that, as Israel's crisis escalates, he is not the man with the answers.

Instead, the sense that Mr Sharon was losing his ability to call the shots deepened when the Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, renewed his offer of a ceasefire, and effected the arrest of three fugitives Israel has demanded for months.

The arrests were Israel's price for ending Mr Arafat's virtual imprisonment in his Ramallah headquarters, and put pressure on Mr Sharon either to make good on his promise, or convince the international community that he has a good reason for continuing Mr Arafat's confinement.

As Israeli helicopter gunships and warplanes attacked Palestinian security installations across the West Bank and Gaza for a second day, Mr Sharon's speech made clear he had no intention of changing his strategy of trying to crush the uprising with military might, while isolating Mr Arafat.

The bombardments, ordered in reprisal for a devastating Palestinian commando-style attack on a West Bank check point which killed six Israelis, were the heaviest since the start of the uprising.

Eight people were killed yesterday in F-16 and helicopter gunship attacks on security compounds in Gaza and the West Bank, and in a tank invasion of the southern Gaza town of Rafah.

Mr Sharon's main concession to growing Israeli disaffection with his performance was the revival of a proposal to build a security zone between the West Bank and Gaza. He has not been a supporter of such ideas in the past - largely because they call for the dismantling of some Jewish settlements - and he did not spell out last night what he meant by a security zone.

Mr Sharon was just as evasive when asked for his response to the arrest earlier yesterday of three men wanted for the assassination of the far-right cabinet minister, Rechavam Zeevi, last October.

"We are checking our reports. We have heard various declarations of this sort in the past," he said

The UN secretary general, Kofi Annan said yesterday the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was heading for full-fledged war. "Truly, we are nearing the edge of the abyss," he told the security council.

It is three months since Ariel Sharon laid siege to Yasser Arafat in his Ramallah headquarters. With the violence mounting wildly, who is really besieging whom?

[The Guardian - 22 February]: It is three months since Ariel Sharon laid siege to Yasser Arafat in his Ramallah headquarters. Physically, his position remains dire. An Israeli tank is stationed a mere 70 metres from where he sleeps and wakes. During Israel's latest land-sea-and-air assaults, a missile struck a police post in his compound. But, with the violence mounting wildly, who is really besieging whom? No better place to look for an answer than that earlier, epic encounter between the two and the rehearsal for this one, Sharon's three-month siege of West Beirut in 1982.

Then the idea was virtually the same as today. Then, too, Arafat and the PLO, deemed the source of all opposition to Israeli control over the West Bank and Gaza, had to be eliminated to make way for an "alternative leadership" that would acquiesce in it. It was likewise with overwhelming popular support that Sharon embarked on his grandiose scheme of geopolitical engineering which envisaged the replacement of the Hashemite kingdom of Jordan with a Republic of Palestine, to which the inhabitants of the occupied territories could be "transferred". He also had a green light from a highly sympathetic White House.

For sure, Arafat was militarily defeated. But it was a disaster for Sharon. Israel lacked the resources for such imperial designs. Palestinian resistance was too strong. The Israeli public soon turned against him. So did a President Reagan embarrassed by his excesses.

Twenty years on, he now stands face to face with the self-same watershed, the same decision whether, his whole strategy manifestly faltering, to press on regardless, or retreat. For once again, the objective he has set himself is so extreme that he is bound to fail unless he goes to the bitter end. But, again, to do so will confront Israel with unbearable costs and incalculable risks.

Ostensibly, he wants to return to the peace process. In reality, he never did. For this was a war which he and like-minded soldiers and politicians long anticipated; and, once he got this war, he did everything to fuel and perpetuate it.

It was never a secret: he always opposed the Oslo accord, and the historic compromise it involves, a Palestinian state on 22% of original Palestine. From the outset, this was his war to destroy any idea of Palestinian self-determination on any portion of Palestinian land, and any legitimate institution empowered to bring it about. However, though his basic ambition has not changed since Lebanon, the stakes are momentously higher with the struggle between the two peoples at its most critical juncture since Israel came into being in 1948.

As in Lebanon, Sharon began his campaign in favourable circumstances, swept into office by a people who saw him as their "saviour". He owed this spectacular comeback largely to Palestinian violence. He also profited from the public's perception that Arafat alone provoked the intifada, that he was still bent on Israel's destruction, and that, in the cycle of violence, the Israelis were only retaliating in self-defence.

Yet this was specious. For one thing, while Sharon openly proclaims a conception of "peace" wholly at odds with commitments Israel has solemnly entered into, Arafat has indefatigably reiterated his loyalty to the historic compromise he spent his later career educating his people to accept. For another, while the intifada was clearly waiting to happen, it was Sharon who finally triggered it with his inflammatory al-Aqsa walkabout. And it has be come ever clearer that the last thing Sharon actually wants is that period of calm he claims he does; every time it risks taking hold he has staged one of those "targeted killings" that inevitably provoke a Palestinian response.

But suddenly, this past week, Sharon has truly begun to pay the price of overweening aim and ferocious means. As they did in Lebanon, the Palestinians are resisting more strongly than he bargained for. It is basically a low-intensity war, and, for domestic and international reasons, he would clearly like to keep it that way. But that is also a kind of war in which the Palestinians, with their guerrilla and terrorist methods, are learning to inflict ever greater pain. "It is Lebanonisation now" - screamed Israeli newspapers at the weekend, amid official talk of setting up "security zones" in the occupied territories similar to the one from which Hizbullah forced Israel to withdraw in south Lebanon.

Sharon also faces growing resistance from his own public. More and more people are saying that he just doesn't have a remedy, or that he is far more interested in his rightwing agenda than in the welfare and safety of the people. And there is nothing like his 1982 Lebanon debacle to remind him how swiftly and profoundly the tide of opinion is now liable to turn against him.

This is an emergency from which, to a man like him, there is only one possible exit: a qualitative escalation.

Officially, at least, what has been happening these past two days does not amount to one. The real escalation, he has made it pretty clear, would come with the deposing, banishing or killing of the "irrelevant" captive of Ramallah whom he now publicly regrets that he did not "liquidate" in Beirut. His rightwing constituents now bay for Arafat's blood.

It is as nonsensical now as it was 20 years ago to lay all Israel's woes at one man's door, to imply that, since Arafat controls everything, getting rid of him would clear the way for that "alternative leadership". The first, unarmed, intifada of 1987-1993 was a total surprise to Arafat, and the second, violent one was directed, potentially, against him as much as the Israelis.

No sooner were Arafat gone than Sharon would have to escalate again; for it would quickly become clear that the intifada is a genuine popular movement that no collaborationist leadership would emerge to suppress. And, no small consideration for Sharon, the Bush administration has reportedly told him that destroying Arafat is a line he must not cross.

Small wonder Arafat seems so perky in his confinement. His physical grip on power may be fraying, but Sharon has greatly enhanced his personal standing. He always thrives in adversity, and he is making sure that the choice between his survival and demise would be as momentous in its implications as one man's fate could ever be. On the one hand, very much the peace-seeker still, he has lately gone to new lengths of flexibility. On the other, reverting to the heroic, freedom-fighter's rhetoric of old, reportedly his guards have been told to resist any Israeli incursion to the last man, up to and including "the death of the president". In other words, après moi le déluge . That choice, of course, is not his, but Sharon's, and, with the struggle so rapidly intensifying, it is surely close. For him, sparing his lifelong adversary would be as bitter a personal defeat as Beirut. Disposing of him would - for Arabs and Palestinians, at least - be a defeat for the whole idea that there can ever be peace.

Poll shows disillusionment and disenchantment as Palestinian attacks continue, with suicide bomber foiled in shop

[The Guardian - Jerusalem - Saturday, February 23, 2002]: Ariel Sharon suffered a humbling finish to the most bruising week of his prime minstership yesterday with opinion polls charting a deepening disenchantment with the Israeli leadership. A poll conducted for the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper, Israel's largest Hebrew daily, showed that 61% of Israelis were dissatisfied with Mr Sharon's performance, and just 38% would give him a passing grade for his handling of the 17-month Palestinian uprising.

His credibility score fell to 54%, a staggering drop from his approval rating of 70% in December and 77% last July. The collapse of Mr Sharon's credibility - accelerated by high Israeli casualties during a wave of Palestinian attacks on military targets and Jewish settlements in the West Bank - is unlikely to be arrested by his poor performance during a nationally televised address on Thursday.

Amid continued attacks on Israelis in the West Bank yesterday, Israeli commentators showed the prime minister no mercy, saying he had utterly failed to calm his people's anxieties on security, or Israel's deepening economic recession.

"The lion that meowed," said the headline on the front page comment in Ha'aretz newspaper, which went on to cavil: "With speeches like these to the nation, it is doubtful whether England would have emerged whole from world war two, or whether the United States would have dragged itself out of the economic crash of 1929."

The piece concluded: "The prime minister spoke last night in lofty words, but did not give the concerned citizen any horizon or any hope to cling to and shake off the despair."

There was little credit given to Mr Sharon's plan to establish buffer zones between the West Bank and Israel. Although the prime minister gave no details of the separation zone, and refused to say how it would effect some 145 Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, Israeli radio yesterday described a plan to create a 125-mile security cordon along the borders of the West Bank. It said the army would begin mapping out the zone in the coming weeks, imposing concrete barriers and eventually a fence.

Political sources told Israeli Radio that the zone, which would be miles deep in places, would be set off with trenches and minefields, in effect creating a death strip for Palestinians. However, aides for the prime minister did not mention land mines, and said the army would patrol the zone, which would be demarcated by roadblocks and high voltage fences.

The notion of a buffer zone between the West Bank and Israel has been in circulation for years. Similar barricades were imposed on a stretch of the West Bank last summer, cutting off the Palestinian city of Tulkaram from the Israeli suburb of Bat Hefer with razor wire, electric fences and a three-metre high wall.

Although yesterday brought a lull in Israel's bombardment of Palestinian towns, and security officials on both sides resumed contacts after several weeks, there was no let-up in the attacks by Palestinian militants.

An Israeli motorist was shot dead north of Jerusalem and a suicide bomber struck the supermarket of an illegal Jewish settlement at Efrat. A customer in the shop shot and killed the bomber before he could fully detonate his explosive belt. Near the West Bank city of Hebron, a Jewish settler who shot and wounded two Palestinians was mistakingly wounded by Israeli soldiers.

The thwarted bombing at Efrat, south of Jerusalem, marked the second time in less than a week that a Palestinian militant has succeeded in penetrating the heavily guarded Jewish settlements.

Mid-East Realities

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Source: http://www.middleeast.org/articles/2002/2/660.htm