Yesterday’s suicide bomb attack on a bus near Haifa ought to convince the Israelis that the military onslaught against the Palestinians has not worked — and never will.
But a grip on reality is what the Israelis lack. Seeing a lull in suicide attacks, the Israeli public chose — at least until yesterday — to believe that Ariel Sharon’s military rampage in the West Bank had stopped the bombers. Common sense should have told them otherwise. They knew perfectly well that the number of Palestinians willing to give up their lives had risen and that it was simply a matter of time before another attack occurred.
It now ought to be blindingly clear to the Israelis that a willingness to seek a political solution is the only viable alternative to the slaughter and violence. Yet neither the Sharon government nor Israeli public opinion appears able to pull themselves out of the ghetto mentality that has brought them, as well as the Palestinians, to the edge of the pit. There is no sign that yesterday’s painful evidence that savage repression does not work has done anything to shake the brutal fantasy that the Palestinians can be beaten into submission. Quite the reverse: Israeli officials say that the attack will harden the determination to continue the onslaught.
Opinion polls show that 86 percent of Israelis support Sharon’s military onslaught. Just 12 percent are opposed. Moreover, more Israelis are firmly convinced that a military solution can work. The other opinion poll statistic is that the main rival now to Sharon is the other leader of the extreme Israeli right, Benjamin Netanyahu. Both are on a 28-percent rating; the combined support for potential Labor candidates is just 11 percent.
There is only one conclusion that can be drawn from this: paranoia. That explains Sharon’s defiance of international demands, particularly Washington’s, for an end to his military operations. However, the evidence, plain as daylight, has been there for months that Sharon’s iron-fist policies actively fuels Palestinian determination to resist, no matter how great the personal cost. But the greater the evidence, the more the Israeli public have closed their eyes to it. They have become so paranoid that they are unable to think rationally about peace.
That raises an aspect to Israeli intransigence so far overlooked. The world condemns the Sharon government for its violence and its refusal to embrace an offer of peace such as the Crown Prince Abdullah’s. Its analysis is that Sharon himself manipulated Israeli security fears to win last year’s election. But maybe the Israeli public has been the real culprit all along. In its paranoia it wanted an extremist government: if Sharon had not been available, it would have found someone else.
If so, the tragic truth is that no evidence to the contrary will shatter Israel’s belief in the effectiveness of brutality. Having retreated into a mental ghetto and hoping to pull up the drawbridge behind them, the Israelis are likely to become more rather than less intransigent. They will not see that if they want to stop the bombers and live in peace, they have to break out of their psychological chains and come down to reality. Only with that is there any chance of a settlement.
