Ariel Sharon’s new policy of invading Palestinian Authority towns as retaliation for bomb blasts and holding them until the bombing stops is the response of a bully. It is heavy with menace but short on vision and judgement. It certainly does nothing to inject much-needed calm into the situation.
Quite the opposite. It is bound to be a failure — and both the Palestinians and the Israelis know it. It is not going to deter the bombers. All it will do is fan the flames of Palestinian fury even stronger. There will be more bombs, not less. So what is Sharon going to do then? Start razing the towns he has seized? Put up more prison fences along the West Bank?
Indeed, the very notion of holding on to towns seized till the bombing stops rings hollow. It has the hallmarks of an idea dreamed up for public consumption today and to be forgotten tomorrow. The reality will be very different. In couple or so weeks’ time, after frantic behind-the-scenes pressure from the US, the Israelis will once again pull out, no doubt making much noise about it being a "concession" to get the peace process started — which it will not. Then, they will go back in again after another bomb attack.
This seesaw of troops-in, troops-out, keeps the Israelis and the Palestinians bogged down in a mire of bitterness and bloody recrimination — and it is all Sharon’s doing. He is the one who, by sabotaging the peace process, brought the Palestinians to such a state of despair that they embraced the bomb as the only means of hitting back at an enemy who, in all other respects, seemed militarily invincible.
Sharon ought to know by now that nothing will stop the bombers except visible evidence that he is pulling out of the occupied territories — all of them — for good and that he recognizes an independent Palestinian state. Promises that he will do so after cease-fires and negotiations will not be good enough. The Palestinians have seen too many Israeli promises turn into lies to believe them any more.
So why does he carry on with tactics that exclude any possibility of peace? To conclude that he has some grand evil design is to give him more credit than he deserves. He does not have any long-term strategy, other than holding on as prime minister and preventing a two-state solution, and even in those he has no well-organized tactics. He only has short-term responses — and they are, as stated earlier, those of the bully. The fence along part of the West Bank is just another of his hasty, ill-conceived and spiteful ideas, aimed as it is at imprisoning the Palestinians behind it. It will do that, but it will not stop the bombers. The more intolerable the conditions imposed on the Palestinians, the greater the number of volunteers for such missions — and they will find ways.
It is precisely because he has no long-term strategy that this crazy merry-go-round of violence and recrimination suits him so well. It muddies the waters and delays indefinitely the only outcome that will achieve peace: the two-state solution. Israelis and Palestinians pay the price in lives lost or wrecked, but he is left untouched, unscathed. In the middle of what is war, the Israelis are too afraid to ditch him.
