WASHINGTON, 15 June 2003 — June 2001: The Bush administration was engaged in one of its sporadic efforts to end the fighting between Israelis and Palestinians. On June 28 Secretary of State Colin Powell announced in Jerusalem that the government of Ariel Sharon and the Palestinian Authority had agreed on a timeline for restarting the peace process, beginning with a complete halt to violence.
Just three days later, Israeli helicopters launched eight missiles at a car in the West Bank, killing a commander of Islamic Jihad. The cease-fire never began. On July 31 another helicopter attack killed two senior political leaders of the Hamas movement. Days later Hamas staged one of its most horrendous suicide attacks, slaughtering children in a Sbarro pizza parlor in Jerusalem. Instead of ending, the war escalated.
December 2002: Under heavy pressure from the United States, Yasser Arafat finally declared a cease-fire. For three weeks in December and early January there was no violence, though the Israeli capture of a ship bearing Iranian arms for the Palestinians nullified any political benefit. Then Hamas staged an attack against an Israeli Army outpost. Several days later Israel assassinated Raed Karmi, a senior figure in Arafat’s Fatah movement. The cease-fire was immediately called off, and in the following two weeks Israel suffered the worst wave of suicide bombings in its history. In March its troops reoccupied Palestinian territories in the West Bank. They are still there.
That brings us to June 2003. Another US-brokered peace initiative has been followed by a Hamas attack on an Israeli military post, then a spectacular Israeli assassination strike against a Hamas political leader, then a horrendous suicide bombing in Jerusalem, and then a new wave of Israeli military raids. A couple of patterns spring out from this history. One is the bid by Hamas, a sworn enemy of a Palestinian settlement with Israel, to disrupt any attempt to start a peace process. The other is Sharon’s more paradoxical habit of following up his acceptance of US peace initiatives with spectacular assassination raids — raids that without exception have been followed by the retaliatory slaughter of Israeli civilians and major escalations of the conflict.
Sharon’s spokesmen protest that Israel can’t stop defending itself against terrorists just because peace talks are under way. In parts of the Bush administration, the critical-but-sympathetic analysis goes that, while the veteran Israeli warrior may have been unwise to take Hamas’ bait, he still looks ready to deal with more moderate Palestinian leaders — and anyway Israel can hardly be blamed for fighting a war against terrorism.
Yet such assessments underestimate Sharon. Surely by now the old general knows what the assassination of a senior Palestinian political figure will lead to. And just as surely, now as before, Sharon has serious reservations about where US diplomacy is taking him.
In June and December of 2001, Sharon publicly assented to cease-fires with Yasser Arafat, but in reality he saw them as senseless and even dangerous. As he has since made clear, the Israeli leader believed the only way to stop the fighting was to destroy Arafat’s Palestinian Authority and replace it with a more moderate administration.
The current situation is similar. While Sharon says he supports President Bush’s new peace initiative, in fact he and his hard-line military commanders have been alarmed by the course it has taken. As Sharon understood it, the US-backed “road map’’ should have required the new Palestinian prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas (aka Abu Mazen), to begin by forcibly disarming Hamas and arresting its leaders. If Abbas really fought that Palestinian civil war, the Israelis figured, their problems with suicide bombings would be over. If not, Israel wouldn’t be obliged to carry out the freeze on Jewish settlements that Sharon finds so painful to contemplate.
But at the summit in Aqaba, Jordan, more than a week ago, Bush reset the terms. He accepted Abu Mazen’s plan to negotiate a cease-fire with Hamas rather than forcibly disband it — a half-measure that Israeli military commanders view as providing the enemy with an opportunity to rest and rearm. He insisted that Sharon begin taking action against settlement outposts even before the Palestinians acted. According to the respected Israeli journalist Akiva Eldar, Bush even rebuked Sharon a couple of times, rejecting an Israeli claim that the army could do nothing to help the Palestinians and insisting that Sharon release impounded Palestinian funds.
Abdel Aziz Rantissi, the Hamas leader Sharon ordered assassinated, is a media personality who lives a highly public life. Had it chosen to, Israel could have targeted him at any time in the past year, when no peace process was under way. So why did the helicopters strike six days after the Aqaba summit? The most logical explanation is that the violent and entirely predictable consequences were exactly what Israel’s prime minister wanted.
