Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon (70 page)

Karmi was arrested by PA
police and briefly jailed in
Ramallah. But he easily escaped. For the whole of the next year he evaded Israeli hunter-
helicopters and undercover hit teams while continuing to take his toll of Israeli lives, mainly on the West Bank
roads but also inside Israel. In January 2002, with the new cease-fire spreading a partial and precarious quiet,
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the Shin Bet tracked Karmi to his latest paramour and found that he was carelessly visiting her at the same time every morning, when her husband was out of the house. In his terrorist activities, the Shin Bet told the prime minister, Karmi was blithely ignoring the cease-fire, even though he had assured his Fatah superiors and an EU diplomat sent to pacify him that he would abide by it. He had two suicide belts ready for use and could send them on
deadly assignment at any time. He was a “ticking bomb” and thus a legitimate target for elimination. Senior IDF officers and Minister of Defense Ben-Eliezer opposed Karmi’s assassination at this time. They argued it would trigger a wave of reprisals. They believed that Arafat had been so weakened by
9/11 and compromised by the
Karine A
that the cease-fire might hold this time and perhaps be widened into a general pacification. But Sharon preferred the advice of the
Shin Bet’s chief, Dichter, and Chief of Staff Mofaz, and the order went out: kill him.

The means chosen was a roadside bomb, hidden in a wall. Israel was to feign ignorance; such devices were used in internecine feuds among the Palestinian militants. But someone in the
Prime Minister’s Bureau was indiscreet, and within hours the true story was out. Marwan Barghouti, the best-known
Fatah-Tanzim leader on the West Bank, responded at a press conference in
Ramallah: “If there is no security for the people of
Tulkarm, there will be none for the people of Tel Aviv. The cease-fire is dead. Sharon has opened the gates of hell.”
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Three days later, on January 17, a young Palestinian walked into a bar mitzvah celebration in
Hadera, just across the green line from Tulkarm, pulled out an M16 assault rifle, and emptied two magazines into the celebrants. Six died and dozens were wounded. The assailant was finally shot dead. In Tulkarm, militants rejoiced on the streets, firing their rifles in the air. The cease-fire collapsed. Following Raed Karmi’s killing, the
al-Aqsa Brigades attached to Fatah threw off any previous inhibitions about crossing the green line. A grisly rivalry developed with Hamas and
Islamic Jihad over which organization could send more successful
suicide bombers into Israel proper.

Sharon’s prime ministership was approaching a critical point; many of the key players were still not resigned to his durability as the long-term national leader. He was losing height in the polls, week after week. After a suicide
bombing on December 1 in downtown Jerusalem, crowds had gathered on the hosed-down pedestrian mall, chanting “Sharon, go home” for the first time. “They’re right,” he told his aides in his
New York hotel, preferring to hear the literal meaning of the ominous mantra. He ordered his U.S. visit cut short and his plane readied to return home at once.
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The sharpest slippage in his standing was happening within his own rightist constituency. “You keep shouting, and I’ll keep fighting terrorism,” he told an unruly gathering of the Likud central committee some months before. The committee members didn’t like his talk of restraint being strength. They applauded politely when the prime minister came into the hall but exploded into a paroxysm of cheering and
chanting when Netanyahu made his entrance. Netanyahu spoke of the “three years of relative quiet” under his government. He was at his most disingenuous when he voiced his ostensible approval for the three tenets of Sharon’s policy: “No negotiations under fire.” “But there are!” the audience bayed back, as he knew they would. “No negotiations under terror.” “But there are!” they shouted. “Jewish blood shall not be cheap.” “But it is. It is!”
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On his left flank, too, Sharon’s situation was not reassuring. Labor had gone through an ugly primaries process, replete with accusations of fraud and vote rigging, and had eventually installed Defense Minister Ben-Eliezer as its new leader. That was good from Sharon’s standpoint: the other candidate, Knesset Speaker
Avrum Burg, had pledged to take the party out of Sharon’s coalition. But Ben-Eliezer would be awaiting the right opportunity for Labor to secede, if not over defense policy, then over domestic issues. The party could hardly go into a general election as the docile junior partner in a government run by Arik Sharon.

T
he attack in
Hadera was followed later in January by a suicide bombing
in Jerusalem. The bomber was a young woman, carrying more than twenty-two pounds of explosives on her body. During February the attacks intensified. On the tenth, two soldiers were killed in a bold assault on the main gate of the IDF’s Southern Command headquarters at
Beersheba. On the fourteenth, Hamas militants set off a massive 420-pound charge under an Israeli tank in the Gaza Strip. Five days later, six soldiers were shot dead by two
Fatah
al-Aqsa Brigades assailants who calmly walked up to their roadblock west of
Ramallah, pulled out rifles from under their jackets, and opened fire.

On March 3, seven reservist soldiers and three civilians were killed at another West Bank roadblock. On March 14 in the Gaza Strip, the same armored corps regiment sent out another of its
tanks to patrol the same road, and once again Hamas was lying in wait. The charge, 220 pounds of high explosives, tore through the Israeli-made Merkava, killing three of its crew. The pain and shame felt nationwide were exacerbated by resentment toward the settlers. Army officers had complained about the poor positioning of the West Bank checkpoint, but the settlers insisted on having it just there because it “gave them a sense of security.” The tank’s mission had been to scour the road ahead of a school bus from Netzarim, the Gaza Strip’s most isolated settlement, which required three whole army regiments to protect it.

For the Palestinians, the
roadblocks, like the tanks, were iconic
symbols of their occupation and suffering. The suicide bombers were their “strategic weapon,” their answer, as they insisted, to the disparity of firepower between the IDF and their own guerrilla forces.

By March 2002, suicide bombings, interspersed with shooting attacks, were an almost daily occurrence, not only
in Jerusalem and the other Israeli cities near the green line, but in Tel Aviv and Haifa, too. On March 9, Café Moment, literally around the corner from the heavily guarded official residence of the prime minister in Jerusalem, was blown up by a Hamas suicide bomber, leaving 11 dead and 54 injured. On March 20, a suicide bombing on a bus in the north killed 7. Another in Jerusalem the next day killed 3 and injured 80.

Israel’s main cities took on the aspect of ghost towns. Half-empty buses plied half-empty streets. Car drivers steered clear of them, in case they exploded. Shopping malls and markets echoed eerily to the footsteps of the few hardy customers who still ventured into them. Restaurants and cafés, those that stayed open, were mostly empty; many of them were now patrolled by uniformed civilian guards. Hotels were empty, too, as tourism dried up to a wartime trickle. Businessmen arranged their meetings with overseas partners and clients in nearby Cyprus. Foreign airlines also took to flying over, empty, to Cyprus to spend the night there and return briefly to Tel Aviv in the morning to pick up the few customers who were still flying. International sporting fixtures took place abroad: no teams would come to Israel. The economy was reeling. But, more seriously, so was the people’s confidence that this plague of indiscriminate carnage could be defeated.

Not since the terrible first days of the Yom Kippur War did such a pall of depression descend on the nation. Back then, Israelis faced an existential threat as two large and well-equipped armies broke through Israel’s lines and seemed poised to advance toward the heartland. Now, with the Jewish state much stronger and more populous, small and relatively weak Palestinian paramilitary groups posed what on paper ought to have been a policing problem. And yet the fear and uncertainty that gripped ordinary families were making for an ominous corrosion of national resilience. Mothers trembled and wept, literally, as they sent their
children to school in the morning. The ubiquity and unpredictability of the suicide attacks were turning ordinary urban life into Russian roulette. The impossibility of deterring on pain of death someone who was determined to die imbued all the precautions and protective measures with a sense of despair.

Preventive intelligence, moreover, seemed increasingly useless as the “profile” of the suicide bomber morphed from the young, male, religious fanatic to a broad and inclusive swath of Palestinian society.
Male and female, religious and secular, illiterate and intellectual, poor and well-to-do, unemployed refugee camp dweller and yuppie—all were represented among the bombers and would-be bombers. Intifada activists, both Islamist and secular, were swamped during this period with people clamoring to be strapped up with a suicide belt and sent out to die. Their motivations were as varied as the candidates’ backgrounds. Religious zeal and an entrancement with death and heaven still inspired many youngsters to volunteer. But increasingly, experiences of personal injury or humiliation of the bombers or their close relatives at the hands of Israeli forces furnished the fury that drove them to kill and die. Often, of course, motives were mixed and confused.

Suicide bombings accounted for barely one half of 1 percent of the violent attacks on Israelis during the intifada. But they accounted for almost half of the deaths incurred in those incidents. They accounted, too, for Sharon’s plummeting popularity in March 2002 and for the sense in Jerusalem that the long-predicted invasion of the West Bank towns and military takeover of the entire territory were now inevitable and imminent.

Despite the escalating violence, talks led by the U.S. peace envoy,
Tony Zinni, were succeeding in narrowing gaps. On March 24, the tough-talking general presented the two sides with what he called “the Zinni Bridging Proposals.” These were designed to secure an immediate cease-fire and then move to implementation of the
Tenet Paper.

The Israeli reply to Zinni was delivered at 2:00 a.m. on March 27, straight from Sharon’s office. The two IDF negotiators, Major General Giora Eiland and Brigadier General
Eival Gilady, had asked to see Sharon. They were ushered in at midnight. “Sharon made us work very hard,” Eiland recalled later. “What if, what if, what if?” But the two officers persuaded him not to unpick any particular provision but to accept the whole package. Eiland was ready to wait with the good news till the morning, but Gilady said, “We’ve kept the prime minister busy till two a.m. Let’s get Zinni busy as well.” They phoned the American envoy, and Gilady formally announced: “The state of Israel accepts your proposals and we are ready to implement them from tomorrow.” Zinni, half awake, replied, “You’ve got to be kidding. You accept it?” He ordered his State Department aide, Aaron Miller, “to push as hard as you possibly can with the Palestinians.”
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Miller, however, ran into a wall of Palestinian procrastination. “Now under ‘house arrest’ in his compound in Ramallah, Arafat was focused much more on trying to get the Israelis to let him out than he was on saying yes or no to Zinni’s ideas.”
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Zinni faulted Sharon for making “a hero, a martyr, and a victim out of Arafat. The American government pressed him to let Arafat go, but the gut hatred between those two is so bad he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Of course, this enhanced Arafat’s stature on the street.”

Zinni and Miller were at a Passover seder at the home of an Israeli official when the upshot of Arafat’s dithering and Sharon’s vindictiveness struck home. “During the meal,” Zinni writes, “news came of a horrific suicide bombing at a Passover celebration in a hotel restaurant, with heavy casualties. This bombing had a tremendous effect on the people of Israel. It was their 9/11.”
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For Israelis, Yom Kippur and the Passover seder are the most widely observed religious rituals of the year. But Passover eve is more than a religious time. It is the time when families get together. They bond through eating, drinking, singing the ancient hymns, and talking. For Israelis, the suicide bombing at the Park Hotel in
Netanya on Passover eve, which took 28 lives and left 140 injured, was a national trauma. “I knew immediately we had come to the end of our road,” Zinni writes. For Sharon, as all his aides instinctively knew, it was the end of his first period as prime minister. “Restraint is strength” would not be abandoned, but both sides of the equation would now be adjusted: there would be less restraint and much more strength.

Operation Defensive Shield, the IDF invasion of all the major West Bank towns apart from
Jericho and
Hebron, and many of the major refugee camps, was decided on that same night. The operation should be limited to the West Bank, the army proposed, since the fence encircling Gaza was proving almost hermetically effective against terror incursions from there. The inner cabinet met and quickly endorsed the army’s plans. Orders went out to start preparations. Sharon knew he had the nation behind him.

At the full cabinet the next night, Sharon added his voice to those of the ministers like
Silvan Shalom and generals like Mofaz who demanded that Arafat be deported and never allowed back. Peres argued against this. “I don’t want another Jesus story on our shoulders,” he said. “Arafat outside could be no less effective than Arafat inside … Arafat is also a political leader, not just the leader of a former terrorist organization.”
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The heads of the
Mossad, the
Shin Bet, and
Military Intelligence also all spoke against expelling Arafat. They warned he might resist and be hurt, or even take his own life, if Israeli
soldiers tried to capture him. Sharon finally relented, as he may well have intended to do from the outset. His original promise to Bush had not expired, and Powell now phoned to remind him of it. The cabinet’s eventual decision was to declare Arafat (though not the PA) an “enemy” who would be “isolated” in his
muqata
compound “at this stage.” The last three words were added by Sharon to imply the threat of further action later.