Anxiety fuels debate over security fences, glider
attacks
Three stories that will do nothing to allay the general mood of anxiety prevalent in
Israel dominate the front pages of Tel Aviv’s mass circulation dailies: warnings that
the Palestinians are purportedly planning to launch terrorist attacks from the Gaza Strip
using hang gliders; the threat of war between India and Pakistan and the fate of the
thousands of Israeli youngsters traveling in India; and the discovery of a suspected case
of “mad cow disease” on a dairy farm on the Golan Heights.
Editorials and commentaries focus on various aspects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
and the US-led efforts to find a solution.
Maariv’s editorial uses the reports of possible hang glider attacks to sustain the
paper’s long-standing policy favoring the construction of a security fence around the
West Bank as the only viable short-term solution to the terror problem.
The paper states: “Chief of Staff Lieutenant General Shaul Mofaz and Shin Bet chief
Avi Dichter have both made it clear to the government that a long-term presence of the
Israeli Army in the Palestinian Authority areas is the most efficient method of combating
terrorism. Their thinking is purely military, but the considerations guiding the
government are more complex. With CIA Director George Tenet in the region, trying to
broker a solution, it is obvious that a permanent Israeli Army presence in PA territory is
out of the question.”
Dichter, unlike Mofaz, Maariv’s editorial continues, also believes that constructing
a fence between Israel and the Palestinians “will go a long way toward stopping
suicide bombings and other terror attacks, as the electronic fence around most of the Gaza
Strip has demonstrated. The fact that a terror group in Gaza is aiming to launch attacks
using hang gliders, proves that the fence has prevented them from crossing the fence to
carry out attacks. Even if one such airborne attack succeeds, it is impossible to use them
in the wholesale manner in which suicide bombers have been dispatched from the West Bank,
on an almost daily basis. This new effort, dangerous as it may be, is added evidence of
the necessity of a fence.”
Maariv recalls that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer and
Foreign Minister Shimon Peres “are reluctant to have a fence built, for different
reasons. Sharon and the Likud are anxious about the reaction of the Jewish settlers, but
certain right-wingers and settlers are prepared to accept the construction of a fence, as
long as it is clear that it is not conceived of as the final political border.”
As to the fate of the settlers, Maariv says that “the 150,000, who live in the parts
of the northern West Bank abutting the Green Line, would be on the ‘right’ side
of the fence, and they need it for their security as much as all the other citizens of the
country. It would be up to the government to decide whether to extend the same level of
protection to the 30,000 living in more isolated settlements as they enjoy today, and it
would be up to the settlers to decide whether to continue living where they are or to join
the concentrations of settlements which will benefit from the security the fence would
bestow. In any case, there is no time or reason
for dithering.”
In a news analysis headlined “Catch 2002,” Maariv political commentator Emmanuel
Rosen asserts that Sharon seems to have fallen into a trap of his own making.
“The way things look now, whether Sharon likes it or not, Israel will be
participating in an international peace conference this summer. Sharon may have initiated
the idea of the conference and agreed to take
part, but he is getting something he never bargained for. He set a list of impossible
conditions, but the organizers the ‘quartet’ of the United States, Europe,
Russia and the UN, together with Egypt outsmarted him. They simply agreed to all his
conditions.
“The conference will be at foreign minister level, as he demanded so he would not
have to meet PA Chairman Yasser Arafat and terror-supporting states (Syria) will
not take part. Far-reaching reforms in the PA will be implemented. Egyptian President
Hosni Mubarak is even prepared to accept the idea that Sharon claims to have fathered: a
Palestinian state in 42 percent of the territory and the start of talks on a permanent
settlement.”
There are, of course, some problems, Maariv writes.
“What will the agenda be? With whom will Sharon speak, and about what? And, of
course, what about the next big terrorist outrage that will blow the whole plan into
oblivion?”
The Palestinian reform issue is taken up in an editorial in Yediot Ahronot by Sever
Plotzker, who finds it ironic that Saudi Arabia and Egypt have taken upon themselves to
pressure Arafat into carrying out democratic reforms in the PA. “How can the
political leaders of two nondemocratic countries one a medieval, inquisitorial
theocracy and the other controlled by a secret security bureaucracy be the spiritual
fathers of Palestinian democracy,” Plotzker wonders. “How can the Palestinians
themselves relate seriously to the demands for reform and moralistic preaching on behalf
of democracy from regimes which have not given their own citizens elementary democratic
rights? Saudi Arabia and Egypt as tutors in the ways of liberal politics? It’s a bad
joke.”
Plotzker argues: “The ruling elites of the Arab and Islamic world are scared to death
precisely of the possibility that a secular democracy will rise in the PA, one that could
serve as an example and a source of inspiration to their own nations. From their point of
view, Arafat is preferable. At least he is one of them, a dictator and autocrat. If the
Saudis and the Egyptians are so keen on democratic reform in the Middle East, why
don’t they begin in their own countries? Like charity, democracy begins at
home.”
On Maariv’s opinion page, diplomatic analyst Chemi Shalev discusses the impact of the
Indo-Pakistan dispute on the Middle East, pointing out that the two conflicts have common
elements.
“Both began in the late 1940s as the result of territorial partitions which did not
solve, but perpetuated, bloody religious conflicts. Previous wars have left wounds that
have not healed two nations bent on revenge, totally convinced of their righteousness,
hatred that blanks out the rationality of leaders and masses alike.
“And from this common past, the Israeli-Arab conflict seems certain to reach the same
level arrived at by the Indians and Pakistanis, with the inevitable acquisition by the
Arabs of nuclear weapons of their own. The very menace of nuclear war, even if it does not
happen, will of itself break whatever taboos still exist and will inspire and impel
Tehran, Baghdad and perhaps Damascus to get their own nuclear arsenals.”
There is not much time left, Shalev warns.
“Some will conclude that Israel has to take daring military steps to neutralize the
threat from Tehran and elsewhere. Others, following the logic that guided the late Yitzhak
Rabin, are convinced that there is a window of opportunity to extinguish the fuse of an
Israeli-Arab conflagration by finding a quick solution to the Palestinian problem, before
the Arab bombs are ready. But Israel and its current prime minister are behaving as if
they have all the time in the world.” Copyright © The Daily Star |
