The bombing of a bus full of Israeli soldiers within the 1967 “Green Line” by a young Palestinian driving an explosives-laden van is proof that the Israeli Army can no longer prevent Palestinian suicide attacks “however much repressive force it uses,” Al-Quds al-Arabi says.
It was a “distinctive” operation in many respects, the pan-Arab daily notes. It specifically targeted soldiers rather than civilians in markets; it used the novel technique of ramming a booby-trapped vehicle into the soldiers’ bus; the operation was carried out in a high-security area at a time of maximum alert; it was outside a notorious prison where many Palestinians are being detained; and it was timed to coincide with the anniversary of Israel’s 1967 conquest of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. To cap it all, it came just as Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his generals were boasting of their success in having eradicated “the infrastructure of terror” in the occupied Palestinian areas.
All these factors “place Sharon and his military plan ­ to put an end to such operations and achieve security for Israelis ­ in an extremely grave predicament,” Al-Quds al-Arabi writes. For he has tried “every murderous method he can conceive,” and has run out of further military options.
“Sharon has arrested over 10,000 Palestinians so far and killed some 2,500” Al-Quds al-Arabi claims. “His forces have wounded 30,000, some of them maimed for life, and all that remains for him is to round up the entire Palestinian population or place them in gas chambers like those of the Nazis.”
It is “ridiculous” for Israeli and American spokesmen to react by blaming Yaser Arafat and accusing him of not doing enough to crack down on “terrorists,” the paper continues. “How can Arafat control the perpetrators of martyrdom operations when he is no longer able to leave his office or give orders to a few members of his security forces, after the systematic physical and psychological destruction inflicted on them by Israel in recent months?”
Israel’s continuing offensive in the West Bank “has failed to achieve anything, because it is a repeat of previous operations that had different names but resulted in the same fiasco,” Al-Quds al-Arabi says.
“The only wall that can defend Israelis from martyrdom operations is genuine peace based on UN resolutions,” the paper argues. “But peace imposed by force, humiliation and insults will only lead to further resistance. Sharon’s massacres in Jenin will be avenged. The children who lost their fathers and homes thanks to the bloody actions of the Israeli army and its leaders will become martyrs in the making ­ unless, that is, they conclude that their fathers’ blood did not go to waste, but led to a just and honorable peace agreement.”
For the UAE daily Al-Khaleej, the Megiddo operation demonstrates how much the US is “putting the cart before the horse” by trying to build a new Palestinian security force to crack down on resistance to the occupation while keeping the occupation itself in place.
So long as that remains Washington’s approach, CIA Director George Tenet’s effort to foist Sharon’s security agenda on the Palestinians, while denying them either security or basic rights, “provides no solution and can only deepen the security crisis whose noose is tightening around
Israelis and Palestinians alike,” it says. “The cause is the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories and the Israeli Army’s crimes against the Palestinian people. Once the cause is removed, the security issue would be easy to resolve.” But it is futile to seek “security solutions” while the occupation continues, as the latest attack on a busload of Israeli soldiers illustrates.
It is not the Palestinian Authority (PA) security forces but Israel’s outrageous policy that the Americans need to “reform,” the Gulf daily writes. “And if the US is serious about defusing tensions in the region ­ which is doubtful, in light of its actual behavior ­ it needs to make Israel comply with UN Security Council resolutions, or at least its previous agreements with the Palestinians, as a prelude to tackling all the other issues.”
“But to insist on starting with ‘reforms’ of the Palestinian security forces as decreed by Israel will not lead to a result. It will only make matters more complicated, and it won’t prevent the Palestinians from resisting by whatever means are available to them to attain their legitimate national rights,” Al-Khaleej says.
Abdelwahhab Badrakhan, writing in the Saudi-run pan-Arab daily Al-Hayat, expects Sharon to use the Megiddo bombing to again try and persuade the Americans to help him “eliminate” the Palestinian leader.
He says that prior to the bombing, Tenet “clearly threatened” Arafat when they met in Ramallah that should there be any more Palestinian guerrilla attacks, the US would not stand in Sharon’s way if he opted to act against him.
Tenet is either ignorant of the reality of the situation on the ground, or is merely pretending to be, Badrakhan comments. Either way, “he is behaving as though the Israelis did nothing between March 29 and today.”
Tenet’s remarks also reveal the “other face” of US policy, a different face to the one that is shown to Arab leaders who are engaged in attempts to secure calm on the ground, in the hope of securing progress toward a political settlement, Badrakhan says.
Differences of view have emerged between the Israelis and Americans over initiating a political process, over whether or not they should deal with Arafat, over the substance of Palestinian “reforms,” and over the form and agenda of the proposed international conference, Badrakhan continues. But “on the security level,” nothing has changed: The Americans have no demands to make of the Israelis, they even see the occupation as understandable and justified, and they are seeking to impose Israel’s demands on the Palestinians.
Sharon is bent on wrecking the PA, he says, and Washington’s pace allows him to do whatever he likes, invoking suicide attacks as a pretext, and exploiting the fact that President George W. Bush has yet to unveil the peace initiative the Arabs and the international community are expecting of him.
Accordingly, Badrakhan continues, during his upcoming trip to Washington, Sharon can be expected to focus solely on the goal of eliminating Arafat, and the Bush administration ­ some of whose principals are “more Sharonist than Sharon” ­ has indulged him so much in the past that it has “deprived itself of the capacity to hold him back.”
In Cairo, the leading semi-official daily Al-Ahram calls on the US ­ as Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak makes his way to Washington and Camp David ­ to call off its “boycott” of Arafat and invite the Palestinian leader and his Israeli counterpart to a summit under American auspices.
Editor in chief Ibrahim Nafie, filing from Washington, writes that while Egypt has “no doubt that the Bush administration has a genuine desire to achieve peace, stability and security,” its policy in the region is based on a “number of mistaken premises that have greatly contributed to the current escalation.”
The administration’s initial reluctance to engage with the Palestinians and Israelis, in the belief that they were not yet ready to do a deal, was a cause of the present tension, Nafie explains. Its post-Sept. 11 failure to distinguish between terrorism and legitimate resistance prompted it to treat the entire Palestinian struggle as a form of terror. This was a “big mistake” that drove Washington to adopt the Sharon government’s view wholesale, endorse its brutal behavior, and focus totally on the security aspect of the conflict and “totally ignore the political facet.”
Apart from eroding US credibility and arousing hostility to America in the region, such an approach “cannot bring about a genuine settlement,” Nafie says, even though Washington has it within its power both to calm the situation on the ground and revive the Arab-Israeli peace process.
Nafie says there are a number of things that could be done to that goal, “above all ending the Bush administration’s bizarre policy of boycotting President Arafat.”
It could also “organize a three-way American-Palestinian-Israeli summit that reaffirms the commitment of all parties to a just and comprehensive settlement, as a basis for activating bilateral political negotiations between the Palestinians and Israelis in accordance with UN resolutions and the principles of the Madrid process, and in a manner that builds on what was actually achieved in the past rather than starting those negotiations from scratch.”
In Amman, Jordanian columnist Fahed Fanek balks at the plan Mubarak is reported to be taking with him to Washington under which a Palestinian “state” would be declared on just 42 percent of the West Bank, and then talks held with Israel to determine its borders and settle all other “outstanding issues.”
It may be unfair to criticize or comment on the blueprint before its full details have been officially unveiled, he writes in the semi-official Amman daily Al-Rai. But the problem is that it “emulates the Oslo approach whose failure has been proven” ­ namely, to establish a weak and nominal Palestinian “entity” ­ this time in the enclaves designated as Areas A and B under the 1993 Oslo Accords, while leaving all the thorny issues of substance to subsequent negotiations “that could drag on for years.”
“The good thing about the Egyptian initiative from the American viewpoint is that it does not touch on any Israeli red lines,” Fanek says. Sharon agrees in principle to the notion of a Palestinian “state,” and the one Mubarak is proposing would cover exactly the same territory that Sharon has suggested it could be established on in future. The difference is that while Sharon sees that 42 percent of the West Bank is the “end of the road,” Mubarak views it as the “point of departure,” notes Fanek, “even if, in this case, it is a departure toward the unknown.”
There seems to be a profusion of Arab initiatives these days, Fanek continues, “with a fresh Arab initiative being launched even before replies have been obtained to the previous one,” and the Libyan leader, the Saudi crown prince and the Egyptian president all coming up with their separate peace plans in quick succession.
There is a danger that these “successive Arab initiatives” might undermine the international conference that the “Quartet” ­ grouping the US, Russia, the European Union and the UN ­ are advocating, Fanek argues. For while the Arab initiatives “are born lame, without muscles, teeth or claws,” members of the Quartet “wield clout and posses many cards,” he says.

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