Three main stories are the focus of the day’s Israeli press: the thwarted “dirty bomb” attack in the United States, Israel’s money market crisis, and Monday’s White House meeting between US President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
In a front-page headline, Maariv quotes Bush as saying: “Conditions are not yet ripe for a peace conference.” It says Sharon told the president that Israel would only renew peace talks with the Palestinians when terror, violence and incitement stop.
Yediot Ahronot reports an “understanding” between Bush and Sharon that there is no chance of progress with Palestinian President Yasser Arafat at the helm.
In a front-page commentary, Yediot Ahronot diplomatic analyst Nahum Barnea says: “On the surface, Sharon’s meeting with Bush was highly successful. The president publicly espoused most of Sharon’s demands of the Palestinian Authority (PA), and relieved the Israeli government of the need to contend with a political process in the near future. Bush did not give the Arab countries, like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, anything to hold on to.”
But then, Barnea wonders: “Why was the senior official in the prime minister’s entourage, who briefed Israeli journalists on Monday night, so prickly and concerned?”
He surmises that perhaps it was because the White House spokesman softened much of what the president said.
“The president spoke of profound reforms, tantamount to the creation of a new PA before entering peace negotiations, and the spokesman corrected this to: ‘Reforms and a political horizon in tandem.’ The president did not exclude the possibility of expelling Arafat and his spokesman corrected this to: ‘Expelling Arafat would not be useful.’”
Barnea says it is hard to tell from the senior official in Sharon’s entourage if the meeting will lead to curtailment of Arafat’s rule.
“On one hand, everything suggests that Israel will not negotiate with Arafat, at least as long as Sharon is prime minister; on the other hand, Israel’s stated conditions for talks do not necessitate his expulsion. In practical terms, however, now that Bush has finished consulting with the leaders of Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Israel, it seems that the chances of renewing the peace process are worse than they were when he started.”
On Maariv’s opinion page, Dan Margalit says the 35th anniversary of the 1967 war is a reminder of how the outcome of the war is still central to today’s reality. At the end of that war, he says, Israel declared that it was holding the territories it had conquered as a “deposit” with which to negotiate peace. This made peace with Egypt possible and also set Arafat on the path of compromise. But tragically, over the years Israel began to do itself harm by instituting permanent occupation and rule over another nation.
“And there’s the catch,” writes Margalit. “There can be no political settlement without holding much of the territory as a deposit, but by transforming that hold from a temporary and conditional one into a permanent occupation, Israel has made the chances for peace remote.”
In a comment in Yediot Ahronot, strategist Meir Stieglitz says that “dirty bomb” terror is more a matter of spreading horror, anxiety and hysteria ­ even without an actual attack taking place ­ than of actual damage and casualties.
“The world must be on the alert,” he writes, “but the world is full of real dangers, and there is no need to add a false one to the list.”
Stieglitz says Israel, because of its area, penetrability and population density, is the ideal target for this type of terror. “As long as Israel is engaged in a bitter conflict with its neighbors, they will use terror of all varieties to try to balance our vast military advantage. And, if you really need to be frightened about all this, then the biological variety is far more scary,” is his macabre consolation.
Maariv’s editorial also discusses the “dirty bomb” threat in terms of the terror spread by the very idea of radiation, and warns that “if the US has become a target, then Israel cannot be far behind. After (Sept. 11), the terrorists here set their sights on the Azrieli Towers in Tel Aviv. And the suicide blast at the Park Hotel in Netanya was supposed to scatter cyanide, although this idea was dropped for technical reasons.”
Avoiding mass panic of another kind crops up in Yediot Ahronot’s leader, where economics editor Sever Plotzker says that this week’s 1.5 percent interest rate hike by the central bank was the first significant sign of the economy moving onto a war footing.
“At least since the Passover Eve attack on the Park Hotel, which was the pretext for the launch of ‘Operation Rampart,’ we have actually been subjected to the economics of war ­ something that the public has grasped and fears very deeply. Not so our economic leadership, which has kept up the pretense of ‘business as usual’ with its feeble attempts to cut the budget, the subsequent fake crisis in the Cabinet and the petty bickering between the central bank and the Finance Ministry. The Knesset may have passed the ‘emergency economic plan,’ but no serious attempt has been made to shape measures appropriate to a state of war.”
Plotzker says: “Yesterday’s events are an excellent illustration of the meaning of a ‘war economy.’ Israelis woke up to two separate realities. The basic interest rate had been increased by 1.5 percent, and the (Israeli Army) had once again occupied the capital of the PA, Ramallah. On the scales of the money markets, the higher cost of shekel credit was weighed against the deteriorating security situation. Predictably, the impact of the war was greater than that of the interest rate. The sight of Israeli tanks around the Mukataa, Arafat’s headquarters, tipped the scales in favor of the dollar.”
Plotzker calls for the establishment of an emergency “Economic Cabinet” to set a strategy for stopping the fall of the shekel beyond the “five-to-a-dollar” point, clamping a lid on the government deficit and blocking the rise in the unemployment rate.
The one-word headline on Maariv’s front-page commentary is simply “Scary,” and most readers would assume it dealt with the “dirty bomb” panic.
But it is by economic
analyst Moshe Pearl, and what he finds frightening
is “the simple fact that Israelis have now lost confidence in their economy, just as since the outbreak of the intifada in October 2000 we have lost our sense of personal security.”
Pearl says that the only person who can do anything about restoring economic confidence is Sharon.
“After he saw how the public reacted to his determination to get his ‘emergency economic program’ through, Sharon must appreciate the tremendous craving for economic leadership,” Pearl writes. “The vast majority backed that inferior program, only because the prime minister projected a message of ‘I am here, I am taking over, and I won’t cross any red lines.’”
But that has turned out to be woefully inadequate, Pearl says, “and if Sharon does not grasp that the loss of economic confidence is as strategically significant as the loss of the sense of personal security, and requires the same degree of serious attention, he will soon discover that it is too late to repair what still can be repaired.”

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