The morning after those ‘illusory days of
quiet’ and ‘the imaginary lull’
Both Tel Aviv mass circulation dailies, Yediot Ahronot and Maariv, produce special
enlarged front-page editions, with pictures from the scene of the terror attack on a bus
outside the West Bank Jewish settlement of Emmanuel in which seven Israelis were killed.
Maariv calls it a massacre and says three of the dead were from one family. Yediot Ahronot
says “the terror returned after 26 days of quiet.” The paper reports that
“the terrorists, wearing (Israeli Army) uniforms, were responsible for a previous
attack in Emmanuel that killed 11 people.”
Both papers have front-page stories of yet another disappointing attempt to find signs of
life from the missing Israeli navigator, Ron Arad, shot down over Lebanon 16 years ago.
Maariv says an Israeli living in Romania and a Romanian middleman obtained blood, urine
and saliva samples from Iran said to be those of the Israeli MIA, but that tests in Israel
proved they were not. Yediot Ahronot says a $150,000 reward, provided the samples were
genuine, had already been placed in trust in a Swiss bank. It reports great disappointment
in the Israeli defense establishment at the apparent hoax.
In a front-page comment on the Emmanuel attack entitled, “The illusory days of
quiet,” Yediot Ahronot military analyst Alex Fishman writes that hours before the
attack, the new Chief of Staff, Lieutenant General Moshe Yaalon, told the Knesset’s
Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee: “‘Operation Determined Path’ is like
a blanket thrown onto a fire to suffocate the flames.” The Emmanuel attack, Fishman
says, “shows that the blanket is too short, and it will get shorter.”
And he adds that “since the blanket will continue to be spread over the West Bank for
an indefinite period, the only way to compensate for its limitations is to peg it tighter
to the ground, so that the embers don’t get any oxygen. In other words, to operate in
the territories with an even heavier hand. That means punishment for the Emmanuel attack
will come in the form of an ostentatious military operation, coupled with harassment of
the residents of the village or town from which the terrorists came, in the hope that this
punishment will get through to someone on the Palestinian side.”
“There is no such thing as a humanitarian occupation,” Fishman asserts.
“Prime Minister Ariel Sharon can set up another 100 committees under Foreign Minister
Shimon Peres to ease the suffering of the Palestinians, but the blanket that has been
thrown over them suffocates and will go on suffocating them because that’s what
it’s there for.
“The nature of blankets is that they wear out in time. The suffocation of the
territories is meant, in the final analysis, to give the political echelon time to advance
a political process. But if this blanket is only a fig leaf for a lack of policy we
will end up holding nothing but another worn out blanket.”
In Maariv, political analyst Emmanuel Rosen writes that if the Emmanuel attack hadn’t
happened, Wednesday would have marked the longest single period of quiet since the
eruption of the intifada in September 2000. “The record,” says Rosen, “was
not shattered. But the illusion, if there was one, was. Yaalon told the Knesset Foreign
Affairs and Defense Committee that if the (Israeli Army) leaves the Palestinian towns and
cities, the terror attacks will be renewed with even greater intensity. That too is an
illusion-shattering statement. It is obvious to everyone that sooner or later the (army)
will have to leave, or at least loosen its iron grip.”
Turning to the political scene, Rosen says: “So far, there has been only faint
resistance to the Bush-Sharon axis, from Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and the European
Union. The Europeans are telling US Secretary of State Colin Powell that
‘someone’ has to judge whether the reforms in the Palestinian Authority (PA) are
real or bluff, and the said ‘someone’ can’t be Sharon, or even Bush on his
own. One can assume that the president will not lose any sleep over that demand. Nor, it
seems, will the Emmanuel attack set off any alarm bells for him.”
“It seems,” Rosen concludes bitterly, “this is not the time for grand
political moves. Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer conceded Tuesday that without the
evacuation of the Jewish settlements, there
is no chance for the ‘Gaza first’
pilot scheme he discussed with Mubarak. He also admitted that in the current government
there is no chance of holding even a hypothetical debate on the evacuation of
just one tiny settlement. These days
it is not the politicians who are showing courage. The brave people are
the soldiers fighting in the territories and the settlers who continue to travel on the
roads of death and, in general, all the people of Israel. Perhaps they don’t believe
in Sharon’s peace, but they don’t have many options.”
In a leader headlined, “The imaginary lull,” Maariv says: “The quiet that
prevailed for 26 days before the attack at Emmanuel was achieved only by virtue of the
Israeli military presence in the Palestinian cities and successful preventative efforts.
Israel is engaged in a bloody struggle that has been forced upon it. If it depended on the
other side, there would be no lulls in the terror, even if Israel made more generous
offers. If the settlers of Emmanuel were evacuated to the Israeli side of the ‘Green
Line,’ they would still be targets of the terrorists who do not distinguish between
settlers and other Israelis, between settlements in the territories and communities in
Israel proper.”
Maariv lays the blame for the situation squarely on the shoulders of Yasser Arafat.
“What more is there to be learned about this man to be convinced that he gives the
green light to terror, that he finances the terror operations, that he sends money to the
families of the suicide (bombers), that his promises of cease-fires become worthless even
before he utters them? The situation can be changed, and the way to do it is to first get
rid of Arafat.”
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