Artículo de Amos Harel en "Ha´aretz" del 18-1-03

As the American offensive in Iraq looms ever closer, the confrontation in the territories, which has been the main concern and preoccupation of the defense establishment in the past two and a half years, is entering a kind of waiting phase. Even though a war in Iraq was again looking less certain this week, the stalemate is becoming worse ahead of the general elections in Israel at the end of the month.

An examination of the developments in the Palestinian arena shows that despite the periodic spasms of terrorism, not much has changed there since the end of last June, when two major events occurred: the address on the Middle East delivered by U.S. President George W. Bush, in which he outlined the "vision" that eventuated in the formulation of the administration's "road map," and, immediately afterward, the onset of "Operation Determined Path," in which Israel again seized control of most of the Palestinian cities in the West Bank.

Since then, there has been no shift in Israeli policy in the territories. Together with the government's declaration in principle that it accepts the "road map," the Israel Defense Forces have remained in or around most of the cities in the West Bank, while refraining from launching a far-reaching offensive in the Gaza Strip. What has changed is the IDF's success in prevention, from catastrophic months (44 Israelis killed in November) to months in which terrorism is relatively "tolerable" (seven killed in December).

A senior officer in the General Staff says he foresees little change in the months ahead: "The Palestinians will not do anything exceptional in the near future. The Palestinian Authority will prefer to sit on the fence and wait, in the hope that the developments in Iraq will extricate it from its plight." To which one of his colleagues adds, "What has been is what will be, unless there is a mega-attack."

Despite the terrible suffering, both sides have become so accustomed to the situation that even the last deadly attack in Tel Aviv, which claimed 23 lives, didn't stay on the front pages of the papers for more than two days. Ironically, the public apathy is convenient for the defense establishment. In contrast to the past, the IDF was not called upon to carry out an immediate fierce response to the Tel Aviv attack, and in fact did not react to it at all. And, on the other side, the terrorist groups did not consider the Tel Aviv massacre to be a major success, because no despair was discernible among the Israeli civilian population afterward.

Five approaches

With the killing expected to go on in the near future, the key question is whether it will be possible, nevertheless, to terminate this round of violence and what the mechanism is that will produce calm.

An analysis that has been conducted in the defense establishment came up with five possible approaches for a solution: 1. The immediate renewal of the political negotiations, even with Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat (this can be called the "European approach"). 2. The opposite approach: The complete rejection of the Palestinian partner, the destruction of the PA and a return to the pre-Oslo period. 3. Unilateral separation. 4. An imposed international solution. 5. Adoption of the Bush vision and the "road map."

The government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon paid lip service to the fifth option but did not advance beyond that. However, even though Bush and the hawkish Republican core around him are loyal to the approach they put forward, the other key players (the U.S. State Department, the United Nations, the European Union and others) are continuing to look for other solutions. In the absence of a positive Israeli response, new road maps will be drawn up. The question is whether the time that Israel is now ostensibly gaining - while waiting for the outcome of the January 28 elections, the subsequent coalition talks and the war in Iraq - will not prove costly in the long term.

Some senior officers admit that this is in effect what the IDF and the Shin Bet security service are providing the political level with: a time-out, not much more. At the end of the day, they say, political moves will be needed.

Overall, the army awards itself quite a high grade at the tactical level. The method of warfare that has been adopted has proved itself, and the bulk of the terrorist attacks have been thwarted. But there is still considerable frustration - above all, because of the large number of casualties, but also because in two spheres, no real progress has been achieved. Money, which is increasingly emerging as a cardinal element in preserving the motivation of the terrorists, continues to flow into the territories from Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia (and recently it has become apparent, as reported in Ha'aretz, that some of the funds are being channeled through Israeli banks). In addition, some of the organizations continue to enjoy partial international legitimacy. The main reason for this is that Europe continues to maintain the artificial distinction between "military arm" and "political arm" in regard to the two militant groups: Hamas (based in the Gaza Strip) and Hezbollah (based in Lebanon). Thanks to this approach, the secretary-general of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, was able to take part in an official reception for French President Jacques Chirac held in Lebanon a few months ago.

According to a report that was presented to Chief of Staff Moshe Ya'alon not long ago, it is the "political" leaders in the terrorist organizations who are putting heavy pressure on the "inside" activists in the territories to abduct soldiers in order to exchange them for Palestinian prisoners being held in Israel. Also notable in recent months is the connection between external countries and organizations, such as Iran, Iraq, Al-Qaida and Hezbollah, and organizations within the territory of the PA. The Iranian influence, exerted via the Revolutionary Guards in Lebanon, is extending as far as secular groups, such as Fatah activists in Nablus.

Surprisingly, of all the groups, Al- Qaida is having a hard time getting off the ground in the territories. The reports in the press about the organization's presence sound dramatic, but officers in the Gaza Strip relate that so far, Al-Qaida has failed in its attempts to perpetrate terrorist attacks (for the time being, in the form of shooting and explosive devices), noting, "Here, in the meantime, bin Laden's people don't have any advantage."

Along with the foreign intervention, various processes - some of which were discerned immediately after the eruption of the intifada at the end of September 2000 - are continuing to develop: the weakening of the PA, the atomization of Fatah into fragments of autonomous organizations, and the strengthening of Hamas, so much so that it is shaping up as an alternative movement to the government.

Deployment developments

All these groups are continuing to conduct talks in Cairo under Egyptian auspices. One of the proposals that was recently raised in the talks spoke of an inter-organizational agreement on stopping the firing of mortars from the Gaza Strip across the 1967 Green Line into Israel. Reports this week say that Arafat is for the first time giving serious consideration to affiliating himself with the understandings. Israel remains highly pessimistic about the outcome of the Cairo talks.

Of the two areas of combat, the West Bank continues to exact the largest number of Israeli losses, in the territories and within the Green Line. Central Command notes that the "professional" quality of the attacks in the West Bank is declining, because of the large-scale arrests of terrorist activists, but sources there also admit that it's enough to have "a Kalashnikov and five clips" to perpetrate a mass attack, such as the murder of six Likud activists in Beit She'an.

In the meantime, Central Command is changing part of its combat deployment. Some of the forces of the Border Police are being moved from the heart of the cities to the area of the "seam line" (the Green Line); in addition, the areas of the territorial brigades have also been changed. The result is that some units will specialize in guarding the seam area while others will focus on the Palestinian cities.

The use of special units for arrest operations and assassinations is becoming increasingly professionalized, as is the interface between the local command level (the brigades) and the intelligence information that originates with the Shin Bet and Military Intelligence.

Despite the effort, though, it's difficult to talk about Israeli success in eliminating the infrastructure of even one of the organizations. Hundreds of Fatah activists have been arrested, but young grass-roots chiefs are continuing to send out suicide bombers (in some cases with success, from their point of view, as in Tel Aviv). The heads of the Hamas military wing in Nablus, Mohammed Hanabli and Nasser Issida, have not yet been captured, and in Bethlehem, Ali Alian is still at large.

Of an infrastructure of 20 key activists in Islamic Jihad in the southern West Bank, 16 have been arrested or killed, but the leader, Mohammed Sidr, who is in close contact with the organization's command post in Damascus, remains free (another senior figure in Islamic Jihad, Diab Shuweiki, "lowered his profile" following a failed Israeli attempt to assassinate him). The IDF is concerned about a new phenomenon of the "migration of wanted individuals": Some of them have chosen to extricate themselves from the pressure Israel is exerting in the Nablus area and to move southward, to Bethlehem and Hebron.
In the Gaza Strip, the IDF's "containment" strategy is working. Only rarely does a terrorist succeed in getting out of the Gaza Strip. The majority of the terrorists are blocked on the way to the security fence, and anyone who does manage to get by that obstacle is quickly cut down in encounters with the units of the Givati Brigade that are deployed in the immediate area.

Weapons industry harmed

At the same time, the IDF has seriously harmed the Palestinian weapons-making industry and the smuggling of arms across the border with Egypt. In the past year, some 40 tunnels have been uncovered on the border. The immediate result is a serious shortage of light weapons among the Palestinians. The smuggling operations are going to become even more difficult with the completion of the new line of outposts, which is backed by a steel wall part of which is dug into the earth (to prevent the digging of tunnels) along the "Philadelphi" line opposite Rafah. A genuine security belt will soon replace the isolated Termit outpost, which has come under constant attack.

The second part of the effort is directed toward the destruction of the workshops in which mortars and rockets are manufactured (35 such sites were blown up in Khan Yunis last Saturday night). The frequent activity of the IDF is distressing the Palestinians, to the point where there is an initiative afoot to move the workshops from residential areas to industrial zones on the edges of the cities and towns.

Nevertheless, the IDF continues to prepare for a broader scenario. The Gaza Division recently held a refresher course in combat in a built-up area, and the General Staff continues to formulate plans for a wide operation in the Gaza Strip. Most of the officers still oppose such a move. If the situation continues to deteriorate, it's more likely that local measures will be taken. First, the creation of buffer zones (as was already done, in part, this week); this may be followed by the conquest of territories inside the Gaza Strip. However, an operation on this scale in the Gaza Strip requires that the Americans look the other way, and for the moment, at least, as long as the preparations for a strike in Iraq are continuing, the Gaza operation is on hold, just like the expulsion of Arafat.

The previous attempt to expel him, in the siege of the Muqata, Arafat's headquarters in Ramallah, last September, is perceived in retrospect as a mistake that set Israel back almost a year in the process of weakening the Palestinian leader. By the way, Tawfiq Tirawi, the head of the PA's General Intelligence, whom Israel described last September as a senior wanted individual, whose capture is crucial to the future of the entire campaign, has long since been forgotten. Tirawi continues to move about freely in Ramallah.

Lebanon lessons

This inundation of data is undoubtedly a bit confusing. So is the IDF successful or not in the war on terrorism - the citizen on the home front, who is still afraid to board the bus every morning, wants to know. The officers reply, of course, that the answer is complicated, but also reject vehemently any comparison to the previous campaign, in southern Lebanon.

"There we knew that in the end, we would leave the entire area, whereas here the picture of how things will end isn't clear," says a senior officer in the Paratroops Brigade, which has for two months been in charge of "Operation Flywheels" in Nablus. From time to time, the IDF releases figures about the arrests being made during the operation. The updated interim total this week was 140 detainees, including 15 suicide bombers. These numbers (not to mention the detailed statistical account of the number of ambushes and arrests recently released by Central Command) reminded some graduates of Lebanon of the misguided attempt by the IDF to depict "victory" in Lebanon - three years before the withdrawal - by setting dozens of "statistical ambushes" in the security zone every night.

A Paratroops officer rejects this comparison. "We have stopped being industrious and stupid. I can say with certainty that every two days, a Zionist act is carried out here, when my soldiers detain a suicide bomber who is on the way to Israel. But beyond that, it's difficult to measure the success. Come back in another four months and we will know."

At more senior levels, these remarks reflect a lively debate over Ya'alon's assertion that 2003 will be the "decisive year" in the confrontation. Some officers dispute both parts of the concept - both because it will be difficult to conclude the conflict in 12 months and because the term "decisive" is not clear in this context. The chief of staff defined "decisive" as referring to a Palestinian decision to desist from terrorism. Will that happen only when the last Islamic Jihad suicide bomber discards his explosive belt?

An additional reservation relates to a point that can, with some caution, be termed "Arab honor." The experience of the past (1967 vs. 1973) shows that an Israeli victory that is too sweeping induces a sense of Arab humiliation and thereby fosters a powerful desire to settle accounts. That could happen with the Palestinians, too.

So is there really a prospect of terminating the conflict by the end of this year? The defense establishment believes there is and cites three cardinal conditions. The first and most important is a successful American operation in Iraq. An American victory there will cut off the Palestinians from their sources of funding, deter other Arab states from supporting terrorism, and may turn the administration's attention to an effort to achieve calm in the Israeli-Palestinian arena.

The second condition is related to the intensification of the process that is now at its height: the disillusion of many within the Palestinian public that terrorism will be the route to achieving their national aspirations.

The third condition, which is more politically sensitive, has to do with the behavior of the Israeli side. Some in the IDF recommend that the next government truly adopt the Bush vision and show concretely that Israel is ready to make "painful concessions," in Ariel Sharon's phrase. "We can give the state breathing room," says a sector commander in the territories, "but that can't go on forever. We have already dragged things out for two and a half years, and if we have to we will drag it out some more, but in the end decisions are going to be needed here."