Sharon's new era

Following the killing of Israeli minister Rahavam Zeevi last week Ariel Sharon went for the jugular. He may yet go for the kill. Graham Usher reports from Bethlehem
At an emergency cabinet meeting on 17 October convened just after the assassination of Israeli Tourism Minister Rahavam Zeevi by Palestinian guerrillas belonging to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine Israel issued what looked like an ultimatum. Either Yasser Arafat transfer into Israeli custody Zeevi's killers or risk his Authority becoming defined as an "entity that supports terror," just like the Taliban and victim to the same fate.
Ariel Sharon was aware it was not an ultimatum. He knows there is as much likelihood Arafat will extradite "wanted" Palestinians to Israel as there is of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin converting to Judaism.
In other words, the threatened redefinition was actually the operative one, covenant for the army's "new patterns of action" Sharon had vowed would mark the "new era" inaugurated by Zeevi's death. This would be the next stage of his intent to destroy all things Oslo, including Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Authority. The new dawn arrived the next day.
Israeli tanks, bulldozers and armoured personnel carriers encircled Jenin and invaded a mile deep into Ramallah, severing both from their north West Bank hinterland. Palestinians put up brave, house-to-house resistance in Ramallah that left two fighters dead and a dozen or so wounded. There was less resistance in Jenin but a greater carnage. A 10-year old Palestinian girl was killed and seven others wounded when machine gun fire from an Israeli tank raked through the classroom of their school.
Some Israeli cabinet ministers (including, it appears, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres) believed this would be the extent of Sharon's vengeance. Ramallah had been partially reoccupied because it was the PFLP's main West Bank base. Jenin was again ensnared because it has long been a "terrorist nest" of Hamas and Jihad suicide bombers.
But it was pretty clear Sharon would be no more bound by these limits than by the 40-kilometer "zone" he had set for the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, a memory that has been much recalled this week.
On 18 October Atef Abayat -- leader of the Al-Aqsa Brigades loosely affiliated with Arafat's Fatah movement and blamed by Israel for the killing of five soldiers and settlers -- was drinking coffee with two other Fatah men in Beit Sahour village next door to Bethlehem. They climbed into a newly hired Suzuki jeep which blew up, detonated by a bomb planted under the chassis.
Within an hour, men from Abayat's clan killed a 30-year-old Israeli, hiking in the desert east of Bethlehem. Then -- and for the first time in five weeks -- Palestinian machine guns and mortars fired from Bethlehem and Beit Jala on Gilo settlement in the West Bank. It was the breach in the local cease-fire Sharon had been looking for.
For the second time in two months tanks rolled into Beit Jala. But this time they did not stop until they reached the southern and northern approaches to Bethlehem, surrounded its Aida and Azza refugee camps and commanded every hill between the town and the so- called eastern villages, known since the Intifada as "Abayat country".
Nor did Israel's most massive ground offensive since the Intifada -- and perhaps since the occupation -- end there. On 20 October 40 Israeli tanks in all entered Tulkarm and Qalqiliya. In Tulkarm two Palestinian policemen were killed and five Palestinian homes commandeered in a reprise of the Ramallah invasion. In Qalqiliya two more Palestinians were slain, including 34-year-old Mustafa Nofal, shot in the chest while trying to rescue neighbors from Israeli shelling.
But the most real terror was sown in Bethlehem, which, despite all the difference in culture, history and landscape, has become the West Bank's Rafah, sucked in a mire of Israeli siege, civilian flight and militia rule.
Over five days of ferocious fighting Israeli tanks, helicopters and snipers laid a Beirut-like siege, shelling houses and hospitals, taking over homes and hotels and taking out all and any Palestinian who stood in their way.
Of the 14 Palestinians killed in Bethlehem alone, some were fighters -- like 15-year-old Yusif Abayat struck down by a tank shell while approaching an army position armed with a knife. Others were police officers, like Issa Abu Khalil shot dead while standing outside Beit Jala's Al-Hussein hospital.
But most were civilians and slain as innocents. Twenty-three year old Rania Kharoufa was killed in a shop in Beit Jala while fleeing rockets from a US- made Apache helicopter. Thirty--year- old Rihab Nofal died in child labour having been denied access to Al- Hussein by an Israeli checkpoint less than a kilometre from the hospital.
Thirty-two-year-old Mohamed Baraqa -- deaf, disabled and father of five -- was shot in the chest by army marksmen in Azza camp after having "disobeyed" (unable to hear) orders to return to his shelter. And 19-year old Joni Thaljiyah killed by an Israeli sniper while walking in Nativity Square, a sanctuary, clearly, no more.
In reply, Palestinian guerrillas wounded five Israeli soldiers, one seriously.
Faced with this absolute and one-sided oppression which some call "war" Arafat alternatively called on his people to "resist the invaders" and on the world to again convene a United Nation Security Council session to provide international accountability to Israel's carnage.
But Arafat knows real salvation lies only with Washington. He also knows the price. In the aftermath of the Zeevi assassination -- and in the teeth of Palestinian opinion and every national and Islamic faction -- he arrested a score or more of real, imagined and lapsed members of the PFLP and outlawed its military wing, the Popular Resistance Forces.
Few took these gestures seriously, least of all Israel. But after six days of abdication Washington finally answered the call. On 22 October State Department spokesperson Philip Reeker demanded Israel "withdraw immediately" from the Palestinian areas and laid down the rod that "no further incursions should be made."
Sharon refused. He not only refused. He insisted his army would stay in place until and unless Arafat extradite Zeevi's killers and dispatchers (the PFLP leadership), dismantle the "terrorist infrastructure" of Hamas, Jihad and the Fatah Tanzim and end all "terrorism, violence and incitement" in the Palestinian areas. If these are truly Israel's conditions the "reoccupation" is going to last a long, long time.
And if Washington accepts this "no" for an answer, Palestinians are convinced the life span of Arafat and his regime can be measured in the metres currently separating Israeli tanks from his various presidential West Bank headquarters: about 800 in Ramallah, just over a 100 in Bethlehem.
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'Everything has changed' 18 - 24 October 2001
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