No success like failure

Most Palestinians saw Bloody Sunday as a vindication of the tactic of a "balance of terror." Ariel Sharon may have seen it as a green light for his ongoing policies of re-conquest. Graham Usher reports from Jerusalem
Relaxing on his Negev farm last weekend Ariel Sharon had reason to be cheerful. The choreographed walk-out by the US and Israeli delegations from the governmental World Conference Against Racism in Durban sowed the necessary fear among European and other states to render the Conference's final declaration a "great achievement" for Israel, purred Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, accurately.
The Israeli leader had also just returned from Russia, deepening a relationship whose harvest he hopes will bring another 600,000 Jewish immigrants to Israel from the former Soviet Union states. And, the cream in the coffee, there was an ill-tempered and possibly fraudulent contest for the Labour Party leadership whose net result was to leave the party headless (possibly for months) and Sharon some 30 poll points clear of the two contestants, Avraham Burg and Binyamin Ben Eliezer. That was Saturday, then reality kicked in.
In one of the bloodiest Sundays of the uprising, Palestinians exacted revenge for a week in which 11 Palestinians were killed (including two assassinations), 12 Palestinian homes demolished, acres of Palestinian farmland razed and 10 army incursions were mounted into Palestinian Authority controlled territories in Gaza and the West Bank.
The deadliest vengeance was in the northern Israeli town of Nahariya, where a Hamas suicide bomber self-detonated in a crowded railway station, leaving three Israelis dead and scores wounded. This was followed by a car blast at the Beit Lid intersection near Netanya that left the driver dead and ten Israelis wounded. At around the same time, Palestinian guerrillas sprayed with machine gun fire a van carrying Israeli teachers to Jewish settlements in the Jordan Valley. Claimed by Islamic Jihad, two Israelis were killed in the ambush.
Israel responded in routine fashion, holding the PA responsible for all three operations and launching tank and air strikes against Palestinian police and Fatah installations in Ramallah, Nablus, Jericho, Hebron, Rafah, Kabatiya and Tamoun villages. These left dozens of Palestinians wounded and a PA police officer dead. Another officer, who was also a militant in the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, was shot dead by the army on Gaza's northern border with Israel. He was about to undertake "a mission inside the Green Line," said the DFLP.
Save for the purpose of destroying the infrastructure of Yasser Arafat's rule, there is a growing consensus in Israeli political and military circles that the hits on usually vacated PA buildings are now little more than a sop to Israeli public opinion. But they provide a distraction, away from Sharon's ongoing policy of re-ordering and reversing the realities established during the now deceased Oslo process and destroying those PA bodies that buttress them. This policy is ratcheted up a notch after every suicide operation in Israel.
Following Bloody Sunday, the notch was ascended by Israel barring all Palestinian traffic on the Jordan Valley road, overtaking PA offices in the Jerusalem villages of Abu Dis and Azzariyya (both nominally under Palestinian "civilian" control) and ploughing trenches around these and other Jerusalem villages. Sharon also ordered a massive military build up around Jenin, where, says the army, some 11 Palestinian suicide bombers have been hosted or dispatched during the Intifada.
The upshot is that Palestinian East Jerusalem is becoming ever more finally severed from its West Bank hinterland. And Jenin, like Beit Jala before it -- is now "re- occupied" by armour, infantry, bulldozers and some 17 Israeli tanks, all poised to strike, invade and clear as they see fit.
The military show of strength was also because Sunday's events rattled the Israelis, and not simply because the incursions and reprisals were accompanied on Tuesday night by yet another Palestinian guerrilla ambush, leaving two Israeli police dead and one injured on the West Bank border near Tulkarm.
The main fear was triggered by the discovery of a tag next to the charred corpse of the Nahariya bomber that identified him as Mohamed Habeishi, an activist in Israel's Islamic Movement and resident of the Galilee village, Abu Snan. The spectre of Israel's Palestinian minority not only empathising with their kin's uprising in the occupied territories but emulating its methods sent Israeli pundits spinning like propellers, with at least one Likud Member of Knesset demanding that Israel's Islamic Movement be banned forthwith.
It also blew a large hole in the army's various proposals for "securing" Israel from the West Bank by creating "closed military zones" east of the Green Line. It remains to be seen what proposal will be devised for quarantining Israel from the Galilee, where some 300,000 of Israel's one million Palestinian citizens reside.
The shock was reflected in the Israeli and Palestinian responses to Nahariya. Elements in Likud denounced their leader for authorising a meeting between Peres and Arafat when the "proper" response should be to exile the Palestinian leader permanently from the West Bank and Gaza. The Israeli Left, which now boils down to the 12 MK Meretz faction, crowed that eight months after his election Sharon "had no plan" to deal with the Intifada other than "more of the same."
As for Hamas, it said the enlistment of Habeishi to their path proved that "it can strike deep inside Israel" whenever it chose and struck a "balance of terror with Israel to achieve an advantage," a sentiment increasingly echoed by armed cadre belonging to Arafat's Fatah movement.
It does not represent an absolute Palestinian consensus, however. Against the grain, Palestinian intellectuals like Saleh Abdel-Jawad and Mamdouh Nufal counter that Sharon actively seeks Palestinian suicide operations inside Israel. These enable him to proceed with his strategy of re-conquering the occupied territories "hectare by hectare" at the head of an outraged Israeli consensus and with minimal international demurral, let alone intervention.
The alternative they posit is a Palestinian resistance that confines armed actions to soldiers and settlers in the occupied territories, combined with a massive popular Palestinian campaign armed with the message to Israeli Jews that the source of all violence is the occupation. And that ending the first is predicated on ending the second.
The problem is that this message can only be blurred, and bloodied, by tactics that view Israeli cities as theatres of war and ideologies that define all Israeli Jews as "legitimate targets," be they civilians in Nahariya, soldiers in Gaza or settlers in Hebron.
One year to the month since it exploded on the rock of the occupation, the failure to get that message across remains the Intifada's gravest flaw, since it leaves Israeli public opinion united rather than polarised and Palestinians "half sheep and half wolf" in the eyes of the world. As for Sharon, high in the polls, bereft of a domestic opposition and head of the largest government in Israel's history, he has long understood there is no success like failure.
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