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February 22, 2002/Adar 10, 5762, Vol. 54, No. 23
Nation feeling hopeless
DAVID LANDAU
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
JERUSALEM - The new editor of Ma'ariv, Amnon Dankner, best summed up the mood of the nation: "It can't carry on like this," was the headline of his front-page piece on Feb. 17.
Dankner's article ran alongside a gallery of the weekend's Israeli death toll as the Palestinians escalated their terror offensive.
As the week wore on, the bombings, shootings and funerals seemed to blur in a constant catalog of misery.
Fear stalks the land. And not just fear - but a growing sense, which pollsters can now quantify, that the leadership has no solutions to offer. According to polls published Feb. 15, barely half of Israelis have a positive view of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's performance, a sharp decline from his approval ratings as little as a month ago.
Yet Sharon is determined to fight the atmosphere of panic and despair, while not acceding to pressures from his own right wing to launch an all-out war against the Palestinians.
"What are you proposing?" Sharon asked witheringly of a hard-line Likud Knesset member, Yuval Steinitz, at a party caucus Feb. 18. "That we go back into Gaza and run the lives of the people there? The advice of self-proclaimed experts who have done nothing and accomplished nothing in this area - well, I am not going to go back into Gaza."
The remark about "self-proclaimed experts" also was taken as a swipe at Benjamin Netanyahu.
Despite his steady slippage in the polls, therefore, Sharon in effect is offering the Israeli public more of the same, that is, more retaliatory bombings of P.A. installations, more targeted killings of terrorist leaders, more incursions into Palestinian cities.
"Whatever it needs to produce a cease-fire, I will do it," Sharon declared.
What there will not be is the kind of stepped-up warfare advocated, for instance, by Housing Minister Natan Sharansky. Sharansky is urging that the army be ordered to temporarily reoccupy Palestinian cities to conduct house-to-house searches for weapons.
Avigdor Lieberman, the minister of infrastructures and Sharansky's rival for the votes of the Russian immigrant community, calls for "transfer" - that is, the physical relocation of millions of Palestinians to other countries.
Others believe that, Sharon indeed is intent on bringing down Arafat's regime - but is patient enough to do it slowly and carefully.
In any case, Sharon's resistance to right-wing pressure appears to be earning him scant praise on the left. On the night of Feb. 16, some 10,000 people attended a Peace Now rally in Tel Aviv. Speakers called for an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Sharon said recently that Israel will win this "war" with the Palestinians - if Israelis remain steadfast. Yet intelligence officials say cracks in Israeli morale - such as the recent letter from some 200 reserve soldiers and officers who refuse to serve in the West Bank and Gaza Strip - are emboldening Arafat to escalate the intifada.
More Israeli casualties, Arafat believes, will quicken the growth of dissent and force the Israeli government to accede to Palestinian demands.
Dankner ended his article as powerfully and plaintively as it began: "If there is a policy," he wrote, "military or politics, strategic or tactical - let it appear at once.''
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