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August 9, 2002/Elul 1 5762, Vol. 54, No. 47
Sharon faces pressure for harsher measures
LESLIE SUSSER
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
JERUSALEM - As Palestinian terrorism takes an ever-increasing toll, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is seeking to walk a fine line: taking tougher measures to deter terrorists without escalating the situation further.
Figures released this week show that more than 600 Israelis, most of them civilians, have been killed since the Palestinian intifada began in September 2000, and more than 4,000 wounded.
Right-wing critics now are demanding harsher action against Palestinian leaders and the Palestinian population as a whole.
Avigdor Lieberman, leader of the National Union-Israel, Our Home bloc in the Knesset, says the army should have no compunction about targeting political leaders like Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat or Hamas leader Sheik Ahmed Yassin, who he says are behind the terrorism.
"They don't send their children to be" suicide bombers, Lieberman said in an early August radio interview. "They send their children overseas. And if they knew their own lives were in danger, the terror would stop."
Hard-liner Michael Kleiner goes further: He says Israel should kill 1,000 Palestinians for every dead Israeli.
But Sharon is showing no sign of responding to the right-wing demands. On the contrary, he continues to distinguish between the Palestinian population, whose suffering he says he wants to ease, and the terrorist organizations.
Sharon's aides say the prime minister hopes to drive a wedge between the overwhelming majority of the civilian population and the terrorists - a strategy that so far has been singularly unsuccessful. Opinion polls show that the Palestinian public overwhelmingly supports suicide bombings, despite the harsh Israeli counter-measures they provoke.
Sharon also has another reason for rejecting the right-wing pressure: He does not want to jeopardize major political gains, like strong U.S. support for Israel, and international pressure on the Palestinians to replace Arafat and reform the Palestinian Authority.
Still, the pressure from the right, and the new tone in the public debate, raises the fundamental question of how far a democracy can or must go to defend its citizens. Are actions permissible in a state of war that would not be acceptable in peacetime?
In other words, can a democracy win the war against terror while maintaining the full gamut of democratic values? And if not, just how much can it reasonably suspend?
In July, the government sought to deter would-be suicide bombers by making it clear that their close relatives would suffer for their actions: houses would be demolished and families expelled from the West Bank to the Gaza Strip.
Israeli human rights organizations criticized the new policy, arguing that it violated a cardinal principle of jurisprudence: that only the guilty can be punished for their actions.
In early August, the Ma'ariv newspaper sprang to the government's defense. It wrote: "It is high time people realized that we are within our rights to try various methods of punishment and deterrence ... In order to save lives we are proposing not to kill anyone ... but to transfer them from one place of residence to another."
Boaz Ganor, a counter-terrorism expert at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, argues that a democratic country's greatest commitment is to protect the lives of its citizens, and that it is only natural for those citizens to demand that the government take radical measures.
This, he says, leads to what he calls the "democratic paradox" in fighting terror: If a government fails to adopt radical measures it will be voted out of office; but if it does, it undermines liberal democratic values and begins to look like the terrorists want it to, illegitimate and undemocratic.
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