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September 20, 2002/Tishri 14 5763, Vol. 55, No. 4
After two years of violence, no Palestinian gains
LESLIE SUSSER
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
JERUSALEM - Israeli society has been bruised and brutalized by two years of Palestinian terror and violence, but as the intifada enters its third year it has brought the Palestinians no political gain whatsoever.
On the contrary, there is far less on the table for the Palestinians than when they launched their campaign of terror in late September 2000.
Now, with the Palestinians' cities in ruin, their leader isolated and Palestinian public figures increasingly admitting that the intifada has been disastrous for their cause, Israeli politicians are beginning to believe that the end of the onslaught is in sight.
Some of that optimism, however, was quashed Sept. 18, when a Palestinian suicide bomber carried out the first such attack in six weeks.
An Israeli policeman was killed and at least two people injured in the attack near a bus stop in northern Israel.
It was the first suicide attack since Aug. 4, when a bomber blew himself up on a bus traveling from Haifa to Safed, killing himself and nine Israelis.
In another terror attack earlier Sept. 18, one Israeli was killed and another wounded when Palestinian gunmen ambushed their car in the West Bank.
In yet another incident that day, the scorched body of an Israeli apparently slain by terrorists was found in eastern Jerusalem.
Given the history of the past two years, however, it is unlikely that such attacks will shake the Israeli resolve to overcome the Palestinian onslaught.
When the intifada began during Rosh Hashana two years ago, Israel had just made an unprecedented and generous offer at the Camp David summit, offering to withdraw from virtually all the territories conquered in the 1967 Six-Day War, share Jerusalem with a Palestinian state and seek creative solutions for control of the Temple Mount.
Though the Camp David offer granted the Palestinians almost all of their demands, Palestinian leaders believed that violence would quickly pry from Israel a few last crumbs - without the Palestinians being forced to make any concessions of their own or declare an end to their conflict with Israel.
According to Israeli military officials, the Palestinians' model was Lebanon.
The ragged Israeli withdrawal in May 2000 led many Arabs to conclude that sustained violence and even moderate casualties would lead Israel to beat a similarly chaotic retreat from the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah had compared Israeli society to a spider web - brittle and easily destroyed. True, he argued, Israel had a strong army and a sophisticated industrial base, but Israelis over the years had become weak and pampered.
In Lebanon, the killing of some two dozen Israeli soldiers each year, far from the home front, had provoked a popular movement that forced Israel to withdraw unilaterally from its security zone. That experience, according to Nasrallah's theory, proved that Israeli society could no longer stomach civilian or battlefield losses, and that Israelis had lost their will to fight.
Palestinian leaders, from Arafat down to militia commanders in the field, eagerly adopted the spider web theory and tried to apply it to the intifada - except that events on the ground disproved it.
What they hadn't counted on is that Israelis would react differently when the battle was not on some distant border but in the heart of their capital or in the cities of their densely populated coastal plain.
The army's new chief of staff, Lt. Gen Moshe Ya'alon, said the staying power of Israeli society will determine the outcome of the conflict.
Unlike the Palestinians, who Ya'alon believes wish to annihilate Israel, Israel does not seek to destroy the Palestinians. Victory for Israel, therefore, means forcing the Palestinians to realize that terror will get them nowhere, Ya'alon said in a recent interview with the Ha'aretz newspaper.
As the intifada enters its third year, 612 Israelis have been killed, including 427 civilians. Of those, 250 were killed in suicide bombings, including 227 civilians.
More than 4,500 have been wounded, over 3,200 of them civilians.
While the Palestinians have suffered more casualties, the percentage of civilian victims on the Israeli side is far higher - a reflection of the fact that Israel has striven to avoid harming Palestinian civilians, while the Palestinians have made civilians their primary targets.
Yet with Israeli military and administrative responses to the terror - closing borders to Palestinian workers, imposing curfews on Palestinian areas and mounting counterterrorism operations in all the West Bank cities - it is the Palestinians who are suffering most from their offensive.
Voices on the Palestinian side increasingly are calling the intifada a disaster and urging their leaders to turn to nonviolent means of oppostion.
Even if it does succeed in decisively beating back the Palestinian onslaught, Israel may find the world demanding that it quickly give the Palestinians at the bargaining table what they failed to win on the battlefield.
Leslie Susser is the diplomatic correspondent for the Jerusalem Report.
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