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March 12, 2004/Adar 19 5764, Vol. 56, No. 25
Will withdrawal lead to Gaza chaos?
LESLIE SUSSER
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
JERUSALEM - If Israel pulls its troops out of Gaza, how can Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon be sure that Hamas won't seize power in the ensuing chaos?
That's one of the key questions troubling Israeli policy planners. So far, they have come up with a number of answers: military force to clip the wings of the Islamic terrorist group before the pullout; diplomatic efforts to convince Egypt to play a peacekeeping role after the withdrawal; and encouraging Britain to train Palestinian Authority police forces to maintain law and order.
It remains to be seen, however, whether these steps will satisfy the Bush admini-stration, which also is wary of the potential for chaos in Gaza after an Israeli withdrawal.
Early on March 7, a large Israeli force entered the Bureij refugee camp in Gaza, hunting for known Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists. In the ensuing firefight, 14 Palestinians were killed, mostly armed fighters identified with Hamas.
According to Israeli military analysts, the operation was not in retaliation for attempted terrorist attacks the previous day at a border crossing between Gaza and Israel proper. Rather, it was part of an ongoing policy designed to keep terrorists off balance in the limbo period between Sharon's declaration of intent and the actual Israeli pullout.
Such relatively large-scale military actions are likely to be stepped up in the interim period. The Israeli army's chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Moshe Ya'alon, says that mere talk of withdrawal could be encouraging the Palestinians to intensify attacks to give the impression that Israel is fleeing under fire.
To counter this, Israel hopes to inflict a heavy defeat on the terrorists before leaving. The message is that the Pale-stinians will be making a big mistake if they think more terrorism will force further Israeli withdrawals.
At stake is the credibility of Israeli deterrence.
Before Israel withdrew unilaterally from Lebanon in May 2000, Sharon urged then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak to hit Hezbollah hard so that the Syrian-backed Shi'ite militia couldn't claim a victory that would inspire other Arab groups to attack Israel.
But Barak ignored that advice. Because of that, Sharon believes, Arabs widely perceived the Lebanon withdrawal as an Israeli defeat - one that encouraged the Palestinians to take up arms to achieve similar results. The result: the intifada.
Now, with the drawn-out intifada shaping up as a test of national wills, many Palestinians are touting Sharon's announcement of a Gaza withdrawal as vindica-tion of their strategy of violence.
Sharon wants to do all he can to counter that impression.
Focusing the army's attack on Hamas and Islamic Jihad also is an attempt to make it easier for relative moderates, like Fatah strongman Mohammed Dahlan, to take over after Israel leaves and establish a modicum of law and order.
But Sharon doesn't trust Dahlan or any other Palestinian figure to stop the smuggling of arms into Gaza from Egypt after Israel leaves. Nor does he want to leave Israeli forces on the sensitive "Philadelphia Axis," which runs for about five miles along the border between Egypt and Gaza.
For years, the Palestinians have used a system of tunnels to smuggle arms and ex-plosives from the Egyptian side of the border into Gaza. Sharon's solution lately has been to appeal to Cairo for aid in shutting off the smugglers' traffic.
Sharon favors an Israeli pullout from all of Gaza, but aides say he will go that far only if Egypt undertakes to police the Philadelphia route. In other words, the outcome of talks on the Philadelphia issue could determine the scope of Israel's Gaza pullback.
The signs are not good. In a recent interview with the French newspaper Le Figaro, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was highly skep-tical about a proposed Egyptian role in Gaza, warning that it could lead to clashes with the Palestinians and even with Israel.
Israeli officials had hoped Egypt would step up in order to impress Washington and be recognized as a major regional player.
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