Powell was right to be concerned. Ariel Sharon, a longtime hawk who now finds himself contending with critics on his right, may be reaching the end of his patience. After last week’s assassination, Sharon mounted the largest assault on the West Bank in 13 months of fighting, sending tanks into four Palestinian-controlled towns but stopping short of an all-out invasion. The United States might have expected the offensive–Zeevi’s murder was a brazen act. A terror group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, shot him dead in the Jerusalem Hyatt. But American officials are using all their diplomatic weight–pleading and pressuring–to contain the violence.
What Sharon does in coming days could affect not only the future of the Mideast, but America’s whole war on terror. As another Israeli-Palestinian ceasefire agreement collapses, Sharon is caught between domestic pressure to smash the Palestinian Authority and Washington’s concern that Israeli escalation will make it impossible for moderate Arab leaders to back the campaign against terrorism. That could give bin Laden what he wants: a broad Islamic front against Israel and the West.
Washington, which gives Israel key political backing and billions in annual aid, still has huge influence over the Jewish state. According to Israeli officials, Powell has called Sharon almost daily since Sept. 11, urging the Israeli leader to go easy on the Palestinians, while President George W. Bush has spoken to Sharon at least four times in the past six weeks. The most serious leverage the United States has might be contained in a peace proposal Powell had planned to unveil at the United Nations last month calling for a Palestinian state in nearly all of the West Bank and Gaza–a settlement Sharon abhors. The prime minister’s biggest concern: that Washington would offer a take-it-or-leave-it plan with the implicit threat of dialing back its support for Israel if Sharon said no.
The United States has not leaned so heavily on Israel since the gulf war. Back then, the first Bush administration successfully persuaded Israel not to retaliate for Saddam Hussein’s Scud missile attacks on Tel Aviv and other cities in order to maintain Arab support for the war. But there are important differences between then and now. Israelis weren’t dying on their own streets in an intifada. And “the United States was actively defending Israel” during the gulf war by supplying Patriot missile batteries and hunting Scud launchers in Western Iraq, said Zalman Shoval, a political adviser to Sharon. This time many Israelis were disturbed when Bush failed to name Palestinian groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad as terrorist organizations. “If people think that Palestinians can kill our cabinet ministers and our children and we will do nothing because the United States is worried about its bigger war, they’re very wrong,” said Natan Sharansky, Israel’s Housing Minister and a hard-liner in Sharon’s cabinet.
Even so, U.S. pressure could at least hold the Israelis and Palestinians at a stalemate while the broader war on terror goes on. During a four-day stretch after last week’s assassination, Israeli troops attacked six West Bank towns and killed at least 17 Palestinians. To residents of the West Bank it looked like a reoccupation of the area, but one Sharon aide described it as a “limited” operation: soldiers would use the new forward positions as jump-off points for raids inside towns and refugee camps, to capture or kill militants. Eventually they would leave, the official said. He didn’t say when.
Powell’s peace proposal could be on the table next month when Sharon meets Bush in the White House for the first time since Sept. 11. Aides say Sharon intends to pre-empt the plan with his own proposal that also proffers a Palestinian state but with much narrower borders. It’s a plan Palestinians are sure to reject. In the meantime Israeli officials have begun a media blitz to liken Arafat and his administration to the Taliban–a radical regime that harbors dangerous terrorists. Unfortunately for Sharon there is one difference: he has no one else with whom to make peace.
