A predictable cycle of violence
Since Ariel Sharon first became prime minister, suicide bombings have increased dramatically. Steve Niva* argues that there is a link between the Israeli leader's policies and the attacks
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Palestinians demonstrate against possible US-led war on Iraq during a march in Ramallah (photo: AFP)
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Ariel Sharon's landslide re-election as Israel's prime minister rests on a paradox. Sharon was re-elected on the grounds that only he could quell Palestinian terrorism and suicide bombings. Yet the evidence suggests that his policies over the past few years have significantly contributed, as a matter of course and in some cases it appears deliberately, to the persistence of suicide bombings.
Since Sharon became prime minister in February 2001 and initiated unprecedented military assaults on Palestinian civilian areas as well as expanding the systematic assassination of Palestinian militant leaders, suicide bombing attacks on Israeli civilians have skyrocketed. The startling fact is that over four times as many suicide bombings -- around 90 incidents -- have occurred under Ariel Sharon's watch than in the seven previous years combined when there were a total of 20. By contrast, there was only one suicide bombing between 1998 and 2000, which coincides with the period in which the Wye River Peace Accords were negotiated and Ehud Barak was elected on a pro-peace platform.
Nevertheless, Israeli officials, and even some independent observers, strongly discount any direct relationship between Sharon's policies and suicide bombings.
The Israeli government claims that the bombings simply illustrate the collective Palestinian rejection of peace following the failed Camp David peace talks in the summer of 2000 and a basic desire to destroy the state of Israel. Hence, Israelis must rely upon the iron resolve of Ariel Sharon and overwhelming military violence to crush Palestinian resistance and secure Israel's survival.
Human Rights Watch published a major study of Palestinian suicide bombings in October 2002 that rightly condemned suicide bombings as "crimes against humanity" for their systematic and deliberate targeting of Israeli civilians. The wanton cruelty of these attacks cannot be overstated. While the report refutes the Israeli contention that Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Authority are behind suicide bombings, it also thoroughly refutes the litany of justifications given by Palestinian militant groups, and calls for their immediate cessation.
Yet the report also fails to adequately contextualise the dramatic upsurge in the incidents during Sharon's tenure as prime minister and underplays the role of his provocative policies in this escalation.
The Palestinian uprising in late September 2000 following Camp David did not immediately lead to a wave of suicide bombings, despite the ferocity of Israel's response. The first suicide attack on Israeli civilians following the uprising did not come until 1 January 2001. The wave of bombings did not occur until after Sharon's election as prime minister in February 2001.
Moreover, the reality is that Palestinian suicide bombings are largely the product of an almost predictable cycle of violence between Palestinian militant groups and Israeli occupation forces. The vast majority of the over 100 Palestinian suicide bombings since they began in 1994 have followed Israeli assaults that resulted in major civilian casualties or Israeli assassinations of important militant leaders.
Palestinian militant groups appear to have adopted a routine policy of responding to civilian massacres and especially assassinations with suicide bombings.
This fact explains why Ariel Sharon's escalation of military assaults on Palestinian civilian areas and his aggressive employment of extrajudicial assassinations of key militant leaders over the past few years have amplified the organisational triggers for suicide bombings, leading to the upsurge in suicide attacks.
Despite the carnage, none of this has deterred Sharon from escalating the assassination campaign and initiating even more violent military operations that kill civilians.
Yet what is even more damaging for Sharon is the apparently systematic use of assassinations and assaults on Palestinians during openly declared cease-fires on Israeli civilians that Yasser Arafat was able to negotiate with militant groups at different times.
The first clear case of this apparent policy was when Sharon ordered the assassination of two leading Hamas leaders in Nablus on 31 July 2001, which put an end to a nearly two- month cease-fire on Israeli civilians observed by Hamas. Haim Shalev, an editorialist in the Hebrew daily Ma'ariv, warned on 1 August that because "Israel has violated the cease-fire" it should expect a new wave of suicide bombings, which indeed came on 9 August in a bloody attack on a Jerusalem Sbarro pizzeria that killed 15 Israelis.
More notorious was Sharon's decision to assassinate leading Hamas militant Mahmud Abu-Hanoud on 23 November 2001 when Hamas was upholding an agreement with Arafat not to attack targets inside of Israel and a few days before US envoy General Anthony Zinni was to arrive in Israel.
In a widely cited article from 25 November 2001, the conservative military commentator for Israel's Yediot Aharanot, Alex Fishman, noted that the assassination had the effect of "shattering in one blow the gentleman's agreement between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority". He continued that "Whoever decided upon the liquidation of Abu-Hanoud knew in advance that [a terrorist attack inside Israel] would be the price. The subject was extensively discussed in by both Israel's military and political [hierarchies], before it was decided to carry out the liquidation."
The brutal bombings that followed Abu- Hanoud's assassination gave Sharon the ideal pretext for his subsequent declaration of war upon Arafat and effectively scuttled the Zinni mission.
Israel's assassination of the leading Fatah militant Raed Karmi on 14 January 2002 broke a month-long cease-fire and led a militant group associated with Arafat's secular Fatah Party, calling itself the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, to deliver its first suicide bombing on 27 January 2002. This group has conducted dozens of suicide bombings since that time.
In the past year, it was widely reported that the 22 July 2002 assassination of leading Hamas militant Salah Shehada in Gaza, which also killed 15 civilians -- 11 of them children -- came within hours of a unilateral cease-fire declaration by both the Palestinian nationalist militia Tanzim and Hamas. Sharon had been briefed by European Union (EU) go-betweens, yet he went ahead anyway. Within two weeks, Hamas claimed responsibility for a bombing at Hebrew University, which killed seven Israelis, and a bloody suicide bombing a week later.
And most recently, on 26 December 2002 Israeli execution squads assassinated members from three Palestinian militant groups while representatives from Fatah, Hamas and other factions were meeting in Cairo to formulate a cease-fire on Israeli civilians to last through the Israeli elections on 28 January. The horrific double suicide bombing in Tel Aviv took place within 10 days of these assassinations on 5 January, putting an end to the talks and virtually assuring Sharon of re-election.
It is difficult to imagine that Sharon, with his much vaunted military and strategic acumen, or his intelligence advisers do not understand the consequences of these policies.
In fact, the only conclusion one can draw is that either Sharon thought it so important to kill these militant leaders despite the bloody consequences for Israeli civilians or that he took these actions precisely because he expected these consequences and cynically sought to reap the political gains. Either way, Sharon is complicit in the deaths of scores of Israeli civilians.
In a scathing 2 August 2002 editorial in Israel's prestigious Ha'aretz newspaper following the assassination of Shehada in Gaza City, Doron Rosenblum declared, "In short, any four-year-old child who examined this pattern of events would conclude that this government, whether consciously or not, is simply not interested in the cessation of the terrorist attacks, for they constitute its raison d'être."
None of this should be taken to exculpate militant Palestinian groups, who have proven more than willing to seize upon Sharon's provocation's through their myopic preoccupation with revenge and fantasies about deterrence to bring untold misery upon both Israelis and Palestinians, who often bear the brunt of brutal Israeli reprisals.
Palestinian militants have not only soured the Israeli public on peace, they have also severely damaged the Palestinian cause in the court of world opinion. In effect, they have aligned themselves with Israel's expansionist right-wing, led by Ariel Sharon, by escalating the conflict into open military conflagration, which could be disastrous for Palestinians. Large-scale population transfer is now openly discussed in Israeli political and military circles.
A Palestinian opponent of suicide bombings, the Bir Zeit University Professor Salah Abdel-Jawad, has recently argued, "The failure of Palestinians, both in the leadership and among the population at large, to grasp the danger of suicide bomb attacks results from their failure to understand Ariel Sharon's aims following the end of the Oslo process and the destruction of the Palestinian authority. He wants to destroy Palestinian civil society and thus move closer to a second expulsion of Palestinians."
Nevertheless, Israeli actions are a crucial part of the cycle of violence and retaliation and arguably more significant for stopping suicide attacks than those of Yasser Arafat and what little remains of his authority and security services.
Israel could easily refrain from actions that kill Palestinian civilians and could suspend the assassination campaign of militants. Moreover, Israel could offer a political vision attractive enough to enable Palestinians to mobilise the growing opposition to suicide bombings within Palestinian society around peace negotiations with Israel, thereby marginalising militant organisations and depriving them of the crucial support they depend upon to gain recruits and conduct their operations.
However, none of this will happen for the simple reason that Ariel Sharon's entire political career has been based on his long- standing opposition to a viable Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and his relentless support for colonising these lands with Israeli settlements. Suicide bombings have become the primary pretext for enabling the brute force and violence needed to achieve this objective.
Furthermore, having secured his re-election, Sharon will soon be confronted with several new opportunities that he will likely strive to derail.
First, Palestinian factions have returned to Cairo in a bid to reopen negotiations leading to a cease-fire on Israeli civilians within Israel's 1967 borders and Hamas has once again declared it would consider a cease-fire if Israel refrains from attacking Palestinian civilians and cancels its assassination policy.
Second, Sharon will likely come under new pressure to agree to the latest draft of the Middle East peace "roadmap" drawn up by the so-called quartet, made up of the United States, United Nations, EU and Russia. Sharon strongly opposes its recommendations that Israeli commitments would include a total freeze on Jewish settlements in the West Bank and a redeployment to positions held before the uprising began in September 2000.
And lastly, following a possible invasion of Iraq, Sharon may confront a renewed American effort to conclude a deal with the Palestinians that would, according to a recent interview with the Deputy Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz, have to include a Palestinian state.
Given the track records of both Sharon and Palestinian militant groups, any hopes for an end to suicide bombings or for a political process that could meet the legitimate aspirations of both sides are now futile, at best.
* The writer teaches International Politics and Middle East Studies at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington.
