Fear splits Israel's ranks

Ronit Dan was scrubbing her kitchen sink when she felt the house shake and a sudden whoosh of air. She crawled to the special 'shelter-room' in her apartment and peered through the steel shutters: in the distance, less than a mile away, the dunes of the Gaza Strip were still as the grave.

She went to her neighbour's house just down the road in Sederot, a town built in the 1950s on the Israeli side of the border with Gaza. A Qassam-2 rocket fired by Hamas guerrillas from within Gaza had ploughed into the front garden and wrecked the ground-floor windows. She found Simi Naamat 'unable to let go of her 18-month-old baby', bleeding at the thighs, eyes and head from shrapnel.

Simi has since left her home, vowing never to return. 'But I'm not leaving Israel,' says Ronit. 'This is my home. This is our state.'

Fear, pain and stubborn resilience are perhaps the last remaining ties that bind the two peoples of Israel and Palestine. Those and a mutual, visceral loathing: 'When the Palestinians target our homes, it means they want to kill us. And when I see them dancing in the street to celebrate the deaths of Jewish children, I want to kill them.'

The Qassam attack was one of the spurs that last week prompted Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to unleash a massive military offensive to crush the Palestinian initfada once and for all.

'We are in a hard war with a cruel and bloodthirsty enemy,' he said at the start of the week. 'We must cause the Palestinians losses, casualties, so that they understand they will gain nothing by terrorism. We must hit them, and hit them again and again, until they understand.'

Over the next six days the Israeli army invaded Palestinian refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza, assassinated activists in Palestinian cities and bombarded Palestinian Authority offices. In desperate reprisal, Palestinians ambushed soldiers, went on shooting sprees within Jewish settlements and attempted to detonate themselves in restaurants in the heart of Israeli west Jerusalem.

In the bloodiest week anyone can remember, 120 Palestinians were killed, including 56 on Friday alone - among them women, children and medical staff; 33 Israelis were slain, including 17 civilians. 'It is war now, a war inside your living room,' says Ronit.

Sederot is a 'microcosm' of Israel, says Avi Suliemani, director of Sederot Community Centre. A drab development town, housing North African and Russian Jewish immigrants, 11 per cent of its 23,000 population are unemployed and 30 per cent of all families receive welfare. 'Poverty affects us far more than the Qassam rockets,' Suliemani says.

Sederot is also confused, unable to fathom how Israelis and Palestinians went from peace to war in less than 18 months.

'Arafat is a terrorist,' says Suliemani, simply. 'He's not fighting to drive the settlers out of Gaza. He's fighting to drive us out of Sederot, Lod, Haifa and Jaffa.'

But there is also the bleak realism that this is a conflict that neither side can win. 'I sometimes think we will be fighting for the next 200 years. And at the end of it Gaza will still be there and Sederot will still be here,' says Ronit.

Not all Israelis share this fatalism. Shlomo Riskin is a native of New York and chief rabbi of Efrat, a Jewish settlement of 6,000 people, trimmed lawns and red-tiled houses chiseled into the southern hills of the occupied West Bank. He believes Sharon's military solutions for 'Palestinian terrorism' are now the only ones left.

'The Palestinians have to be made to understand that they will not drive out Jews from here. We are not the Crusaders. We came home to Israel.'

Riskin believes Israel must 'certainly' destroy the Palestinian Authority, so that a leadership will arise that accepts the 'principle of thou shall not murder'. In the absence of this, 'I see no possibility other than reconquest'.

Outside the rabbi's window, the rattle of gunfire can be heard from the Palestinian village of el- Khader, near Bethlehem, two miles away, and on whose land Efrat was built. The army is hunting for militiamen, including those who killed Dvora Friedman, a resident of Efrat, on Tuesday.

At her funeral, Riskin assailed those Israelis who apologise when innocent Palestinians are killed in pursuit 'of those who seek to destroy us', such as the wife and three children of a Hamas activist, 'accidentally' blown apart by an Israeli tank shell in Ramallah on Monday.

He says: 'We have to get to the assassins, and get to them without regard to their families. That's a natural consequence of war, that's side-effect, that's debris.'

Riskin is fully behind Sharon's savage new policy. Other Americans are less enthusiastic.

'If you declare war against the Palestinians thinking that you can solve the problem by seeing how many Palestinians can be killed, I don't know if that leads us anywhere,' US Secretary of State Colin Powell told a Congressional committee on Wednesday. Sharon 'has to take a hard look at his policies to see if they will work'.

Within hours, President Bush dispatched US special envoy Anthony Zinni to 'again try' to put a workable ceasefire in place. By Friday - and under enormous international criticism for the carnage - Sharon waived his condition of 'seven days of quiet' before negotiations could resume.

It is unlikely to do him much good. The Palestinian Authority said Sharon's apparent about-face was of no value unless the army 'stopped the massacres'.

Settler leaders like Riskin and right-wing politicians like Binyamin Netanyahu will accuse Sharon of buckling under US pressure and 'Palestinian terrorism'. As for the Israeli Left, it has long concluded there is no military solution to the conflict, according to political analyst Moshe Maoz.

This common antipathy is reflected in an opinion poll released on Friday by Israel's Yediot Aharonot newspaper, showing that Sharon's approval rating had plummeted from 68 to 43 per cent in less than a month. If Sharon remains Prime Minister, 'it is only because Israelis don't see an alternative', says Maoz.

One alternative would be for Israel's Labour Party to leave Sharon's National Unity coalition. Foreign Minister Shimon Peres intimated this could be imminent.

But after meeting Sharon on Wednesday, Peres was appeased. It was a stance endorsed by Labour Party leader and Defence Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer.

Maoz thinks such loyalty is mistaken. But he does not hold only Peres and Ben-Eliezer responsible for the bloodshed.

'Bush should exert pressure on both Sharon and Arafat. We get our F-16 fighter jets from the US. It turns a blind eye to our nuclear capability. It has a lot of sticks to beat us with. It should use them, if only to save us from ourselves.'

Maoz also believes there is now a vehicle for this salvation: last month Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Abdullah offered recognition and normalisation of relations with Israel in return for its withdrawal to its pre-1967 borders.

The 'initiative' has gained support from the Authority, Egypt, Syria, the European Union and the US. Abdullah plans to present it to the Arab League summit in Beirut on 27 March, where it could become official Arab policy. Maoz hopes this happens, but even if the initiative withers it is 'strategically important'.

'The intifada does not pose an existential threat to us as a state. But it has presented us with a choice: either we go on with the killing or we accept a peace treaty along the lines of the Saudi initiative. Everyone knows in their hearts this is the price.'

It is because Europe and the world felt guilty not coming to the aid of Germany's Jews, that Israel exists. Would it not have been fairer to carve out a section of Germany for the Jews with a Berlin-type wall, for the time needed, rather than prey on a defenseless people not given statehood, turning THEIR lands over to the Jews to allow them to wreak their hostilities on a people weaker than the Germans? Wars do not necessitate taking over people's land, either. May God let justice prevail. Perhaps you need a psychedelic drug to open up your psyche, as you seem to be unable to do it by yourself.

Yes, Israel's leaders SHOULD react for the benefit of the ordinary people of Israel. But not in the way you imply.

Iodine-131...for those stubborn infections!

People who refuse to see more than one (their) side of the coin are intellectually depriving themselves of half their brain. No loss for me, and I see the Bush administration sees the true character of the Israeli leadership. No peace, we just are greedy for land (never really ours, of course).

Genocide is hardly a substitute for a peaceful heart.

Tell that to the Canaanites and the Philistines. Israel needs to do with the Palestinians as it did with these earlier nations.

A martial solution, as your namesake would choose, is NOT the way to a better world. In this case, the Palestinians alone are fighting for what is theirs and thus the only side fighting justifiably.

Genocide is hardly a substitute for a peaceful heart.

Ahh, but life is conflict. Indeed, the very nature of life and of nature is unending battle. So peace may be an ideal - albeit an unachievable one - but cannot exist while breath remains within us.

Don't think of it as genocide. Think of it as introducing the palies to a truly lasting peace.

A martial solution, as your namesake would choose, is NOT the way to a better world.

Worked pretty well against the Palestinians' Nazi allies though. Besides, my namesake was known for massacring unarmed civilians, more like a Palestinian, in fact.

In this case, the Palestinians alone are fighting for what is theirs and thus the only side fighting justifiably.

Sorry Mr. Bin Laden, go sell crazy somewhere else, we aren't going to drink your cool aid anymore. In any case, there will be no Palestinians alive between the Jordan and the Mediterranean before the end of the decade.

Ya iggit, there was no body there but Jews. No Arabs, no Arabs that call themselves Palestinian, it was a waste land. Go read some history books, they are out there waiting for you.

There always comes this denigration of these people. They were nomads, much like some American Indian tribes. They allowed all their Arab brethren to roam or live freely there, Syrians, Jordanians, any, but it is THEIR land of the Philistines from the beginning. Because the land was not crowded with people building monuments to themselves, does not mean it was not appreciated and used. Rather it shows that they appreciated this handiwork of nature as God-given and had no intention of paving it over.

The Guardian hates Israel, and the US too. Spreads disinformation about both. I remember you from another thread accusing Daniel Pearl of being a spy or Mossad agent some weird stuff like that.

Ya iggit, there was no body there but Jews. No Arabs, no Arabs that call themselves Palestinian, it was a waste land. Go read some history books, they are out there waiting for you. It looks like boltfromblue joined FR to avail us of fine Arab propaganda.

They were nomads, much like some American Indian tribes. They allowed all their Arab brethren to roam or live freely there, Syrians, Jordanians, any, but it is THEIR land of the Philistines from the beginning. Oot of the Blue, our dearest member Bolt invented a new ancient people -- Jordanians.

You see, if you get Arabic education, you don't really need to know anything -- just repeat the sheick's words.

You are doing well, Bolt. But I am afraid, however, that I am talking to a Nut.

And what do you know about the "weird" notion that Pearl did not spy for the Mossad? Israel likely has the largest spy network of any nation, including of course its spies here.

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