Posted on 06/22/2002 10:43:26 AM PDT by mdittmar
The Israeli military was preparing a "crushing and decisive" response to recent Palestinian attacks, and it could include an extended stay by Israeli troops in Palestinian areas, a senior defense official said Saturday.
Israeli troops have poured into several Palestinian towns and cities in recent days, and as of Saturday night, remained in five places in the West Bank where strict curfews were in force. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's government has endorsed a plan to gradually reoccupy Palestinian land until suicide bombings and shootings stop.
The plan for stepped up military action came after a bloody week that left 33 Israelis and 18 Palestinians dead, leading U.S. President George W. Bush to put off an address that was to outline his proposal for moving toward a Palestinian state.
Amos Yaron, director general of the Defense Ministry, suggested that the current operation could be even larger in scale than the six-week sweep through the West Bank that ended in May.
"This terrorism cannot be allowed to continue. Our response has to be crushing and decisive," Yaron said in an interview on Israel radio. "We have to take much more massive action than we have up until now."
"If what we have done (in the previous operation) was not enough, so we'll do it with even more force," he said. "If we have to stay in the territories for more time, we'll do it for more time."
During the earlier campaign, the Israeli forces killed or arrested scores of suspected Palestinian militants, shattered Palestinian infrastructure, and kept Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat imprisoned in his battered office headquarters for more than a month.
Yarden Vatikai, adviser to Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, said reserves were being called up for the operation, but the number would be less than a brigade.
Vatikai also said that Ben-Eliezer "expressed regret" and called for an investigation into a tank shooting Friday in Jenin that left four Palestinians dead, three of them children, ages 6 to 12.
Jenin residents rushed to the market Friday to replenish supplies amid rumors that the 3-day-old military curfew had been lifted temporarily. When troops searching the area for an explosives laboratory spotted a group of Palestinians heading toward them in violation of the curfew, a tank fired two shells to deter them, the army said.
Jenin was calm Saturday, with Israeli tanks withdrawing from an area near a high school so students could enter and take final exams.
Other West Bank towns occupied by Israeli troops were also quiet Saturday.
In Bethlehem, shopkeepers swung open their doors and vegetable vendors lined the streets while the army curfew was lifted for three hours. Shoppers jammed the city's dusty streets to stock up on supplies. The army usually lifts the curfew for a few hours every third day.
In Nablus, fire from an Israeli tank damaged the gate to An-Najah University, but no casualties were reported.
Near Nablus on Friday, a group of Israeli settlers went on a rampage as they returned from the funerals of a mother and her three sons, killed in a Palestinian attack on the settlement of Itamar.
After the funerals, the settlers drove toward the village of Hawara, and killed a Palestinian man and torched a home and a car, Palestinian villagers said.
Israeli police arrested a 27-year-old Jewish settler in connection with the shooting death, police said Saturday. But the investigation was hampered because the Palestinians did not want to turn over the body of the dead Palestinian man, police added.
We shall see.
Good analysis......waiting......
I'm no Kreskin, but I predict that 'crushing and decisive' will be operationalized as gradualism, proportional responses and tit for tat.
I know that in the cold war game theory, gradualism and tit for tat was the strategy for getting two sides to work together. It's not working with people who get their war instructions from the Koran.
A perfect example of why the terrorist bombings will not end.
You come over and murder our kids in a suicide bombing,we come over and make sure your kids can take their finals.
Not much of a curfew,or clampdown.
It would seem to me that when we use response in this sense it should be understood in the same sense as "Pavlovian response". In other words, you do thus and this is what you get in return. Shock the monkey before he gets his banana. But the key in this type of conditioning is to offer the "shocked" a stimulus that is better avoided- ie the monkey can get a banana for choosing what's behing door number 1 (the desired behaviour) or he can get intense pain via electrical shock for choosing the undesirable behaviour behind door number 2.
In this case, the response to the homicide bombings has to be effectively bad enough to deter the murder. But when Israel has to tailor its conditioning so that it provides a stimulus without offending pre-existing Western conditioning- well, it becomes moot. The conditioning must fit to the perpetrators- in this case the Palestinians- not to those who have been conditioned to think that violence is never justified.
The Islamic world as a whole is about 4- 6 centuries behind "enlightened" Western thought and philosophy. To commuicate with them, as ugly as it may sound, we must talk to them in their own language. True, there will be fewer Palestinians thereafter but this is not our fault. They will never understand us on our terms. If they revel in death and bloodshed, we must put on a celebration of their own culture of death until they have had enough. Then we will have peace.
If the Israelis really want to stop this nonsense, their "response" must have the desired effect of deterring these barbarians from ever doing these things again. That calls for some pretty ugly things- by our standards. But it is silly to use our standards when they clearly do not apply. Let us use the standards of our enemy. Clearly, he feels that by causing random innocents to die this will have an effect on the political process. Obviously, this reveals his thought processes. If we were to do the same to him, by his own admission, his political thought processes would alter themselves. And, if not, it would also infallibly illustrate to him that this method (even when he uses it) is not workable.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.