Mideast Raid Looses a Flood of Questions

JERUSALEM —  Just a week ago, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon announced that his government had hit upon the right formula for fighting its war with the Palestinians. Policies that included incursions into Palestinian territory and the killing of key militants were beginning to pay off, he said.

But Sunday, Israelis were consumed with questions about a disastrous Palestinian raid on an Israeli military base, and the region’s most powerful army was struggling to come up with answers while defending tactics that have not stilled Palestinian rage.

Palestinians, meanwhile, were sifting through the rubble of police posts flattened by U.S.-made Israeli fighter jets in retaliation for the shooting ambush of a settler family. Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat, apparently stunned at the scale of the damage, toured the crumpled Gaza City police headquarters and denounced the “savage” attacks.

“The mountain will not be shaken by the wind,” he said, vowing defiance, a submachine gun at his side.

All told, it was a bloody weekend that left the chances for resumed truce negotiations at a new low. Eleven people--seven Israelis and four Palestinians--were killed in a 36-hour period. The seventh Israeli was shot Sunday afternoon in a Palestinian ambush on the border between Israel and the West Bank.

Later Sunday in the West Bank, Israeli helicopters pumped seven missiles into Tulkarm, destroying a police station, and tanks shelled the outskirts of Ramallah, the main Palestinian city, off and on throughout the evening.

A double funeral was held Sunday for husband and wife Yaniv and Sharon Ben-Shalom, the settlers whose car came under heavy sniper fire as they drove northwest of Jerusalem on Saturday night. Their two infant daughters, who were in the back seat, were slightly injured. An uncle, who the army originally said had died immediately, survived the night but was pronounced dead Sunday.

But it was Saturday’s army base raid--which left three Israeli soldiers and two Palestinian guerrillas dead--and its aftermath that riveted Israeli and Palestinian attention.

Both sides agreed that the raid in the southern Gaza Strip marked a qualitative shift in Palestinian military operations. But the two infiltrators clearly took advantage of mistakes or failures by the Israeli soldiers.

A high-level military investigation will examine, among other things, whether some of the soldiers who were killed or wounded were hit by friendly fire, Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer said Sunday.

Newspaper headlines and commentaries were scathing. “Blunder” was among the words that appeared most. The liberal Haaretz newspaper demanded “urgent answers,” while the conservative Jerusalem Post, referring to the army’s “Achilles’ heel,” said: “The problem is that the [Israeli army] is somewhat like a cumbersome knight in armor.”

Analysts listed a range of possible weaknesses that allowed the infiltration. The soldiers stationed at the Marganit base, by the Bedolah Jewish settlement, were relatively young and inexperienced, in an army increasingly taxed by 11 months of low-intensity warfare. Training in hand-to-hand combat is deficient. The Palestinian guerrillas somehow managed to penetrate the well-fortified base without detection; if any alarms were sounded, they were not heeded.

The raid--for which a radical group known as the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine took credit--was being widely compared to similar operations by Hezbollah guerrillas, who fought Israel successfully in southern Lebanon for nearly two decades before Israel withdrew last year.

“In a world constructed of images, one symbolic incident is enough to turn everything around,” political commentator Hemi Shalev wrote in the daily Maariv. “Yesterday the Palestinians truly had a reason to celebrate, and the Israelis to begin to worry.”

Public confidence in the way the war is being waged was already shaky. Many Israelis are demanding that Sharon take tougher steps, while others advocate that he demonstrate more flexibility in dealing with the Palestinians. A poll late last week showed that although support for Sharon was high, two-thirds of those surveyed said they did not believe him when he said the government had found the way to “deal with the security problem.”

Sharon’s options remain as narrow as they have been since he assumed office in March. If he launches an all-out war to crush the Palestinian Authority, as many of his supporters want, he risks creating an even more volatile and dangerous Palestinian populace. If he continues with the tactics he is currently employing, he risks never fully stopping the violence, and a war of attrition could drag on indefinitely.

Arafat too has shown little flexibility or willingness to rein in the fighting. His lieutenants repeatedly vow to continue the battle to end Israeli occupation, a promise that Palestinian Police Chief Ghazi Jabali made again Sunday.

Sharon is generally unable, or unwilling, to embark on political discussions with the Palestinians. First of all, it would be difficult to get his right-left coalition government to agree on terms. And his own hard-line nationalist philosophy goes against granting the Palestinians large pieces of territory or dismantling Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Those settlements are considered illegal under international law but were Sharon’s brainchild.

“He doesn’t have a successful military strategy, and he doesn’t have a promising political strategy,” analyst Joseph Alpher, an Israeli expert on security issues, said in an interview. “Arafat also doesn’t have a strategy, and [President] Bush doesn’t want to have a strategy.

“So we will muddle through until something blows and there is a huge disaster . . . that brings about a dramatic change in the way Israel, the Palestinians, the United States or the Arab world addresses the conflict.”

Israeli outrage was sharp Sunday. Public Security Minister Uzi Landau, one of the most right-wing members of Sharon’s government, defended the use of U.S.-supplied F-16 and F-15 fighter jets to attack Palestinian cities--despite the risk of a bomb going astray.

Landau said it was necessary to “destroy the Palestinian terrorist infrastructure,” referring to Palestinian security forces, which number about 40,000. “Before that, no real good political outcome can emerge.”

Other right-wing politicians urged Sharon to bar Foreign Minister Shimon Peres from meeting with Arafat, something that Germany has been attempting to arrange as a way to begin negotiating a truce.

From the left, opposition leader Yossi Sarid called for an urgent meeting of the Knesset, or parliament, which is on a long summer recess despite the profound crisis engulfing the land.

“It is now very clear that Mr. Sharon has no plan whatsoever,” Sarid said. “They hit us; we hit them. They attack; we retaliate. It’s an endless process. . . . We are on the verge of greater deterioration and, God forbid, an open war.”

Palestinian newspapers and those throughout the Arab world gave glowing front-page coverage to the raid on the army base.

“The operation yesterday enters the history of the intifada as the first operation with characteristics of guerrilla warfare . . . that brings back to mind the operations at the end of the ‘60s and ‘70s,” Hafez Barghouti, editor of the Palestinian newspaper Al Hayat al Jadida, wrote.

“This will force the [Israelis] to reinforce their troops and bring in more soldiers and make new fortifications and new camps. . . . Israeli aggression may force the Palestinian factions to return to the style of guerrilla warfare to incur as many losses as possible.”

If the Palestinians were celebrating a form of military victory, they were not faring too well on the diplomatic front. Enraged by recent statements by Bush, Palestinian officials accused Washington of bias and of attempting to undermine European-sponsored diplomatic initiatives.

Palestinian spokeswoman Hanan Ashrawi said a “deafening silence” and “vacuum” created by American inattention have been replaced by “absolute bias.”

Bush, speaking at his Texas ranch, had called on both Israel and the Palestinians to stop the violence but urged Arafat to “stop the terrorists.”

The Palestinians have been seeking more Arab support for their cause. A Palestinian official said Sunday that Arafat will pay a Sept. 12-13 visit to Syria, signaling a possible end to years of animosity between Arafat and the ruling Assad family.