Ariel Sharon has embarked upon a low-intensity war that could quickly spiral out of control, writes David Hirst. If he succeeds in getting rid of Yasser Arafat, Israel will only reap a whirlwind of retaliation from the Palestinians
It is three months since Ariel Sharon laid siege to Yasser Arafat in his Ramallah headquarters. Physically, his position remains dire. An Israeli tank is stationed a mere 70 metres from where he sleeps and wakes. Yesterday morning, in Israel's land, sea and air assault, a missile struck a police post in his compound, and gunboats killed four presidential guards at his Gaza office.
But, with the violence mounting wildly, who, in a larger sense, is now really besieging whom?
The earlier, epic encounter between the two - and the dress rehearsal for this one - was Sharon's three-month siege of west Beirut in 1982. Then, in what Menahim Begin, the premier at the time, called Israel's first chosen war, the idea was virtually the same as today.
Then, too, Arafat and the PLO, deemed the source of all opposition to Israeli control over the West Bank and Gaza, had to be eliminated to make way for an alternative leadership that would acquiesce in it. It was likewise with overwhelming popular support that Sharon embarked on his grandiose scheme of geo-political engineering which, at its most ambitious, envisaged the replacement of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan with a Republic of Palestine, to which the inhabitants of the occupied territories could be "transferred". He also had a green light from a highly sympathetic Republican administration in the United States.
For sure, Arafat was militarily defeated. But it was a disaster for Sharon. Israel lacked the resources for such imperial designs. Palestinian resistance was too strong. The Israeli public soon turned against him. So did President Reagan.
Twenty years on, Sharon now faces the same watershed he did in Beirut - the same decision to press on regardless or retreat. Once again, the objective he has set himself is so extreme he is bound to fail unless he goes to the bitter end. But, again, to do so will confront Israel with unbearable costs and incalculable risks.
Ostensibly, he wanted to return to the peace process; he only needed the right conditions - a convincing cessation of Palestinian violence as he defines it - to do so.
In reality, he never did. For if this was not exactly another chosen war, it was one which - as independent Israeli researchers have shown convincingly - he and like-minded soldiers and politicians had long awaited.Once he got this war, he did everything to fuel and perpetuate it.
It was never a secret: he always opposed the Oslo accord, and the historic compromise it involves - a Palestinian state on 22 per cent of original Palestine.
From the outset, this was his war to destroy any idea of Palestinian self-determination on any portion of Palestinian land, and any legitimate institution empowered to bring it about.
However, though his basic ambition has not changed since Lebanon, the stakes are momentously higher. For it is both a gladiatorial contest between two historic adversaries at the climax of their careers and a struggle between two peoples now at its most critical juncture since Israel came into being in 1948.
As in Lebanon, Sharon began his campaign in favourable circumstances, swept into office by a people who saw in him, with his renowned brutality, the saviour who would suppress the intifada.
He owed this spectacular comeback largely to Palestinian violence, especially Hamas's suicidal exploits, and to the foolishness of an erratic leadership which appeared to tolerate, or surreptitiously encourage, what it formally condemned. He profited from the public's perception that Arafat alone provoked the intifada, that he was still bent on Israel's destruction, and that, in the cycle of violence, the Israelis were only retaliating in legitimate self-defence.
Yet this was specious. For one thing, while Sharon openly proclaims a conception of peace wholly at odds with commitments Israel has solemnly entered into, as well as the broad Arab, international and even US consensus on the subject, Arafat has indefatigably reiterated his loyalty to the historic compromise he spent his later career educating his people to accept.
For another, while the intifada was clearly waiting to happen, it was Sharon who finally triggered it with his inflammatory, "right-of-ownership" rhetoric.Israeli soldiers had killed many civilians before Hamas staged its first terrorist exploit. And, as the struggle deepens, it has become ever clearer that the last thing Sharon actually wants is that period of calm he claims he does; every time it risks taking hold he has staged one of those "targeted killings" that inevitably provoke a Palestinian response, thereby enabling him, under cover of his war on terror, to pursue his long-term agenda.
But suddenly, this past week, Sharon has truly begun to pay the price of overweening aim and ferocious means. As they did in Lebanon, the Palestinians are resisting more strongly than he bargained for.
It is basically a low-intensity war, and, for domestic and international reasons, Sharon would clearly like to keep it that way. But that is also a kind of war in which the Palestinians, with their guerrilla and terrorist methods, are learning to inflict ever greater pain, both through a self-sacrificial zeal that is spreading from the Islamists to other, secular organisations, and through improving skills, technique and weaponry.
"It is Lebanonisation now," screamed Israeli newspapers at the weekend, amid official talk of setting up "security zones" in the occupied territories similar to the one from which Hizbullah forced Israel to withdraw in south Lebanon.
That was in response to the appearance of a home-made Hamas missile, the Qassam-2, primitive and inaccurate, but reminiscent of the Katyushas the Hizbullah used to unleash on northern Israel. Last week, in another Hizbullah move, came the carefully planned ambush of a Merkava tank. On Tuesday gunmen killed six Israeli soldiers at a single checkpoint.
Sharon also faces growing resistance from his own public. More and more people are saying he just doesn't have a remedy, or that he is far more interested in his right-wing agenda than in the welfare and safety of the people. And there is nothing like his 1982 Lebanon debacle to remind him how swiftly and profoundly the tide of opinion is now liable to turn against him.
This is an emergency from which, to a man like him, there is only one possible exit: a qualitative escalation. That may have begun last night. But everything suggests that, before long, it will lead to the deposing, banishing or killing of the "irrelevant" captive of Ramallah he now publicly regrets that he did not "liquidate" in Beirut. His right-wing constituents now bay for Arafat's blood.
Typically, Prof Arie Eldar, a former Israeli army medical officer, told the Yediot Aharonot newspaper: "We must go to war. An official war... with an opening shot at Arafat's head. We must execute him - today."
It is as nonsensical now as it was 20 years ago to lay all Israel's woes at one man's door, to imply that, since Arafat controls everything, getting rid of him would clear the way for that "alternative leadership". The first, unarmed, intifada of 1987-1993 was a total surprise to Arafat, and the second more violent one was directed, potentially, against him as much as the Israelis.
With Arafat gone, Sharon would have to escalate again; for it would quickly become clear that the intifada is a genuine popular movement that no collaborationist leadership would emerge to suppress.
And, no small consideration for Sharon, the Bush Administration, for all its unprecedented pro-Israeli partisanship, has reportedly told him that destroying Arafat is a "red line" he must not cross; the last thing it wants as it prepares to take on Saddam Hussein is a raging conflict in Palestine.
Small wonder Arafat seemsso perky in his confinement. His physical grip on power may be fraying under the relentless Israeli onslaught, but Sharon has greatly enhanced his personal standing.
He always thrives in adversity, and he is making sure the choice between his survival and demise would be momentous.
On the one hand, very much the peace-seeker still, he has lately gone to new lengths of flexibility, notably on that most intractable of questions, the Palestinian refugees' "right of return".
On the other, reverting to the heroic, freedom-fighter's rhetoric of old, he is putting it about that he will only leave his compound a free man - or a martyr to the struggle he has embodied these 40 years.
Reportedly, his guards have been told to resist any Israeli incursion to the last man, up to and including "the death of the president".
That choice, of course, is not his, but Sharon's, and, with the struggle so rapidly intensifying, it is surely close. For him, sparing his life-long adversary would be as bitter a personal defeat as Beirut.
Disposing of him would - for Arabs and Palestinians, at least - be a defeat for the whole idea that there can ever be peace between Israel and themselves.
David Hirst is a freelance journalist and commentator on Middle Eastern affairs