April
12, 2002 1:20 p.m. Sharon’s
Contribution
What
is he up to?
y
vote is that General Sharon's offensive is the stupidest campaign in recent
memory. Defined here as a campaign that has: solved nothing, increased
Israel's problems, intensified Palestinian hatred of Israel, estranged
many Europeans and Americans, and fanned Islamic hostility. What is General
Sharon up to?
What
he said was that he was determined to destroy the "infrastructure"
of the suicide terrorists.
Well, how do you do that?
We Americans are trying to do that to al Qaeda. This involved a war on
the government of Afghanistan, a nation formally identified with terrorists
it sheltered, trained, and dispatched to do their grisly work. The U.S.
in effect declared war on the Taliban government and pursued that war
as best it could. Having toppled Kabul, our anti-terrorist forces are
now deployed here and there, doing such things as raiding a terrorist
nest in Pakistan and hauling in a suspected leader.
Sharon's policy is scorched-earth. Under his command, the Israeli army
has engaged not in isolating the infrastructure of the suicide terrorists.
What he is engaged in is wanton damage. The New York Times's Serge
Schmemann, reporting from Jerusalem, tells it in a dispatch on Thursday
with a memorable lead:
The
images are indelible: piles of concrete and twisted metal in the ancient
casbah of Nablus, husks of savaged computers littering ministries in
Ramallah, rows of storefronts sheared by passing tanks in Tulkarm, broken
pipes gushing precious water, flattened cars in fields of shattered
glass and garbage, electricity poles snapped like twigs, tilting walls
where homes used to stand, gaping holes where rockets pierced office
buildings." And he uses Sharon's missionary mandate without apparent
irony: "It is safe to say that the infrastructure of life itself
and of any future Palestinian state — roads, schools, electricity
pylons, water pipes, telephone lines — has been devastated.
How's
that for retaliation for the Passover massacre?
What Sharon has been doing is to give way to Israeli rage. The rage is
hot, deserved, and purposive. But to proceed on the assumption that water
and electricity lines and schools and hospitals are vital organs of terrorist
excursions is untenable except on an understanding that General Sharon
hasn't articulated. If you say: The poison that animates the suicide bombers
is endemic in every stick and stone that make up the West Bank, then it
would follow that a destruction of everything and of everybody standing
would follow, as an inoculation would serve to chase down the infection
in any part of the diseased body. Sharon hasn't ordered his soldiers to
mow down every Palestinian standing, but his artillery and air force haven't
been discriminating — there is no way to be entirely discriminating
in a military offensive designed to find something that can't be found,
namely the fuse box that causes an 18-year-old Palestinian girl to arm
herself with a bomb and detonate it in an Israeli mall. There aren't,
sitting about, neat paramilitary kiosks with explosives and rosters of
willing terrorists. The search for these was bound to be fruitless, rather
like looking for the infrastructure of lechery in Gomorrah.
General Sharon might have sent in a platoon, pulled out Arafat and his
100 lieutenants and executed them on the entirely reasonable grounds that
they embodied the terrorist movement in the West Bank. A bullet into the
heart of Arafat is not a wayward contribution to the search for the infrastructure
of the evil and genocidal war against Israel. So Palestine would be left
leaderless? Such a problem would be that of the Palestinians who have
tolerated Arafat for so many years.
What has been done is to enhance and even legitimize Palestinian grievances.
"After four days of heavy fighting," the Times dispatch
goes on, "the Casbah, as the centuries-old warren of shops and homes
at the center of this city (Nablus) is known, has been utterly destroyed."
How would we feel in analogous circumstances? What happened to Atlanta,
Georgia, in 1864 at the hands of General Sherman was perceived through
the lens of a great civil war, a surrender of the losing side, and the
heart and mind of a magnanimous national leader who sought to heal the
wounds of a nation torn asunder. Such elements aren't there in the Mideast.
Sharon has wounded the State of Israel incalculably, causing ache and
pain not only to Palestinians, but to his people, and to friends of Israel
everywhere.
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y
vote is that General Sharon's offensive is the stupidest campaign in recent
memory. Defined here as a campaign that has: solved nothing, increased
Israel's problems, intensified Palestinian hatred of Israel, estranged
many Europeans and Americans, and fanned Islamic hostility. What is General
Sharon up to?
