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May 31, 2002, 8:45 a.m. The Tragic Demise of DIDO There can never be peace this way. By Steven Plaut

n May 23, two mass atrocities were averted by what can only be described as miracles. In one, a Palestinian attempt to murder thousands (or more) of Israelis by blowing up the country's largest fuel depot — at the "Pi Glilot" junction near Tel Aviv — was averted when the bomb, which had been placed in a fuel truck parked inside the compound, failed to set off the entire mass explosion. Had it succeeded, it would have been a terrorist attack without precedent in Israel and with carnage possibly dwarfing that of September 11 in the U.S. There are rumors that al Qaeda, in collusion with the PLO, were responsible. The bombing failed only out of pure dumb luck, or divine intervention, whichever you prefer.

In the second attempt, a car loaded with explosives was speeding toward the entrance to a Tel Aviv nightclub late that same night. It, too, was designed to produce mass carnage, although not of the scale of the Pi Glilot attack. An alert guard at the door shot the Palestinian driver before the explosives could be detonated. The guard is a national hero today.

Both events raise immediate questions. Most importantly, how long can Israel count on miracles to rescue it from the megastupidity of its political leaders and from the fiasco of the Oslo "peace process"?

The PLO's two attempts at mass carnage show up the complete failure of DIDO.

DIDO stands for Dash In Dash Out. It is at the heart of the Sharon Doctrine, the military strategy of the increasingly befuddled administration of Ariel Sharon. Israel dashes into West Bank areas with tanks and masses of soldiers, shoots a few terrorists and arrests some others, and then — a few days or a few hours later — dashes out again, before the American administration or the State Department have enough time to growl about the Jews being obstacles to peace. It is what Jeff Jacoby calls the military hokey-pokey: You put your ground troops in, you take your ground troops out, and you shake them all about.

The two May 23 attempts, added to the week's worth of other atrocities — including suicide bombings in Rishon Letzion and in Netanya — prove that DIDO is a total and unmitigated failure. If the PLO failed last week to commit mass atrocities rivaling Sept. 11, well, next week is a new week. What do Sharon, Bush, and Powell think: that so long as the PLO fails in a few of its attempts, this will be enough to make it give up mass murder as its main policy strategy?

We have been saying so all along. It is time to return from the Oslo parallel universe — in which being nice to the PLO could produce a peaceful settlement of the Middle East conflict — to Planet Earth.

In fact, there is no effective way for resolving the Middle East war and reducing the carnage other than R&D: Reoccupation and DeNazification. Israel will have to reimpose its military control on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip indefinitely, for decades. It will have to shoot many Palestinian terrorists and expel many others. The alternative is to suffer mass murders of its children and civilians, also indefinitely. Being nice, as a form of deterrence, has failed.

Israel will have to suspend habeas corpus for Palestinians and impose martial rule over them — as the Allies did in 1945. It will have to impose collective punishment for the collectively guilty. This is the lesser of the evils; the alternative is escalation, unlimited carnage, and eventually the destruction of Israel and its population.

Israel will have to impose a regime of DeNazification — as the Chicago Sun-Times recently advocated — in some ways resembling that of the U.S. and its Allies in Germany and Japan after 1945, though in other ways different. If, in order to halt the suicide bombings and other mass atrocities, it is necessary for Israel to place the entire Palestinian population under open-ended, unlimited house arrest, then so be it. How would the United States have responded to mass murders of its civilians by conquered Germans or Japanese in 1945? The alternative is an unlimited number of Pi-Glilot atrocities. And the ones to come may be not like the ones last week, which failed, but rather like the successful attempts made on Sept. 11 — which were what the PLO intended to perpetrate.

The failure of DIDO is now on display for all to see. PLO atrocities have effectively returned to the same level as before the misnamed Operation Defensive Shield, which itself was nothing but Dash In, level a few empty buildings, and Dash Out.

Jews will continue being massacred for the Oslo pagan goddess until the country awakens from its Oslo delusions. The carnage will continue until Israelis are willing to fight, rather than appease. Only then can a Jewish government arise that is devoted to military victory over the PLO, rather than to playing little political posturing games with the PLO in order to placate the Americans.

If the White House wants a settlement of the Middle East conflict, it must back up Israel when it abandons DIDO for the pursuit of victory. The Americans have been demanding nonstop since 1948 that Israelis respond to Arab barbarism and savagery with "restraint." But restraint is the best way to produce escalated Arab terror. In the Middle East, restraint spells timidity, vulnerability, and destructibility. This is why the Bush people would never have considered dealing with al Qaeda with "restraint."

There is no non-military solution to the problem of terrorism.

— Steven Plaut teaches business administration and economics at the University of Haifa in Israel and is the author of the forthcoming book The Scout.