Mistaken bombing puts Israeli military's reputation on line

JERUSALEM - The timing was desperately unfortunate. Yesterday, a fighter jet from the Israeli Air Force dropped a bomb on the West Bank city of Nablus. By mistake.

True, it was a training bomb, empty of explosives. But the blunder was serious enough for the Israeli armed forces to rush out a statement "expressing sorrow" and to offer to help Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority clear up.

All this, only a day after Israel's Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, had blamed the Palestinian Authority for being indirectly responsible for a car bombing in the Israeli coastal town of Hadera, which killed two.

And only three days ago – not for the first time – Apache helicopters from the Israeli air force were firing rockets at the Gaza offices of the authority.

The strange contradictions of this grim low-level war grow by the day. Just the night before yesterday's embarrassing error, the streets of Jerusalem filled with tens of thousands of right-wing Israelis, infuriated by the Hadera bomb and demanding that the army use more force.

Israel's entire dilemma is complicated by doubts over the competence of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) to deal with the urban guerrilla war now developing out of what began as a popular intifada.

No one beyond the most wildly extreme elements in Israel wants to see the military make a mistake by slaughtering a large number of Palestinian civilians in oneattack.

International pressure on Israel has mounted sharply in the past few days and, feeling isolated and abandoned, Israel wants to avoid mistakes; meanwhile, its armed forces have moved to what it – alarmingly – calls "pro-active" operations, a euphemism for killing people on the basis that you suspect them of planning to kill you, a policy known in Britain in Baroness Thatcher's years as shoot-to-kill.

A "pro-active operation" was almost certainly behind the death yesterday of Ibrahim Bani Odeh, an alleged activist in the Islamic militant group Hamas, who was found dead in his car in Nablus.

Reports said he had been released from jail only 24 hours before.

For the IDF, one mistake has followed another in the uprising.

Three Israeli soldiers, and a reserve colonel, have managed to get captured by Hizbollah guerrillas in Lebanon.

And if the Palestinian mob that butchered two Israeli soldiers in Ramallah on 12 October acted in abarbaric way, the soldiers had made a breathtaking mistake by wandering into an autonomous Palestinian area.

Even after the lynchings, an Israeli military bus managed to stray into an Arab area.

And what Israel clearly intended as a clinical helicopter strike to take out a Palestinian guerrilla in Bethlehem was horribly marred by the casual killing of two middle-aged Arab women, who happened to be passing by.

This is not the heroic stuff on which the Israeli army's reputation as a brilliantly efficient force was built.

At heart, Ehud Barak, Israel's most decorated soldier, is a commando; in uniform he was part of a group that specialised in undercover assassinations.

But his enemies now are guerrilla fighters and a complex, popular uprising not directed by one single leader, but by several, almost certainly at odds with one another. The military manuals offer no quick fix.

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