Sharon ups the ante in conflict

JERUSALEM - Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon announced plans on Thursday to set up special "buffer zones" to protect Israelis and demanded Palestinians disarm fully, after Israeli forces carried out a new wave of deadly reprisal raids. Sharon, under pressure to protect Israelis amid the worst sustained violence in nearly 17 months of conflict, said in a nationally televised speech the new zones would achieve "security separation" between Israelis and Palestinians.

The right-wing Prime Minister gave few details, but his comments were widely interpreted to mean he would put slices of Palestinian-ruled territory bordering the Jewish state back under Israeli military control.

Sharon vowed the Israeli military would not rest "until the terrorist network has been destroyed", following a second day of fierce bombardments of Palestinian areas in retaliation for the killing of six Israeli soldiers.

But on the same day helicopter gunships and warships struck security targets across the West Bank and Gaza Strip, killing nine Palestinians, Sharon said he would make every effort to prevent the conflict from escalating into "total war".

Palestinian cabinet minister Nabil Shaath said Sharon had "offered no hope, no complete suggestions, and opened no way to ending the confrontation and heading back to the peace table".

The latest fighting - in which 39 Palestinians, including two suicide-bombers, and 10 Israelis have been killed since Monday - has left international peace efforts in tatters and prompted talk of a spiral into full-scale war.

In announcing the creation of buffer zones, Sharon appeared to be siding with Israel's far right, which had demanded expansion into parts of the West Bank and Gaza Strip bordering the Jewish state to prevent Palestinian attackers from entering.

There is no doubt that the ground beneath the boots of ex-general Ariel Sharon is beginning to shift.

A year ago, he won a landslide election by promising to deliver peace and security to Israel in the face of the Palestinian intifada, then five months old.

As the violence worsens, frustrated Israelis across the political spectrum are concluding that Sharon's attempts to seek a military solution to the conflict are misguided. And they are beginning to say so publicly in growing numbers.

"After 17 months of intifada, we must admit that the Palestinians have not been broken," wrote Nahum Barnea, a leading commentator in Israel's mass-circulation Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper. "Despair has only steeled them. Economic and human distress has only pushed them to acts of madness."

Such was the overall change in mood that the Jerusalem Post, Israel's hard-right, English-language newspaper, declared angrily that Israel's "resolve" was cracking and a "chorus of defeatism can be heard in the land".

It is not, in fact, a chorus. The voices raised against Ariel Sharon and his coalition Government - with its awkward marriage of the right-wing Likud and the centrist Labour - do not sing in unison. Nor have they yet had much impact on his approval ratings which hover impressively around 60 per cent.

The voices come from the left and the far right. And now, significantly, they have also been joined by elements from the centre - the natural habitat of the majority of Israeli voters in less-violent times.

The latter emerged this week in the form of an organisation called the Council for Peace and Security, a group of 1000 reserve generals and other senior officers and ex-officials from Israel's Mossad and Shin Bet security services.

It has declared that it is mounting a public campaign calling on Israel to withdraw unilaterally from all of Gaza and part of the West Bank, which would include evacuating about 50 of the Jewish settlements built in the occupied territories.

Their plan is unpalatable even to Palestinian moderates - it falls far short of an agreement based on the borders of June 4, 1967, their primary requirement - and is firmly centrist in Israeli political terms.

But it amounts to an attack by a distinguished and senior group of Israeli security and military officials on Mr Sharon - an ex-colleague whose entire philosophy is embedded in military doctrine. "The clock has begun ticking for Ariel Sharon," wrote one council member, David Kimche, in an article.

"Our Prime Minister is still immensely popular, he still commands majority approval in the polls, yet with every passing day more people realise that the Government has no answer for the dire straits in which we are foundering."

The council - though different - is following the Israeli left, which swung into action recently after more than a year of hibernation. For the past two weekends, thousands of Israelis have taken part in anti-war demonstrations in Tel Aviv demanding that Israel withdraw from the occupied territories.

Although numbers have been relatively low by the standards of Israel, with no more than 10,000 at each event, they seem likely to grow as a national debate about Israel's handling of the conflict gathers volume.

A major part in their comeback, and also in the general change in the political climate, is being played by a group of Israeli Army reservists, including many officers from combat units, who last month published a petition stating that they would refuse to serve in the West Bank or Gaza Strip, as the occupation is "corrupting" Israel.

Their personal stories have begun to appear on Israeli television, including alarming accounts of being given orders to shoot Palestinians for stone-throwing.

The issue now is whether Sharon will pay any heed to the rumbling. So far there is no sign that, at 73, he is inclined to change his view - that military force succeeds in the end.

- REUTERS / - INDEPENDENT

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