The American Jewish Committee

Our own War Is Far from Over,

Within the last 24 hours (it is Wednesday evening as I write) the IDF has been engaged in a fierce night battle in the Saj’iyyah neighborhood of Gaza, a redoubt of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), in which eleven Palestinians reportedly have died (with no Israeli loss of life); elsewhere, another brigade has taken over the old core of the city of Nablus, a veritable warren of interconnected alleys and subterranean passages, known as the Casbah, and is combing it for terrorists and explosives laboratories; IDF and the Shin Bet (the Internal Security Service) have arrested or killed a number of key terrorists all over the West Bank; and now the Israeli High Command weighs a possible response to the volley of Kassam rockets—homemade Katyushas—which fell on the Negev town of Sderot this afternoon, apparently from Gaza, wounding one person and bringing back bad memories of Hizballah rocket attacks on Kiryat Shemona (but this time it happened right in the heart of the country, and was perpetrated by our former peace partners).

The war, our war—28 months old by now, longer than the War of Independence of 1947-49—is far from over. In the last few weeks we have lost ten soldiers in battle: three south of Hebron, two in Nablus, one in Bethlehem, and four in the northern Gaza Strip, when a tank was destroyed by a huge explosive device. Can we therefore be faulted for clinging to the hope that the blast that will extinguish the Iraqi burning oil well will dampen this conflict as well?

            And yet it is also fair to say—with all the “fear of the evil eye” that any such statement involves—that by now we feel increasingly confident that we are winning this war anyway. (I speak here for the professionals within the national security establishment; ordinary citizens, on the other hand, are watching the war clouds on the horizon and tend to veer between theatrical panic and demoralization and equally theatrical nonchalant posturing). In a dry but impressive presentation to members of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations this week, the head of the Shin Bet, Avi Dichter (whom I know to be much admired by his American interlocutors) rolled off some statistics—a painful way to discuss the subject, when every digit stands for suffering and irredeemable loss, and yet the only way we can measure the trend lines. In the first three months of 2002, we suffered 60 Israeli deaths a month, some two a day on average.  The number now is down to 20 a month since Operation Determined Path, a follow-up to Operation Defensive Shield, was launched—and going down steadily, despite occasional setbacks. No civilian has died since January 7—but not for lack of trying. In all, no fewer than 253 suicide bombers have been stopped in their tracks since the war began: Multiply this by the average “yield” of each successful attack, and you get a sense of the dimensions of slaughter prevented by the extraordinary determined intelligence and military efforts, day in and day out, 365/24, which have kept alive so many of the ordinary people you see passing by on our streets.

            Almost every Palestinian you speak to (privately) knows by now that their war is lost: Indeed, Dichter quoted Palestinian leaders who told Arafat, immediately after the failure at Camp David, that his folly might bring upon them a second Nakba, catastrophe, as bad as their disaster in 1948 (brought about by another Palestinian national “hero,” Hajj Amin al-Husseini, who led them on the exterminatory path against the Jews, fresh from having collaborated with Hitler throughout World War II). In the Gaza Strip, the enemy is the hard core of the Hamas, a few hundred men seduced by the Islamist creed, with many thousands of followers disappointed with PA corruption and incompetence and impressed by Hamas and PIJ terrorist successes against the IDF. It is thus important, not only in direct terms, but also as a symbolic measure, to keep constant pressure on Hamas and force them on the defensive, to prove who has the upper hand. The system—and the fence around Gaza—actually work. In the entire war, only one attacker has penetrated directly from Gaza (four more walked around through Egyptian lines), and none was successful. Dichter did not hide his conclusion that a similar mix would have been useful in the West Bank as well—a subtle rebuke for those who did not hasten to build the fence.

            Meanwhile, the prime minister meets with Palestinian leaders (this week it was Salam Fayyad, the well-respected finance minister); and louder and louder voices on the Palestinian side openly state that the terror campaign was a terrible mistake, which has kept Sharon in power and destroyed the Israeli left, the only true friends the Palestinians ever had. It is too early to tell, however, before the “Iraq Blow-back” does its work, whether this will mature into a new, safer environment:

1. Arafat still employs Saddam-like delay tactics and half measures, such as appointing a prime minister, under acute pressure and even threats from three-quarters of the Quartet (Terje Larsen, the UN envoy; Miquel Angel Moratinos for the EU; and a specially assigned Russian envoy): but fashioning the job description so as to assure that this will be a French/ Russian/ Egyptian type of prime minister, fit only for domestic chores.