- The Observer,
- Sunday March 31 2002
The Israeli army didn't bother with the gate. The road that leads to Arafat's compound is also the road that leads to war. The question is: how did it come to this?
One partial answer is a prediction from the years before the Oslo peace process collapsed. Both sides expected the greatest danger to arise when the leaders sat down to discuss the most difficult issues that had been put carefully to one side: a final settlement that would resolve once and for all whether (and how many) Palestinian refugees would be allowed to return, the status of Jerusalem and its holy sites, and how much of the territories still under Israeli occupation would be returned.
This was made explicit to me in the first few weeks of the intifada. In autumn 2000 I ran into the Tanzim militia leader, Marwan Bargouti, at a funeral in the main cemetery in Ramallah.
I found him standing beneath a tree to one side of a group of mourners, a little way from a line of a dozen open graves, dug in anticipation of the dead to come. He told me then, with what I regarded as a strange optimism, that violence 'could stop tomorrow'.
He was not alone. Leaders of the uprising told me the same story. So too did Israeli army officers and political advisers, though with a different slant. The message was that the violence and the rioting were part of a negotiating process for a final settlement that stalled at Camp David. No one wanted, or expected a wider war. But it has come.
I was last in Israel and Palestine in January. I missed Bargouti, but this time I caught a fleeting glimpse of his wife, again in Ramallah, and at a funeral. This time it was for Wafa Idris, the first woman suicide bomber of the uprising. By then the intifada had been utterly transformed by increments of ever increasing violence.
The stone-throwing boys - the focus of the first months of the intifada, who were shot down by Israeli soldiers in their scores - had been replaced by gunmen in their late teens and early twenties from the militias. Their place had been taken in turn by the police and security officers of Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority.
Suicide bombings, at first occasional and sporadic over the summer months, became more frequent. In response, Israeli tanks and armoured carriers raided the cities of the West Bank and Gaza in increasingly large numbers. The violence got worse.
What had started as a violent negotiation over a stalled peace process, by late last year had taken on a dangerous new meaning for both sides. The issue now is who can inflict the greatest pain.
And at stake, say the hardliners in each camp, is the very existence of their peoples in the Promised Land.
It is a view that has been articulated most forcefully on the Israeli side by those like the dove-turned-hawk historian Benny Morris who now believes that Arafat is determined to claw back not just the West Bank but all of the state of Israel.
On the Palestinian side a similar distrust was evident. Sharon, Palestinians believed, was bent on dismantling the Palestinian Authority at any cost and fracturing its leadership to leave in its place an archipelago of Palestinian cities, locally administered, but without any functions of a real or putative state.
But if there was a turning point that made the Israeli assault of the last few days inevitable, then what was it?
That turning point, Sharon and his aides have insisted, came on Wednesday with the suicide bombing of a Passover seder meal at a hotel in Netanya that left 22 Israelis dead. It was an act of shocking brutality calculated to cause the maximum outrage.
But it has been one 'turning point' in many. And one atrocity in many committed by both sides.
Israel's Housing Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Natan Sharansky told me last autumn that the moment of truth had really come on 1 June last year with the suicide bombing of a queue for the Pacha nightclub at Tel Aviv's dolphinarium, when 22 young Israelis were killed. Then Sharon and his cabinet had come to a critical decision.
In their long deliberations they ordered the Israeli Defence Forces to draw up a plan to dismantle the security apparatus of the Palestinian Authority.
It was a plan for a war against the Authority that would strip Arafat of all his power and leave him utterly isolated.
Under United States pressure, that plan was put on hold. But with each exchange of attacks - with each assassination by the Israelis of alleged terrorists and each retaliation by Palestinian bombers and gunmen - the pressure on Sharon to act on it became more pressing.
But the key to the increasing ferocity of the last few weeks is to be found in the weakness of both Sharon and Arafat. It has been the strange conundrum of this unfolding crisis over 18 months that, as both sides have talked and acted ever tougher, both leaders have been personally weakened by their ever hardening positions, prey to the extremists.
Arafat's position has been subtly eroded by the months of intifada that have given renewed power and strength to those radical Palestinian organisations like Hamas and Islamic Jihad that Arafat himself has felt most threatened by and tried for so long to suppress.
For Sharon too, the problems have become equally pressing. Faced with a collapse in confidence in the ability of the 74-year-old former general to deliver on his election pledge to bring security, Sharon has at each turn opted for more extreme retaliation.
And hovering in the wings is the figure of Sharon's great rival Binyamin Netanyahu, now openly advocating the expulsion of Arafat and the reconquest of the West Bank and Gaza to force a separation of Israelis and Palestinians.
These dangerous weaknesses are a recipe for a deepening disaster.
