Amid the blasts of war, a dialogue of the deaf

The war between the Israelis and the Palestinians has spun totally out of control – and, the way I see it, there’s not much left for Messrs. George W. Bush and Colin Powell to do, except scold.

As for the Arab world, their reproving governments may decry what’s happening and hysterical mobs in the streets may rage and threaten to send their own "suicide" attackers and "martyrs" brigades to destroy Israel; but the hardlining, unrepentant Prime Minister Ariel Sharon won’t budge.

That’s the long and short of it.

This is the message Sharon, while theatrically trying to appear a peace-monger not a war-monger, delivered in an hour-long speech he made in the Israeli Knesset (parliament) Monday. In effect, Sharon said he’d listen to US President Bush, and he’ll stop the operations of the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) but not until their mission is completed. What’s the IDF’s mission? Apparently to crush all Palestinian resistance. (The way things look, the IDF may be out to crush all Palestinians.)

Sure, Sharon was in effect purring: Mr. Bush is our best friend, and, of course, we’ll leave the West Bank as he insists. Sure, we’ll order the IDF to conclude its operations and depart from Nablus, Jenin, et cetera. The departure date and time, naturally, will depend on . . . well . . . circumstances. (Anyway, it’s implied, there’s no rush: US Secretary of State Colin Powell won’t be getting to Israel and Palestine till Friday.)

Sharon even threw the Arabs a sop. He said he was ready to go anywhere, anytime to discuss "peace" with all "moderate Arab leaders." The trouble is, it doesn’t seem that there are any moderate Arab leaders left. The Israeli Defense Forces’ all-out offensive in the Palestinian territories, particularly in the towns of Jenin and Nablus in the northern West Bank, has knocked the moderation out of any Arab. (If you’re an Arab "moderate" these days, you stand to be murdered or beaten to death by your own countrymen.)

In sum, Sharon has polarized the struggle: Jew versus Arab in a grudge-fight that seems unending.

For many years, this writer has disliked the blustering Mr. Sharon and denounced his methods, and he’s brought Israel to this sad pass – but the blame, I’ll have to say, must be shared by the duplicitous Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat. (He talked of "peace" in English, but said "war" in Arabic.) The two deserve each other.

But do the Israeli civilians and Palestinian civilians deserve what has been happening? No, sir. Yet in every war, it’s the civilians who suffer – first, last and always. The soldiers at least are doing something: they’re busily engaged in combat.

* * *

As I listened yesterday afternoon to Sharon’s speech, covered "live" by British Broadcasting Corp. (BBC) and Cable News Network (CNN), I’ll have to admit that his was a virtuoso performance.

He started out his speech by enumerating the names, the heartbreak, and suffering, of the victims and survivors of the "Passover" suicide bombing, in which 22 persons peacefully celebrating one of the happiest Jewish holidays at a dinner in a hotel in Netanya were blown away by a Palestinian suicide-bomber, with scores of others wounded.

The IDF’s intent, Sharon piously declared, was to root out terrorists and destroy their hiding places. This is obviously why the refugee camp in Jenin is getting specially destructive attention – for Jenin has long prided itself (even boasting about it on television) as being the community that produces those "martyrs", the "suicide-bombers".

As for Arafat, Sharon unctuously asserted: "I reached out my hand in peace, but my hand was returned empty."

He also attempted to calm the fears and angry indignation all over Christendom about the prospect of IDF troops, tanks, artillery and gunships attacking the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, in which 200 Palestinians including many gunmen have holed up for the past several days.

Sharon vowed not to "desecrate" that holy shrine. Let’s see. The siege has taken a week, with Israeli infantry and armor deployed around Manger Square. With the Palestinians "sniping" at them from the sanctuary of that church (built, according to centuries’ old belief, over the cave where Jesus was born), the Israelis’ trigger fingers are getting itchy.

Indeed, it would be a grievous mistake for the Israelis to assault that shrine. Then they might have ranged against them, not just the world’s 1.2 billion Muslims, but many of the world's 1.2 billion Christians. (The accusation might even be resurrected that they’re the ones, through their stubbornness, who crucified Jesus Christ. So, Sharon and his men should leave well enough alone.)

* * *

In the Knesset, many in that 120-member chamber were quite plainly in angry disagreement with Sharon and his policies. He was besieged and interrupted during his address, with hoots and catcalls. Furious Knesset delegates demanded that their objections be heard, shouting imprecations at Sharon. The Speaker of the House, however, kept on saying he couldn’t hear them, that they should listen to the P.M.’s speech, that they mustn’t disrupt proceedings. He dispensed pleading Toda Raba’s all over the place, while politely ignoring the complainants.

How can the corpulent, bellicose Sharon be the messenger of "peace" as he claims? He must be plagued by frequent headaches; his halo’s too tight.

When I picked up his autobiography in my favorite bookshop in Paris, Brentano’s, last October, I immediately realized Sharon (who had just taken over the helm of government in Jerusalem some months earlier) was bound to make mischief. He had entitled his book, co-authored by David Chanoff and updated that month: WARRIOR. (Simon & Schyster, New York, London, Toronto, Sydney, Tokyo, 1999, undated 2001).

In the volume, Sharon mentioned his conviction since childhood that Israelis and Palestinians (and other Arabs) could live and work peacefully side by side with each other. His other thoughts, revealed in the same opus, were in contention with this allegation. He believed, as other chapters showed, in wielding military power and beating any enemy to his country and community into surrender. (He belongs, I guess, to GMA’s pupolbusin ang Abu Sayyaf view of strategy.)

What does a self-proclaimed "warrior" do, after all? He wages war. No wonder, Sharon has launched the IDF against the Palestinians on its biggest military operation in 20 years, indeed, its most extensive since the 1967 Six-Day war. The difference is that this war won’t take just six days. It threatens to go on and on. The IDF will win militarily. The Palestinians are being pounded into the ground. The Palestinian Authority’s entire infrastructure is being smashed. There are no lights or electric power in many areas of the West Bank any longer – almost no food is left, almost no water. Dwellings and buildings have been reduced to rubble. Yet, there is no guarantee that the suicide bombers won’t soon be back in action.

The suicide bombers, the Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade’s gunmen, the Hamas snipers, the Islamic Jihad infiltrators, the Hezbollah rocketeers have made life miserable for everyone in Israel. No Israeli can go to the shopping mall, the cafe, the restaurant, or any of the shopping streets today, without fear of sudden death plucking at the sleeve. Children cannot go to school by bus – everyone over there fears that a bus ride may be a one-way ticket to the cemetery (if enough body parts are scraped together for a burial). More than 419 Israelis have died violently in the past 18 months. That’s what the suicide bombers have wrought.

Israel is such a tiny nation that every life lost counts grievously. Whatever euphemistic spin may be put on what they’re doing today, they’re out to inflict even worse "pain" on their foes – they’re bent on revenge. It’s in their law – "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth."

* * *

And we must not think the IDF soldiers feel themselves any less divinely-motivated by God than the Islamic mujahideen. If the Qu’ran guides the Muslim, the Jews are guided by their Holy Bible and the Torah, and they’ve been told for thousands of years they they’re God’s "Chosen People."

Almighty God, Jehovah, Yahweh – it is their fervent belief – protects them, blesses them, and goes into battle with them. The Hebrew story, for instance, is that when they marched out of bondage in Egypt with the Pharoah’s army pursuing them, "He (God) divided the sea and brought them across. In the daytime he led them with a cloud and all the night with a light of fire."

When the Jewish General Joshua defended Gideon, it is written in the Hebrew texts, "from the heavens Yahweh thundered . . . lethal hailstones rained down on the enemy from heaven, and the sun and moon stood still."

When Joshua and his Israelis marched on the fortified city of Jericho, he was visited by a supernatural "presence" called the "captain of Yahweh’s army," who endowed him with the magical power to crumble the city’s walls by the sound of his trumpets.

The Jewish chronicles declare that "Yahweh was strong and mighty, the lord of battle . . . the lord of armies." In another tract, it was said, "The Lord most high is terrible . . . he shall subdue the people under us and the nations under our feet." Again: "The Lord shall fight for you . . . the Lord God of hosts (yahwi saba’ot, the Lord Creator of Armies) is the patron god and who goes before the warrior king as his vanguard."

It is written that "God promised David he would deliver the Philistines ‘into his hand.’ " Did God mean the Palestinians? That’s the modern-day question.

In any event after his victory, King David named the battleground of Rephaim the sacred place of the "breaking through."

On occasion, the Jews even carried the Ark of the Covenant into battle.

Perhaps God, Allah, or Yahweh favors no one in this struggle – so far from heaven so near that Apocalyptic site called Armageddon, which nowadays is known as Megiddo, a thriving citrus plantation area on the fringes of a barren plain. (The site, the "visionary" avers, is where the last great battle of mankind will be fought.) Certainly, the Devil, old Beelzebub, is at work in the current conflict.

And yet, with Palestinians chanting that Allah blesses them and has promised them eternal life in paradise, and the Jews vowing that their "Promised Land" will never again be taken away from them, who will triumph? When the Jews had rebelled against Rome in the year 66 A.D., the Romans had retaliated in fury – the Legions has leveled the Temple in Jerusalem to the ground, massacred all Jews around it, and forced the rest into an exile of almost 2,000 years. For more than a millennium and a half, the Jews wandered in the diaspora, and their daily prayer went: "Next year in Jerusalem!"

Now that they’ve realized that immemorial dream, and are back in Jerusalem, they won’t give it up. They’ve come from 80 countries around the world, and these immigrants or their children and grandchildren are the men and women who man the formidable IDF.

* * *

My last trip to that troubled area was in 1996. But here’s what I wrote from Tel Aviv on April 1, 1996. I spoke of how Israel was determined to defend itself, every which way, from hundreds of millions of hostile Arabs – not just Palestinans.

I had just passed by, I recounted, a cluster of unremarkable grey white concrete buildings in Herzliyah, lined with dusty eucalyptus trees off the Mediterranean coastal highway north of Tel Aviv.

Those buildings house an organization incongruously named, "The Institute for Intelligence and Special Services." If you’re not told, you wouldn’t realize that this is the headquarters of the dreaded and world-famous Mossad, Aman and Shin Bet – Israel’s secret services.In my column that day, I had gone on: "Mossad special squads, for example, tracked down the Palestinian terrorists who had massacred Israeli athletes in the Munich Olympics and gunned them down or blew them up. The Mossad was ruthless and inexorable. The message delivered was: You don’t kill Israelis without getting killed, and even your family wiped out, yourselves.

"The chief of the Black September terrorists, George Habash, was attacked by a special landing force of agents in his Arab sanctuary – and everybody on the premises slaughtered. The paranoid and defiant motto of the Jews is that the Jews who went placidly and meekly to their deaths in Hitler’s extermination camps, six million victims, won’t be encountered ever again. This time, the Israelis pledge, they’ll fight back and sting mercilessly.

"Every IDF recruit has to swear that the fortress mountain-stronghold, Masada, in which Jewish zealots – men, women and children – slew themselves in a suicide pact rather then surrender to the Tenth Roman Legion which had surrounded their rebellious mountain redoubt, would never yield again. ‘Masada Shall Not Fall Again’ is emblazoned on the shoulder patch of every IDF soldier and officer.

"I climbed Masada on foot in 1970, and the other day, I made the ascent again – this time by speedy cable car. It has become a place of pilgrimage. The ghosts on that wind-swept, barren, sun-scorched mountain, with its crumbled walls, overlooking the azure blue Dead Sea below, speak to you with the keening wind. They say: This land is ours. We will never surrender."

This is why any dialogue conducted between Ariel Sharon and Yasser Arafat, or any Palestinians, can only be a dialogue of the deaf. They won’t listen to what the other is saying. The Palestinians are determined to root the Jews out of Israel itself – their Palestinian "home". The Israelis are determined never to give Jerusalem or Masada up – not ever again.

The suicide complex is not one-sided.

Where will it all end? In Armageddon?

That other hardlining, revisionist Zionist, ex-Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, put it truculently the other day, scoffing at Europeans or "world opinion". He pointed out that "when Jews were being slaughtered in Europe, nobody raised a finger. With Jews being slaughtered here today, nobody raised a finger." He declared that nobody’s helping or defending them, they’re determined, to the very last, to do it for themselves.

That’s what "Operation Defensive Shield" which the IDF launched 12 days ago is all about. Lt. Gen. Shaul Mofaz, the Israeli army chief of staff, reports the IDF has lost 13 soldiers, and killed about 200 Palestinians and wounded 1,500 more. About 1,600 suspects have been "detained" (361 of them called "wanted militants"), and 2,000 weapons seized.

Will Arab armies mobilize and come to the rescue of the beleaguered Palestinians? That’s the final question.