JERUSALEM — Yet another Qassam rocket fired from Gaza hit Prime
Minister Ariel Sharon’s ranch in the Negev Desert on Tuesday,
WorldNetDaily reports. The rocket, which according to Abu Abir
of the Popular Resistance Committees “was intended to kill Sharon,”
instead hit a water pumping facility next to the ranch.
It must be the only case, anywhere, anytime, in which a head of
state is getting credit for “stabilizing” a situation and
“rationalizing” his country’s borders while making his own civilian
residence a target of shelling.
Another Qassam fired on Tuesday landed in open ground near the
main oil depot in the city of Ashkelon just north of Gaza. Ashkelon
is the site of several power facilities vital to the whole state of
Israel. It is now within easy range of the growing arsenal of Gaza
artillery, with nothing much to prevent a strike except prayers and
luck.
In another development this week, the mayor of Sderot announced
he was joining Sharon’s erstwhile party, Likud. Sderot is the town
bordering Gaza that, along with the erstwhile settlements within
Gaza, has taken the most constant pounding from mortars and rockets
over the past five years, and it too was hit again this week. The
popular mayor, Eli Moyal, voiced frustration with Sharon’s policy
by saying, “When the state of Israel decides to wage a real war
against terror and stops playing cat and mouse, then Qassam attacks
will stop.”
According to the conventional wisdom, Sharon is a wily old
strategist who, concluding that the Palestinians are not ready for
peace, is taking unilateral steps to make Israel more secure and
defensible. He is said to be the standard bearer of a new Israeli
“center” that realizes the Palestinians, at present, can neither be
reconciled with nor ruled, so that Israel has to pursue a middle
course. While sharing the aspiration not to rule over Palestinians,
I wish I could concur with the rest of it.
Along with the ominous situation in Gaza, ynet reported
this week that Israeli paratroopers “uncovered a Qassam rocket in a
raid on a large explosives lab in the West Bank town of Nablus.”
During the run-up to the Gaza disengagement, top security
officials, including the then chief of staff Moshe Ya’alon, warned
that after Israel was out of Gaza the theater would eventually
shift to the West Bank in an effort to force Israel into further
withdrawals. Ya’alon warned explicitly of a growing Qassam threat
in the West Bank, from which Jerusalem and communities in Israel’s
heavily populated coastal plain are in easy range.
In the last couple of months Israeli forces have put pressure on
the West Bank terror infrastructure and made numerous arrests. As
always, the goal of the operations falls short of finally defeating
the terrorists, Sharon apparently having decided that this is
diplomatically infeasible. Just a few months after the
disengagement, amid other reports of West Bank Qassams, it already looks as if
Ya’alon — also said to be on the verge of joining Likud — was
right.
Despite unilateralism’s current popularity as a supposed egress
from Israel’s dilemmas, since Israel’s conquest of the territories
in 1967 it was not a favored solution, not even by those most eager
to give those territories up. The reason, as a glance at the map
reveals, is simple: the distances in question are tiny, and handing
land wholesale to whoever is ruthless enough to grab it, with no
peace treaty or stipulations, is not a formula for serenity. That
was what Israel did in Southern Lebanon in 2000 — now a tense,
dangerous border lined by thousands of Iranian-supplied Hizbullah
missiles.
Sharon has staked a lot on his new course — including even his
ability to relax on his ranch without fear of explosions. One
question is whether, if reelected in March, he’ll continue his
unilateralism in a push for grand achievements that ignores
security realities. Another is whether the Israeli people —
currently, according to polls, favoring his new, sprawling,
grab-bag party Kadima — will continue to be taken by Sharon’s aura
of sagacity and experience, or instead will wake up.
P. David Hornik is a writer and translator in
Jerusalem.
