A politician's peril
The assassination of a right-wing Israeli cabinet member again pushes the Mideast to the brink
JERUSALEM--For Israel, it was like September 11, or so Prime Minister Ariel Sharon portrayed the assassination of his old army buddy, ultraright-wing cabinet minister Rehavam Zeevi. Israel now faces "an entirely new situation," said a furious Sharon. Echoing President Bush's ultimatum to the Taliban to hand over Osama bin Laden, he demanded that Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat extradite Zeevi's killers--gunmen from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine--or Israel would "act accordingly." Sharon gave Arafat until Thursday, the end of the seven-day Jewish mourning period for the dead.
The comparison to the World Trade Center attack had some basis; this was an assault of unprecedented enormity and brazenness. Zeevi, 75, was the first active parliament member killed by an Arab in Israel's history. A legendary warrior, he was shot in the head outside his hotel room in Jerusalem, a block from Israeli Police headquarters.
Zeevi was no ordinary politician; he was the most aggressive anti-Arab nationalist in the Knesset. He vowed to shoot any Palestinian Authority policeman who stopped his car in the West Bank or Gaza (although he never got the opportunity). He refused the Shin Bet bodyguards assigned to cabinet members, and usually carried a gun himself, though not this time.
Blunt to the point of insult, he once referred to Martin Indyk, then U.S. ambassador to Israel, as a "Jewboy," a slur meaning "obsequious Jew." When Indyk told him later at a reception that he'd like to punch him in the nose, Zeevi replied, "Try me, Jewboy, try me."
In likening the Zeevi assassination to the September 11 terrorist attack in the United States, Israel has a political purpose: to win U.S. support for a stepped-up military campaign against the Palestinian intifada. But the Bush administration is anxious to keep this conflict on a low flame, to avoid rattling moderate Arab and Muslim leaders who quietly support the U.S. war in Afghanistan. And with Israel assassinating Palestinian terrorists before and after the Zeevi murder, which itself was revenge for Israel's killing of PFLP leader Abu Ali Mustafa, Sharon has a tough sell.
While U.S. officials pressured Arafat to condemn Zeevi's murder, arrest the killers, and crack down on terrorists, they did not back Israel's extradition demand. Nor did they agree that Israel may now treat Arafat as its own bin Laden, or the Palestinian Authority as its own Taliban foe. And when Israeli soldiers killed three Palestinians, including a 10-year-old girl, while moving tanks to the outskirts of West Bank cities, a State Department spokesman said, "We deplore such killings of innocent civilians," adding that the tank movements were "not helpful."
A hard-liner's hard-liner. The murder of Zeevi is the most flagrant challenge Sharon has faced in his skirmishes with the Palestinians. It strengthens Jewish settlers and other hard-liners who demand that he act like the "old Sharon" and drive Arafat's regime out of the West Bank and Gaza. Zeevi was one of the hard-liners' champions; his resignation from the cabinet over Sharon's "restraint" was to take effect only hours after he was killed.
Eulogizing his father at the military funeral attended by thousands in Jerusalem, Yiftach Palmach Zeevi exhorted the prime minister: "Arik, take revenge--the way [Zeevi] would have taken revenge for you." For Sharon, the killing was personal; he and Zeevi had been comrades in arms since the 1940s. "I bid farewell to a friend with whom I marched a long way," he told mourners.
However, Sharon again made it clear that while he intends to escalate his response--many observers anticipate assassination of higher-level Palestinian targets by Israel--he does not want a full-scale Middle East war. Yet that's what then Defense Minister Sharon said in 1982 when he sent the Army into Lebanon, after Palestinian terrorists critically wounded an Israeli ambassador. What followed was the Lebanon War, lasting 18 years and costing tens of thousands of lives.
On Thursday, Israel's ultimatum expires. Arafat says he will not extradite Zeevi's killers, and Washington is not asking him to do so. So now, after a terror strike against Israel like none before it, something America now understands all too well, the pressure is back on Ariel Sharon.
This story appears in the October 29, 2001 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
advertisement
