Peres: assassination harmed Israel's image

Fear of seeming weak drove Israel's decision to kill Yassin
Posted on Tue, Mar. 23, 2004
Fear of seeming weak drove Israel's decision to kill Yassin
By Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson
Knight Ridder Newspapers

JERUSALEM - Israel's government knew it couldn't assassinate the leader of a prominent militant Islamic organization without inciting reprisals and paying a high price on the international political stage.

But two past events - and one that hasn't taken place yet - led to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's decision to kill Sheik Ahmed Yassin in an air strike Monday as the quadriplegic spiritual leader of the Palestinian group Hamas was being wheeled home from morning prayers.

The first was relatively recent: twin suicide bombings two weeks ago at the heavily guarded Israeli seaport of Ashdod. The bombers killed 10 people, but the death toll would likely have been much higher if the hazardous chemicals stored nearby also had exploded.

The second event took place four years ago: Israel's withdrawal from southern Lebanon under the government of then Prime Minister Ehud Barak. The pullout came after 22 years of occupation that had grown increasingly unpopular among Israelis tired of Israeli soldiers dying in a country where many believed they had no business.

But the pullout hurt Israel's tough guy image, and may have encouraged the current Palestinian uprising of suicide bombings and other attacks. Yassin himself said Hamas was expecting its campaign of suicide bombings to drive Israel from Palestinian lands, much as another militant Islamic group, Hezbollah, had driven the Israelis from southern Lebanon.

The event that has yet to happen is Sharon's proposal to pull Israeli settlers and soldiers from the 139-mile Gaza Strip - part of a unilateral plan Sharon has proposed to give Israel more defensible borders and Israeli voters the security they crave.

Some Israelis wonder whether the Yassin assassination is Sharon's first step toward reneging on his proposal to withdraw because Israel can't pull out while chaos reigns on its border.

More likely, however, the assassination was intended to demonstrate that any Israeli withdrawal would take place with guns blazing - not like the withdrawal from Lebanon, which looked like a retreat.

"When the prime minister says, `We are about to unilaterally withdraw from Gaza,' and immediately afterward, you have two suicide bombers killing people in Ashdod, Israelis realize that no matter what we do, they want to annihilate us," explained Dan Schueftan, a senior fellow at University of Haifa's National Security Research Center. "So to say, `Oh, let's not hurt them because they will do something to us' is ridiculous. They are already doing a hundred percent of what they can."

Added Zalman Shoval, a foreign police adviser to Sharon: "We must make it clear to the Palestinians - at least some of them - that this is not southern Lebanon all over again."

It's an "eye-for-eye" mentality that's defined years of fighting in this volatile region.

Not long after Sharon announced the Gaza proposal late last year, Hamas reinvigorated its offensive by sending its first female suicide bomber and more recently, attacking the Ashdod seaport.

In one of his last interviews before his death, Yassin told Knight Ridder that no matter what words or weapons Sharon applied to his proposed pullout, he viewed it no differently than what happened in southern Lebanon. Both are a "victory for the resistance," he said.

Which explains why Israeli military leaders who have often said there's no long-term military solution to the Israeli-Palestinian crisis are carrying out an aggressive Defense Ministry plan to weaken the militants - particularly Hamas - regardless of the political consequences.

In addition to targeting leaders such as Yassin, they're trying to shut off funding for extremist groups from abroad, particularly Saudi Arabia and Iran, and to demolish workshops and warehouses for explosives and weapons.

"It's a strong message Sharon sends to Palestinian society, one with the language of blood and the language of bombings and assassinations," said Ghazi Hamad, an editor of the pro-Hamas al Risala newspaper in Gaza City.

The payback will be equally harsh, he predicted, with no consideration for "cease-fires, political borders or anything else."

Ordinary Israelis share his premonition. A poll in the Israeli daily newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth on Tuesday found that while 60 percent thought that killing Yassin was the right thing to do, almost half are now more afraid that they and their loved ones will become victims of Palestinian terror.

Of the 500 people polled, 81 percent expect at least a short-term increase in the number of attacks. The poll has a 4.4 percent margin of error.

"Sheik Yassin bears responsibility for the death of hundreds of Jews in his life," wrote Nahum Barnea, a senior columnist for the newspaper. "The question that ought to trouble us now is how many Jews he will kill in his death."

There's no question that the assassination harmed Israel in the court of public opinion, just as the attack on Iraq has harmed the US in the same court. The tough question to answer is whether the benefit to Israel from taking this guy out outweighs the real cost of that negative international opinion.