Streets Red With Blood

By Matt Rees/Jerusalem

Ariel Sharon has never been one to pussyfoot. He does not shy from confrontation, physical or verbal. The bumptious Prime Minister of Israel outdid himself, however, when speaking to reporters in an impromptu session at the parliament cafeteria early last week. Explaining the decision of his inner Cabinet to intensify the military campaign against the Palestinians, he used language that was unusually bald. "The Palestinians must be hit, and it must be very painful," he said. "We must cause them losses, victims, so that they feel a heavy price." He went on to do just that, unleashing a broader military offensive than anything seen so far in the past 17 months of fighting.

Of course, Palestinians weren't the only ones with losses, victims. The Israelis, with their superior firepower, did take more lives (113) than the Palestinians did last week (49), the bloodiest week since the Palestinians unleashed their new uprising in the fall of 2000. But by terrorizing Israelis wherever they could reach them, Palestinian militants succeeded in spreading the heavy price around. "No place is safe anymore," a senior Israeli security official acknowledged.

With the killings and counterkillings coming so fast that locals can barely absorb the news of one outrage before the next takes place, it feels like the beginning of something different--an atrocious new phase in an already gory conflict. Militants on both sides boast that they are ready for an intensification. But at the highest level of leadership, locally and in Washington, the crescendo of violence has produced what could prove to be a corrective shock. After refusing for months to venture into the unpromising business of trucemaking, the Bush Administration said it would send special Middle East envoy Anthony Zinni to the region for just that purpose. Bowing to a crucial Israeli demand, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat had his forces arrest the fifth and final suspect in the October killing of an Israeli Cabinet minister. And Sharon made his own concession. He did not take back his threat to "batter" the Palestinians--though he claimed to have meant not Palestinians generally but terrorists--but he said he was dropping his insistence on a week free of Palestinian attacks before Israel would discuss a cease-fire. "Negotiations to stop the shooting will be [held] under fire," he said.

The change in the Bush Administration's approach came straight from the top. According to a senior White House official, President Bush was moved to action after monitoring the bloodletting on TV throughout the week. He had an additional motivation. Vice President Dick Cheney plans to travel through the Middle East this week in an effort to line up support for the Administration's plan to try to remove Iraq's Saddam Hussein from power. Arab leaders will surely try to focus the conversation on the exploding Israeli-Palestinian conflict. With Zinni heading to Israel and the Palestinian territories, Cheney can argue that the Administration is on the case and move on to the topic of Iraq.

Arafat too had a special incentive for the concession that he made. He is eager to attend a summit of Arab leaders in Beirut later this month so that he can show he remains relevant on the world stage. But since December, the Israelis have kept him pinned inside the West Bank city of Ramallah, demanding the arrest of all suspects in the assassination of Tourism Minister Rehavam Zeevi. With the detention of the final fugitive, Majdi Rimawi, Sharon has lost much of his justification for confining Arafat to Ramallah, but he will have to convince right-wingers in his Cabinet before lifting the blockade.

Even before Rimawi's arrest, Arafat was recalibrating his strategy. Aides tell TIME he was disturbed by a March 2 suicide bombing in Jerusalem by activists of his own Fatah organization. The attack struck a community--the ultra-Orthodox Jews of Jerusalem's poor central district--that is relatively moderate in its view of relations with the Palestinians. The bomb wiped out a family, the Nehmads--two parents and their two children, a nephew and two cousins.

Arafat called his "battlefield leadership," the men who run Fatah's part in the Palestinian uprising, to his Ramallah office the next day. According to sources who were present, he told the Fatah leaders that he wanted no more suicide bombings inside Israel because they harm the image of the Palestinians internationally and harden the will of Israelis against him. Angrily, Arafat told the group that the people who carried out the Jerusalem operation were "collaborators serving the strategy of Sharon to show that every Palestinian is a terrorist." He then interrupted the meeting to call an ultra-Orthodox rabbi in Jerusalem who had met him several times. "We will punish those who did this," Arafat told him.

Maybe he will. But Fatah leaders say the Palestinian chief has no plans to punish anyone who attacks soldiers and settlers in the Palestinian territories--the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. It's an unpleasant distinction, but as the Fatah leaders see it, suicide bombings within Israel look like damnable terrorism to the outside world, while West Bank shootings cast the Palestinians as guerrillas waging a war against a foreign occupation. "Fatah is free to fight settlers and the army at any place in the West Bank but not inside the Green Line," says a senior Fatah official, referring to the unofficial border separating Israel proper from the Palestinian territories. Says Nabil Shaath, a minister in Arafat's Cabinet: "No one on earth could blame us for attacking the soldiers and the settlers."

Not quite. The Palestinians have attracted considerable condemnation worldwide for doing just that. But even if Shaath were right, the week proved Arafat incapable of enforcing the new rules he had set forth. In the days after his pronouncement, 17 Israelis were killed and some 120 injured in five separate attacks within Israel proper, including the suicide bombing Saturday of a Jerusalem restaurant near the Prime Minister's residence. Three of the assaults were claimed by militant Islamic groups over which Arafat has little control, and two were claimed by al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a Fatah group.

Arafat's unreliability is one reason that Sharon, though prepared to discuss a cease-fire, intends to remain on the offensive pending an agreement. Last week the Israeli army gave a clear display of what Sharon on the offensive looks like. It sent a missile into Arafat's Ramallah compound, for the second time this year, coming within 70 feet of where the Palestinian leader was sitting with Miguel Moratinos, the European Union's Middle East envoy. Army officers say they are not trying to kill Arafat--just to scare him into curbing the uprising. For good measure, the Israelis also bombarded a building in Arafat's Gaza City compound.

In the course of the week, the Israeli army reinvaded or bombed 15 Palestinian towns. Among the targeted sites were several camps housing refugee families from the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, compounds that are often hotbeds of militancy. The army's operations inside these camps are intended in part to enable soldiers to arrest bombmakers and gunmen, though the wanted men are often able to flee in time. A greater benefit of these operations, TIME has learned from senior Israeli officers, is to force the gunmen from the Tanzim, a Fatah militia, to exert their energy by defending their homes in the camps instead of by plotting attacks on Israelis.

The Israelis also continued their policy of targeting Palestinian security forces and activists they link to the violence. Last week in the Gaza Strip, the Israelis killed a Palestinian general, the highest-ranking Palestinian Authority victim of an Israeli gun in this conflict. But the hits sometimes go wrong. Israeli soldiers tried to kill Hussein Abu Kweik, a Hamas activist in Ramallah. But when they shot up his car, Abu Kweik wasn't in it; his wife was. She died, along with her three children. Like Arafat, Sharon is unable to control all his people. Last Tuesday seven children and a teacher were injured in a bombing at a Palestinian school in East Jerusalem, suspected to be the work of Jewish extremists.

Sharon's room for maneuvering--between seeking a truce and initiating hostilities--is constrained in part by the political environment in which he operates. He heads a coalition government that relies on both an ultra-right and a center-left faction. Thus he cannot lean too far in either direction without risking that one of the coalition members will quit, bringing his government down. If that were to happen, new elections would follow. With Israelis in a hawkish mood, Sharon's right-wing Likud Party would almost surely make significant electoral gains. But Sharon might not be his party's candidate for Prime Minister. Former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who told TIME last week that he intends to challenge Sharon at the next opportunity, has considerably more support within the Likud central committee.

Against that backdrop, and with Washington sending Zinni back to the region, it makes sense for Sharon to offer at least an opening for negotiations. And therein lies the region's only hope. The alternative is continued escalation of the mutual bludgeoning as each side tries to bloody the other into submission. In the Knesset's cafeteria last week, Sharon asserted, "In the current situation, it's either them or us." But it is never only one side that suffers. It is always both.

--With reporting by Massimo Calabresi and James Carney/Washington, Aharon Klein/Jerusalem and Jamil Hamad/Bethlehem

With reporting by Massimo Calabresi and James Carney/Washington, Aharon Klein/Jerusalem and Jamil Hamad/Bethlehem