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The Israeli view: With the killing of Ahmed Yassin, Ariel Sharon has upped the ante in the Middle East. Diplomatic Editor Trevor Royle reports



Sitting in his wheelchair as he left the Islamic Association Mosque in the al-Sabra district of Gaza City in the early hours of last Monday morning, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin would not have been aware of the three missiles that were fired from the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) Apache helicopter hovering above him.
Disabled and practically blind and deaf, the founding father of the Islamic resistance movement Hamas was simply blown to pieces by the first missile in an act which has been described variously as the legitimate taking out of a known and reviled terrorist or the state-sponsored assassination of a political leader. With him died his three bodyguards, while the second and third missiles exploded nearby, killing a further four Palestinians and wounding 17 others.

It was not the first time that the Israelis had targeted a terrorist leader. The country’s defence forces have a long history of killing Palestinians from various factions who have been accused of taking part in terrorist outrages, the most infamous being the assassination in January 1996 of the Hamas bomb-maker Yehiye Ayash (“The Engineer”), whose death was followed by a series of suicide attacks which killed 60 people in just over a week.

Yassin had already escaped with his life last September when an Israeli warplane fired a missile at a residential building in the middle of Gaza City, wounding the sheikh and his colleague Ismail Haniya. Last year also saw the assassination by a roadside bomb of another Hamas leader, Ismail Abu Shanab. According to the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR), Israel has carried out 337 “targeted killings” between September 2000 and the present day. In all the incidents there was one common factor: the final orders were given by Israel’s prime minister Ariel Sharon.

Predictably, the international outcry was not long in arriving. Yassin’s assassination was condemned by the European Union and the United Nations and there were even words of rebuke from the White House and the British Foreign Office. The main theme of the disquiet was that the attack had not been helpful at a time when the Arab world remains deeply suspicious of the West’s involvement in the Middle East and especially when there were continuing tensions in Gaza. But the Israeli leadership was unrepentant.

A spokesperson for the IDF was adamant that Yassin had been responsible for managing attacks on the Israeli homeland and had to be liquidated: “Yassin, who was personally responsible for numerous murderous terrorist attacks, resulting in the deaths of many civilians, both Israeli and foreign, was killed in the attack.”

The message to Israel’s enemies was clear and uncompromising: Hamas, Hizbollah or the various martyr brigades are legitimate targets and would be decapitated whenever they posed a threat. This is precisely where Sharon stands on the issue as he maintains his increasingly precarious political position between President George Bush, who would like to see some restraint, and his great political rival, the former Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who has demanded more action against the terrorists and more support, not less, for the Israeli settlers in the Palestinian territories of Gaza and the West Bank.

Netanyahu is also opposed to the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza which was presaged by Sharon’s statement in February that he was “working on the assumption that in future there will be no Jews [sic] in Gaza”. Also providing an uncomfortable counterpoint is the opposition in parliament provided by Shimon Peres’s Labour Party.

As Sharon coped with their rival concerns about the withdrawal from Gaza, he suddenly understood that his own political survival might depend on ordering the killing of the frail Hamas leader. When the moment came just after 5am last Monday, Sharon gave the military equivalent of the thumbs down and minutes later the missiles were on their way to explode in downtown Gaza City.



Ironically, at the very moment the decision was taken, Yassin was on the point of bringing Hamas in from the cold and forcing it to embrace the political process. Although Hamas had refused to play any role in the Palestinian Authority, believing it to be a creature of the Oslo peace accords, it softened its stance once Sharon announced his intention to pull out of Gaza without seeking any prior agreement. For Yassin and his colleagues this gave them the green light to involve Hamas in the administration and one of the local political leaders, Dr Mahmoud Zahar, had already announced that the next municipal elections would be contested by Hamas representatives. There was even talk of renewing last year’s truce which had been broken with such disastrous results by the recent Hamas-inspired suicide bombers.

Ironically, too, Yassin’s killing could increase Hamas’s willingness to enter that political debate and to engage with the election process in Gaza. With their community involvement already well developed through schools and health-care clinics, Hamas has potential supporters amongst the young and they would certainly pose a threat to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s Fatah faction which is widely considered to be corrupt and incompetent. How Sharon would respond to such a change is another matter. His decision to withdraw from the territories precipitated much of the current violence and in so doing it has attracted stinging criticism from the right who argue that Sharon is simply handing over Gaza to Hamas. Not only do hawks such as Netanyahu see parallels with the decision to withdraw from Lebanon in 2000, but they fear that the resulting vacuum will weaken Israel’s defences against its Arab neighbours.

At their most extreme, hawks would like to see the territories re-occupied by the IDF, who would expel the terrorists and destroy their infrastructure. Most see little virtue or necessity in the plans for the defensive wall which will provide a defensive buffer once the withdrawals have taken place. As one Netanyahu supporter said of the proposals: “What exactly does Ariel Sharon think the Palestinians will do once they are behind the fence, take up quilting?”

Against that background, Sharon badly needs US support for his withdrawal plan and he needs it sooner rather than later. On Friday, he was given a fillip by the US decision to veto an Algerian-backed resolution condemning the assassination of Yassin, and this week he will be seeking support for his policies at a Likud Party convention. Widely condemned in the Arab world, the US decision was prompted by its long-held policy that Washington would not condemn Israel’s retaliation without also condemning the terror attack which prompted the action – in this case last Sunday’s double suicide bombing at the seaport of Ashdod in which 10 died.

Today, in attempt to take the disengagement plan forward ahead of the planned summit in Washington with Bush on April 14, Sharon’s chief adviser Dov Weisglass is in Washington to discuss the proposals with officials working for national security adviser Condoleezza Rice. In return for US support for the continuation of the policy of refusing to negotiate with Arafat, they will be offering a plan which will see the partial withdrawal of Israeli forces before the onset of summer.

This will be implemented in two stages. The first will include an almost total withdrawal from Gaza; then there will be a smaller withdrawal from the West Bank at Kadim, Ganim, Sanur and Homesh, four settlements in the West Bank near Jenin. As this will require some fencing-in, it may not be enough to convince Rice’s officials that Sharon is doing enough. But total disengagement would almost certainly be vetoed by his senior IDF commanders.

So far, though, the signs are encouraging. From the White House have come words of comfort that the withdrawal is “historic” and that plans for a more lasting peace are “positive”. Nobody really believes the fighting between Israeli and Palestinian forces will terminate, but Rice’s officials are investing a lot of political capital in the hope that the withdrawal from Gaza will be an interim measure which eventually allow the peace process to be restarted. While that may be the short-term effect, in the longer term there has to be practical engagement with the Palestinians, and if Hamas decides to throw itself into politics they too will become part of the equation.

For Dr Jeroen Gunning, a Middle East analyst with the Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies, that would be the only equable way out of a vicious cycle of killing and retaliation: “A more fruitful way forward would be bringing pressure to bear on both Israel and Hamas equally: on Israel to cease its policies of assassination, collective punishment and settlement expansion; on Hamas to cease its suicide operations and change its ideological rhetoric. Such a course of action would have to go hand in hand with a constructive engagement policy towards the moderates within Hamas, which might involve financial incentives for its welfare network in return for signs of moderation. Unfortunately, an approach such as this is unlikely to be adopted in the current climate generated by the war on terror.”

28 March 2004