POLITICS-ISRAEL: Strike into Syria Lacks Conviction

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Peter Hirschberg

JERUSALEM, Oct 8 2003 (IPS) - A perilous move born of intense frustration over the inability to extinguish Palestinian suicide attacks, and one which could lead to a wider regional conflagration. Or, an overdue strike against a country that sponsors terror groups and is in any case too weak to retaliate.
      These are the two competing views in Israel following the Israeli air strike over the weekend at a base near the Syrian capital Damascus that Israel says was being used to train Palestinian militants.

A perilous move born of intense frustration over the inability to extinguish Palestinian suicide attacks, and one which could lead to a wider regional conflagration. Or, an overdue strike against a country that sponsors terror groups and is in any case too weak to retaliate.

These are the two competing views in Israel following the Israeli air strike over the weekend at a base near the Syrian capital Damascus that Israel says was being used to train Palestinian militants.

The aerial assault Sunday, the first Israeli attack inside Syria since the 1973 Middle East War, was Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s response to the Palestinian suicide bomb attack in the northern coastal city of Haifa that killed 19 people Saturday. The Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for the attack.

The violence continued Monday when an Israeli soldier was shot dead by gunmen who fired from Lebanon into Israel, most likely in response to the air raid in Syria. Israel blamed Hezbollah.

Earlier, a four-year-old boy was killed in a Lebanese border village; Israel said he had most likely been killed by an anti-aircraft shell fired from Lebanon. Israel beefed up its forces on its northern border Tuesday, adding another artillery battery.

In the hours after Saturday’s suicide bombing in Haifa, all eyes were on Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat’s compound in Ramallah. The world waited to see if Israel would go through with a decision announced last month to “remove” the Palestinian leader.

It did not. The U.S. opposition to deporting Arafat, and the fact that the Israeli army was unable to assure Sharon that the operation could be carried out without harming the Palestinian leader apparently extended his stay in Ramallah.

With action against Arafat ruled out, the government sought a new target. The focus shifted to Syria.

Defending the operation, and saying that Israel was expanding its own “war on terror”, Israeli government spokesmen insisted that by allowing terror organisations like Islamic Jihad to operate on its soil, Syria had forfeited its immunity.

In a speech for the fallen of the 1973 war broadcast live over national radio networks, Sharon declared Tuesday that “Israel will not be deterred from defending its citizens and will hit its enemies any place and in any way.”

Sharon knew that Syria, hopelessly outgunned by Israel, would not respond militarily even to such a flagrant breach of its sovereignty. He also knew that the United States with its post-Sep. 11 doctrine of attacking countries that host terror would not object to an Israeli strike on Syrian soil.

He was right. President George W. Bush, who has been lambasting Syria for sponsoring terror since the early days of the war in Iraq, stuck to the script. He announced Tuesday that the decisions taken by Israel “to defend her people are valid…we would be doing the same thing.”

The Israeli government might also have been counting on a meek response from Hezbollah, which operates with Syrian consent in south Lebanon and enjoys Iranian backing. With tens of thousands of troops in Lebanon, Syria is the main powerbroker there.

“Syria pushes Hezbollah to act, but there are limits to this because Hezbollah also has domestic considerations,” Shlomo Brom, former head of Strategic Planning in the Israeli army (1996-99) told IPS. “Hezbollah is a Lebanese political faction and so it cannot ignore Lebanese public opinion, which is against reopening the fighting with Israel because it will harm the process of normalization inside the country.”

But as Israel has learned in the past – it pulled its troops out of south Lebanon after an 18-year occupation largely due to guerrilla warfare led by Hezbollah – its border in the north is not a controlled environment. There are no guarantees that the Israeli government, unable to fully protect its citizens from suicide bombers, is not running the risk of transforming its warfare with the Palestinians into a regional conflagration.

During Israel’s occupation of South Lebanon, Hezbollah often fired Katyusha rockets at Israeli communities just across the border. The group now has long- range Katyushas, many of them aimed at Israel that can reach as far as the northern coastal city Haifa.

Justice Minister Yosef “Tommy” Lapid who voted against the Syria strike said he had been persuaded against such action by the risk of opening another front. “We needn’t endanger ourselves with renewal of the fighting with Hezbollah on the northern border,” he said.

He also did not believe that a strike on a training base in Syria would convince Islamic Jihad leaders in Gaza to halt attacks on Israel. The base belonged to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine but Israeli officials said Islamic Jihad fighters trained there.

Brom agrees that the strike will not deter Islamic Jihad, but argues that “it may convince Syria to behave more responsibly and more cautiously” with groups operating on its soil.

If this was a one-off strike, however, its effectiveness will be limited. That raises the question whether Israel can really hit Syria, or other states in the region it says are harbouring terrorists after every suicide attack. This is unlikely. Even U.S. understanding will wear thin if such strikes continue and they begin to impact negatively on U.S. efforts to stabilise Iraq.

The United States backed Israel on the latest strike, “but I am not convinced they will be as accommodating in the event of a regional flare-up,” said former army intelligence chief and one-time negotiator with the Syrians, Uri Saguy.

As supportive as they were, even Bush’s remarks contained a rider: “I said that it’s very important that any action Israel takes should avoid escalation and creating higher tensions.”

Brom suggests another reason why the government decided to hit Syria: the targeting of the training camp, he says, was aimed also at providing a “morale boost” for a bomb-battered Israeli public.

Some Israeli opposition politicians suggested that this was the entire motivation behind the attack. “What was the point of attacking Syria?” former Labour Party leader Amram Mitzna asked. “Who can even explain the goal? Was the goal to calm down the Israeli public? To divert the public’s attention from our day-to-day problems here and the government’s inability to deal with terrorism?”

But government officials, buoyed by the U.S. backing they had won, insisted the strike had effectively focused attention on Syria as a state that sponsors terror.

Many in the Israeli public are likely to have backed the action. But at the same time they will be praying that exactly 30 years after the most devastating war Israelis have experienced, and after three years of bloody fighting with the Palestinians, their leaders are not about to widen the conflict.