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News :: Israel / Palestine |
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Waiting for the Hamas Shoe to Drop |
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by haaretz via gehrig
(No verified email address) |
07 Apr 2004
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Newly installed Hamas Gaza leader Abdel Aziz Rantisi is under the gun to make good on his own threats, and attack Israel as it has never been attacked before. If the Hamas leadership, and Rantisi in particular, fails to follow through on their pledges of vengeance "their credibility will be lost," says Haaretz Arab Affairs commentator Danny Rubinstein. |
Background / Hamas' clock: the pressure for a bloodbath
By Bradley Burston, Haaretz Correspondent
It may have been the biggest gamble Ariel Sharon ever took.
The decision last month to assassinate Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, a man of near-mythic status within the Palestinian territories, threatened to unleash a bloodbath of revenge attacks from which even the prime minister would not be held immune.
"Sharon has opened the gates of hell," a Hamas statement said at the time. "Nothing will stop us from cutting off his head."
Nearly all Israelis, polls have shown, expect the militant Islamic movement to avenge the Yassin killing soon, and with a ferocity unlike anything the Jewish state has suffered in the past.
Hamas' Palestinian constituency expects nothing less.
Thus it is, that as the psychic countdown to an attack proceeds on both sides - and as pressure mounts on the Shin Bet, Military Intelligence, police, Border Police, special anti-terror units and thousands of uniformed volunteers to intercept planned terror operations - pressure is being exerted in another direction as well.
Newly installed Hamas Gaza leader Abdel Aziz Rantisi is under the gun to make good on his own threats, and attack Israel as it has never been attacked before.
If the Hamas leadership, and Rantisi in particular, fails to follow through on their pledges of vengeance "their credibility will be lost," says Haaretz Arab Affairs commentator Danny Rubinstein.
Moreover, time is a factor in the equation. As it passes without what is perceived by the Palestinian public as an appropriate response to the assassination, the standing of Hamas leaders may be harmed.
"So long as nothing is carried out, this is seen as demonstrating that the leaders made efforts, orders and instructions were handed down, and nothing happened, thus indicating that the leaders lack the capability, the structure, the means, the 'talent' to execute this," Rubinstein says.
"This can very much damage their prestige, and the longer the time passes without anything happening, the more their prestige declines."
Already this week, Rubinstein notes, Yasser Arafat spoke of Rantisi in somewhat disparaging terms. "There's a big difference between Hamas founder Yassin, who was a moderate man seeking peace, and Abdel Aziz Rantisi, who replaced him," Arafat said on Tuesday. "Rantisi only has a role in the Gaza Strip and has to be in touch with the Hamas leadership."
It is especially Rantisi's credibility that is on the line, because it is Rantisi who has spoken with the most vehemence of a Hamas response, Rubinstein continues.
Should the Hamas political bureau, the movement's Syria-based decision-making body headed by Khaled Mashaal, decide to replace Rantisi, there are others who would be pleased to step in.
According to Rubinstein, the likeliest candidates would be leaders of the relatively more moderate contingent of the Hamas political wing. The primary candidates would be Ismail Haniyeh, former head of Yassin's office, and Mahmoud al-Zahar, long second to Rantisi as spokesman for the movement.
Rantisi, Haniyeh, and Zahar all bear the literal scars of having narrowly escaped death in recent IDF attempts on their lives.
-- Israelis convinced vengeance bombings loom
So convinced were Israelis that the killing of Yassin would trigger a plague of unprecedented terrorism, that even strong backers of the assassination said they fully expected a torrent of bloodletting in its wake.
A Yedioth Ahronoth poll taken the night of the assassination showed that while 60 percent of Israelis supported the decision to kill Yassin as he left morning prayers at a Gaza mosque, 81 percent - a figure of startling unanimity in an exceptionally polarized nation - said they expected a surge in terrorism, at least in the short term.
Nearly half said after the attack that they were now more afraid that Palestinian terrorism would strike home, claiming their loved ones or themselves.
Within hours, brokers, pundits, military historians, diplomats, even fashion merchandisers were speaking of a Yassin Effect, a gripping new version of what Israelis know as "connanut sfiga, " or Incoming Alert, a tense entry into the emotional bunker, a hunched, hands-shielding-head posture in the face of impending calamity of shattering proportion.
"Sheikh Yassin bears responsibility for the deaths of hundreds of Jews in his life," wrote Yedioth columnist Nahum Barnea at the time. "The question that ought to trouble us now is, how many Jews he will kill in his death?"
Indeed, in the aftermath of the March 22 Israeli helicopter gunship attack, the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange swooned, consumers steered clear of shopping centers and open markets, and Israel suffered a barrage of international condemnation and outrage.
Within days, however, the Yassin killing had left the international stage. It was quickly supplanted by other developments, among them revelations of a succession of Palestinian youngsters recruited by militants to take leading roles in suicide bombings intended to avenge the Yassin killing. The specter of an indictment-borne Sharon resignation also helped shunt the assassination to the world's back burner.
In Israel, to be sure, the threat of catastrophic suicide bombings has not lessened. Haggard police and Shin Bet agents on maximal alert over the Passover holiday reported a record 60 active, substantive warnings of impending terror attempts.
But after 42 months of bloodletting in which more than 900 Israelis have been killed and thousands injured, a poll published Wednesday pointed to an unexpected finding over the Yassin Effect, and amid widespread expectation in the Jewish state that Hamas intended to target Passover for a "mega-terror" operation.
Among Israeli Jews questioned in the Peace Index poll over the impact of the Yassin assassination on their daily lives, 79 percent of respondents said they had not changed their own or their family members' daily routines in response.
Even of the 20 percent who said they had altered their routines, three quarters said they had retained their plans for the Passover holiday, going through with planned trips and hotel stays.
This, despite the still-fresh memory of one of the most painful suicide bombings on record, the 2002 Passover eve attack that turned a Pesach seder in Netanya's Park Hotel into a blood-soaked hell.
Twenty-nine of the seder participants, among them Holocaust survivors, were killed in the blast. More than 140 were injured, including small children.
Commenting on the opinion survey results, pollsters Ephraim Yaar and Tamar Hermann wrote in Wednesday's paper that "The resolve expressed by the interviewees in regard to not changing their routines ... apparently stems from the widespread conviction that one should not alter (or admit to altering) one's habits under a threat of terror."
(c) 2004 Haaretz |
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