Israelis Expect Assassination To Open New Chapter In Conflict

by Ferry Biedermann

(IPS) JERUSALEM -- Israelis here are waiting expectantly for a wave of retaliatory attacks over the killing of Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. The consensus seems to be that some major strikes will come sooner rather than later.

That they will come is about the only thing analysts and commentators -- Israeli, Palestinian or others -- agree on in the wake of the Israeli military's killing of the most prominent Palestinian militant leader.

Even before this assassination, Hamas was the most relentless and most effective of the extremist organizations engaged in terror attacks on Israeli civilians. Now it will not only seek revenge, it will also set out to prove that it is still very much in business and that it has the capacity to take revenge on a scale well beyond that of lesser organizations.

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine had killed Israeli tourism minister Rehavam Ze'evi in 2001 in revenge for the Israeli targeted assassination of its leader Abu Ali Mustafa. Hamas can reasonably be expected to try and outdo the PFLP.

It is difficult to predict what kind of dynamic the expected cycle of revenge killings and Israeli retaliations will create, but some things seem clear.

Even before the assassination of Yassin, terror attacks on Israeli targets were going full throttle; any target that presented itself was liable to be hit. It will be hard to argue that future attacks are due to the killing of Yassin. They might have taken place anyway.

The Israelis are also much better prepared to handle attacks now than they were at the outset of the Intifadah. Their army occupies most of the towns and villages of the West Bank and they have put a series of restrictive measures into place to minimize the possibility of such strikes.

Those measures are not watertight, however, and they must have taken into account a number of casualties as a result of this high-profile assassination.

In right-wing and government circles, such casualties in the short term are seen as justified when weighed against the longer term benefits of aggressively going after the leadership and the field commanders of militant organizations. Criticism of their methods is countered with the observation that the number of terror attacks on Israeli citizens has dropped dramatically over the last couple of years.

"Israel has demonstrated that a strategy of counter-terrorism based in part on directed attacks against extremist leaders can be relatively successful," writes Gerald Steinberg, a strategic analyst at the Bar Ilan University in Israel.

"Although suicide bombings have not been eliminated, the casualties have decreased steadily as a result, and similar approaches have been adopted in the U.S. and elsewhere," he says.

The reference to "the U.S. and elsewhere" is interesting. Israel has been trying very hard, especially since 9/11, to link its own fight with the Palestinians with the global fight against terrorism. Despite the near-universal condemnation of the killing of Yassin, except in the United States, this should be one case where such a link is quite obvious.

Hamas has been internationally marked as a terrorist organization, and it is also on the European Union's terror groups list. Yassin was the undisputed leader of the organization and as such without a doubt has been responsible for the deaths of hundreds of civilians in terror attacks, as defined by most of the international community. Certainly Israelis will have a hard time to believe that any serious diplomatic consequences will flow from this act in the current climate.

Steinberg, like many others, links the assassination of Yassin to Prime Minister Sharon's stated intention to withdraw from the Gaza strip. Hamas has been claiming that declaration from Sharon as a signal victory for the hardline strategies of the organization, if indeed the program is ever carried out. For the moment it has not even been presented in detail.

Hitting Hamas hard prior to a withdrawal, goes the argument, would show that Israel's 'deterrent capacity' is intact, and would rob the militant group of the possibility of claiming such a move as a victory.

Judging by the mood in the Palestinian territories, that seems more like wishful thinking. Hamas members and their supporters have always taken into account the possibility that they will be 'martyred'. Often this 'martyrdom' is actively sought. Among the general Palestinian public, the organization is often admired for this.

No matter how hard Israel hits Hamas, the group will survive, maybe even prosper, and any withdrawal that is not the result of negotiations and a peace process will still be seen as the achievement of the militants.

It is hard to fathom what motivated the Israelis at this point to go after Yassin. The prospect of a Gaza withdrawal, the pattern of recent attacks, a possible message to Arafat to watch out -- none of these seem convincing.

Opinion polls show that after years of steadfast support, the Palestinian public's patience with attacks on Israeli civilians has been running out. How the assassination would have affected the situation on the ground in the long run is hard to say, but at least for a while now suicide attacks are likely once again to enjoy a higher level of popularity.

If there is any pattern that Yassin's assassination fits into, it is the one that sees both sides escalating the conflict at a point when some kind of positive development had seemed possible.