Violence Waits in the Wings

Israel’s furious attacks on Palestinian towns have bought a relative calm, but that must not be confused with lasting peace. Unless both sides start talking again about how to build a Palestinian state, sooner rather than later, there will be more suicide bombings, more reprisals, even deeper hatred of one people for another, more risk that the conflict will spread.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said Tuesday that the campaign to root out terrorists on the West Bank opened the door to peacemaking with Palestinians and to “regional peace.” He pronounced himself “optimistic about the future.” We can’t share that optimism. Not if Sharon keeps offering shopworn rhetoric of the kind in his televised speech to pro-Israel Americans: a complete end to violence, a long-term truce between Israelis and Palestinians and eventually a final settlement. Those are the old ideas that have produced violence from Palestinians promised a state of their own and unwilling to wait until Sharon decides when they can achieve it.

The odious suicide bombing that killed two dozen Israelis at a Passover dinner March 27--by Israel’s count, the 1,424th attack of various types in two months--spurred Sharon to lash out with bulldozers, tanks and helicopters. He then defied President Bush’s demand for an immediate withdrawal and kept the attacks going for two more weeks.

Much of the savage fighting took place in the refugee camp in Jenin, which a Palestinian fighter said Sharon had called a “nest of cockroaches.” The fighter termed it a “nest of angels.” Some angels. People seeking Israel’s destruction filled storehouses in Jenin with weapons and ammunition. In tiny rooms, men packed gunpowder and fertilizer into canisters that some bomber would use to blow apart Israeli men, women and children.

The Palestinian ambush that killed 13 Israeli soldiers in the Jenin refugee camp two weeks ago sparked frenzied retaliation, with Israeli bulldozers destroying houses, sometimes before people could escape, and troops preventing rescue workers from reaching the injured. Some residents reported being used as shields and forced to open doors that soldiers feared had been booby-trapped.

Amnesty International said its preliminary review of the attack indicated “serious breaches” of human rights, “including war crimes.” Israel vehemently disputes that, saying it tried to spare civilians and targeted only terrorists. But after keeping out reporters during the siege, it is now objecting to a United Nations fact-finding team. It should welcome the U.N. investigators. Israel, after all, is a democracy that has been willing to hold its institutions accountable. After the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, a court of inquiry found Sharon, then the defense minister, indirectly responsible for a massacre of hundreds of refugees by Christians allied with Israel.

More than 400 Israelis and more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed since attacks resumed in September 2000, following Yasser Arafat’s eleventh-hour rejection of the peace plan the United States had brokered. Still, this week’s violence has been less than during Israel’s three-week West Bank offensive.

In Spain, Israeli and Arab officials agreed Tuesday after two days of talks that there could be no “military solution” to the Middle East conflict. Now the U.S. and other nations need to charge into this tiny opening and push both sides to put as much energy into political negotiations as they have into bloodshed.