It is a question rarely asked by Israel’s Jews, and almost never in public. But on Wednesday one Israeli MP, Roman Bronfman, cautiously wondered if Prime Minister Ariel Sharon did not have Jewish blood on his hands.
In carefully couched terms, he raised the question after the militant Islamic movement Hamas responded with its favourite weapon — the suicide bombing of civilians — to Israel’s botched attempt to kill its political leader.
”It is necessary to examine government policy which may not have been helpful in progressing the road map and seems to have taken us back to death, pain and sorrow,” Bronfman said.
In the 24 hours between the failed assassination bid on Abdel-Aziz al-Rantissi and the killing of 16 people on a bus in central Jerusalem, there was fevered speculation about the timing of Sharon’s order to kill Rantissi.
There was uncommon agreement ranging from the Israeli far-right to the Palestinian leadership that the assassination bid was bound up with the politics of Sharon’s reluctant embrace of the United States-led road map to peace.
There was also a consensus that Israel would pay in blood.
Jewish settlers facing eviction from barren hilltops across the West Bank suspect that Sharon was trying to placate his hardline partners in the governing coalition, who say he is endangering Israel’s security by bulldozing Jewish ”outposts” to satisfy the road map’s demands. Others seized on the attack to claim that the real Sharon was back — the one who claims he wants peace, but acts like a warrior.
Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud ”Abu Mazen” Abbas fears that may indeed be the case, and has frantically urged the Americans to whip Sharon back into line.
The assassination attempt also brought stinging criticism from generally less hostile quarters. A group of 25 retired generals, who had planned to publish a newspaper advertisement on Thursday in support of Sharon’s commitment to the creation of a viable Palestinian state at last week’s summit, cancelled the notice after the failed assassination.
Frustrated foreign diplomats believe Sharon is playing politics with the road map.
”They could take out Rantissi any time they wanted, so why now?” said one. ”Whenever Sharon gives ground, as he did to the Americans in Aqaba, he always takes back the other way.”
Abbas has spent weeks trying to persuade Hamas to agree to a ceasefire; Sharon wants him to take on the Islamic militants by force.
But the Israeli leader knows that the Palestinian prime minister lacks the resources and manpower to get into a fight with Hamas, which many Palestinians fear could degenerate into a civil war. So the Israelis claim they have to do the job.
Sceptics note a pattern of Israeli assassinations at crucial moments in the peace efforts. In January and July 2002, and March this year, the army’s assassination of senior Hamas or Tanzim commanders broke weeks without Palestinian attacks and efforts to establish a ceasefire.
Sharon dismissed the criticism. ”What did they want, that I not protect the Jews? I’ve been doing that since the dawn of my youth, for over 55 years,” he told the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth.
But from the smouldering wreckage of the bus in central Jerusalem on Wednesday rose new questions about whether Israel’s leader is saving Jewish lives or sacrificing them. — Â