Security alert for Sinai – and Sderot

Thursday, September 09, 2004

espite huge headlines reporting that the Counter-Terror Staff Headquarters in the Prime Minister’s Office has issued a warning that it is dangerous for Israelis to visit Sinai, some 150,000 Israelis have plans to visit the desert peninsula in the coming weeks, as the Jewish New Year begins next week. Already today, more than 1,000 Israelis getting a jump on the holiday, had lined up at the border crossing at Taba by 8 A.M., and according to the Israeli passport control officer at the scene, speaking to Israel Radio, only a handful turned back when they heard the news about the warning about going to Egyptian Sinai.

Whether it is dangerous or not in Sinai will yet to be seen, but there was no doubt it was dangerous to be a Palestinian in northern Gaza today, as troops continued operating in the area trying to isolate the areas from which Hamas men launch Qassam rockets into Israel. Another Qassam hit the outskirts of Sderot this morning, and the townspeople are growing restless, with ever louder threats to march on the nearby Sycamore Farm, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s private estate about five kilometers out of the Negev town. Many Sderot residents are leaving the town for the holidays, creating a reminiscent atmosphere of Kiryat Shmona in the days of the Katyusha wars, when the PLO controlled south Lebanon and used it as a base to attack Israel from the north. Kiryat Shmona was practically abandoned in the winter of 1981 as the Katyushas fell with lethal frequency.

Not that there is any comparison to be made between the factory-made Katyushas of the 1970s and 1980s and the Qassams cobbled together in small metalworking shops of Gaza. But the real oldtimers of Israel can remember the Davidka, the essentially harmless home-made mortar used by Israeli troops in the War of Independence, which made more noise than it did damage. The Qasam’s effect is its utterly random effect, the way it is impossible to predict where it will fall and when. Only two people – a toddler and a middle aged man – have been killed by a Qassam, but that was enough to turn the town into the darling of the media and politicians. Not that such attention helps when a Qassam hits the roof of your house.

Woman Crucified # 13 by Silvia Rosenberg, mixed media on recycled paper, 20x30 cm.

Thus, of all the military threats to Israel, including the potential of an Iranian nuclear bomb, the one most pressing right now for Sharon is the Qassam rockets from northern Gaza. And despite repeated army efforts to push the rocket launchers out of the Beit Hanoun to Jabalya area, the rockets continue to fall, one by one, and sometimes in pairs. Repeatedly, Sharon has called for ‘creative’ responses to the Qassams. Last week, he lost his temper, and asked, somewhat rhetorically, why Israel could not bomb Gaza from the air in response to Qassams. Attorney General Menachem Mazuz pointed out that it would be a war crime to deliberately bomb civilians.

The fear now is that the daily trickle of Qassams – which is matched by daily army sweeps in northern Gaza, often at the cost of Palestinian lives – will build up the pressure for a mass exodus from the town by Rosh Hashanah, which begins next Wednesday. This year, the holiday lasts for a very long weekend and indeed, the coming month of mid-week holidays –Rosh Hashanah, Sukkot, and Simhat Torah (Yom Kippur begins on a Friday night) -- means that Israelis will be living by the old phrase ‘after the holidays’ for at least a month. But before the holiday, the Sharon government has to survive a power struggle in the National Religious Party, which will hold a national convention next week, just before the holiday and right after a scheduled downtown Jerusalem rally of anti-disengagement forces. The NRP is divided, with half its faction (including its chairman, Effi Eitam) in the opposition and the other half in the government. With public opinion polls now showing that the only opponents of the disengagement being the NRP, the National Union, and only about 30 percent of the Likud rank and file, theNRP convention will be meeting to decide whether to remain in the government if it passes a law granting compensation to evacuated settlers. If the party votes to quit the government, Sharon will be left with only 54 MKs in his coalition, and even he will find it very difficult to pass a state budget with such a minority government. In short, after the holidays is not only an excuse to avoid work now in the coming month. It also is the emerging deadline for answering the question whether the current government will be able to go ahead with Sharon’s disengagement plan.

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