As deadly clashes escalated, Prime Minister Ehud Barak on Friday said Israel may suspend any peace talks with the Palestinians. The Palestinians quickly called the warning a ploy to kill the peace process.
Barak delivered his warning after one of the bloodiest days in weeks. Ten Palestinians were killed and dozens injured as massive crowds marched on Israeli military outposts, and snipers as well as Palestinian police opened fire on Israeli soldiers.
Barak said Israel will decide whether to call a “timeout” on the peace process after the Arab League summit meeting in Cairo ends Sunday. Israeli officials fear that the meeting, which starts Saturday, will further inflame the situation.
They had predicted that the Palestinians would turn up the violence at the start of the Arab summit, which was called at the behest of the Palestinians, to gain support for their latest confrontation with the Israelis.
Ahead of the meeting, Arab leaders have talked about economic and diplomatic boycotts against Israel as a way to punish Israel for the three-week-old conflict, which has taken more than 110 lives and seemed to lurch further out of control Friday.
Indeed, the day that was supposed to mark the end of violence as agreed upon at the truce reached in Sharm el-Sheik earlier this week turned out to be the most violent single day in the clashes since Oct. 6. Both sides had set a 48-hour deadline for late Friday, saying they would decide whether their cease-fire was working.
They both concluded that it was not.
“This is a message from the people to the Arab summit, to the Israelis and to the Americans that this struggle should continue,” said Abdul Jawad Salih, a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council. He was standing at the rear of a major clash in Ramallah, where 2,000 people had marched on an Israeli army check post.
Soon after the crowd began heaving stones and Molotov cocktails at the Israelis, ambulances were rushing away those shot by the Israeli soldiers, and black smoke from burning tires filled the air.
The warning to the Palestinians came in a televised interview Friday night, where Barak attempted to assure troubled Israelis and bring them together as he also hinted that Israel would take strong steps if it decided it could not make peace.
He would neither say how long a timeout would last, nor would he detail the steps it might take. Israeli news analysts quickly viewed Barak’s statement as a prelude to Israel’s separation from the Palestinians across hostile borders–a move the Palestinians have strongly denounced.
Deserted by political allies on the left for pursuing peace too cautiously and derided by political foes on the right for offering too much to the Palestinians, the one-time army chief of staff, whose popularity ratings have fallen to all-time lows, seemed intent on calming a nation suddenly afloat in fears for its future.
Barak said he was not prepared to have the same kind of peace as an ostrich, “where you put your head in the sand and you just let people kick it out of the way.”
In an open appeal to Israelis and especially his right-wing political foes, some of whom have been cool to his call for an emergency unity government, Barak said Israelis must stand together.
“We have no alternative other than being unified. We have to stand shoulder to shoulder until the other side understands that they won’t manage to get us to yield by running the other way,” he said.
Describing Arab negotiators’ demands, he also said they want to regain control of the land Israel recaptured in 1967, control over parts of Jerusalem, including the Jewish Quarter in the Old City, and the right of return for Palestinian refugees scattered around the world to Israel. Such a demand for the refugees can be a threat to Israel’s existence, Barak said.
Palestinian leaders rejected Barak’s threat as they blamed the growing violence and fatalities on the Israelis and said the 3 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip would not halt their latest uprising.
“We will fight them again, if they will continue. We will not let them kill Palestinians,” said Hasan Asfour, one of the Palestinians’ negotiators, adding that the Israelis had changed the stakes of the battle by using much more powerful weapons. “Today, more than nine persons died. I think there will be more.”
At the United Nations, the General Assembly voted Friday to condemn the “excessive use of force” by Israeli troops and called for a truce and resumption of peace talks. The United States, Israel and four other countries voted against the non-binding resolution.
As the violence raced from town to town Friday, it was the clearest measure of the Palestinians’ willingness to continue to fight with the Israelis despite the high cost in lives lost and injuries suffered.
For their part, the Israelis showed their might, filling the West Bank roads with military patrols and sealing Palestinian cities and villages back under a tight state of siege, only one day after they had lifted their shutdown as part of the Sharm el-Sheik agreement.
With the new clampdown on travel, Palestinian health officials complained that sick patients were not able to get to medical facilities, and medical staff could not visit small villages, where a large number of Palestinians live.
When Arab snipers hit several apartments in Gilo, a Jerusalem neighborhood not far from Bethlehem, the Israelis relied on helicopter gunships to try to knock out the snipers, and the image of such intense fighting in the capital fed Israelis’ worst fears that they were being dragged back to the 1948 war when Arabs and Jews fought door to door.
“It is a very dangerous situation. It is deteriorating, and I think getting worse,” said Saeb Erekat, a top negotiator for the Palestinians.
Israeli officials were equally adamant that the situation was veering out of control and that they were not the ones to blame.
“What we have seen in the last 48 hours is more violence than before. We have seen that the incitement and violence is continuing and the Palestinian authority has done little to stop the fighting,” said Avi Pazner, an Israeli government spokesman.
The government is considering where to call a timeout in its bargaining with the Palestinians because the conflict has made it impossible to continue with the peace process, Pazner said.
Actually, the peace process slammed to a halt this summer when the two sides failed to reach an agreement at U.S.-brokered talks at Camp David, and U.S. diplomats were searching for ways to simply restart the process when the conflict erupted.
Like a crashing wave, clashes spread across the West Bank, reaching into small alleyways and major avenues. One of the most lethal incidents took place on a road just south of Nablus as Palestinians fired from a clump of olive trees at Israeli soldiers. The soldiers fired back heavily, killing four of the Palestinians.
Israeli soldiers firing on rock-throwing demonstrators killed a 13-year-old in Ramallah, a 17-year-old in the village of Salfit and a 16-year-old in Qalqiliya.
Hundreds of mourners, many carrying rifles and pistols took part in the funeral ceremony for a Palestinian who was killed Thursday in a shootout between the Palestinians, the Israeli army and a busload of Israeli settlers, who were visiting a biblical site near Nablus.
Five of the Israelis were injured and one of them, a 64-year-old rabbi, died. At his funeral Friday,hundreds of settlers bemoaned the violence in the largely Arab communities where they lived but they vowed not to give up their right to live on land that they say should belong to Israel.
