Your letter http://www.haaretz.co.il/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=125854&contrassID=2&subContrassID=4&sbSubContrassID=0&listSrc=Y&itemNo=125854 People and Politics Waiting for the peace marchers By Akiva Eldar Ha'aretz -- Feb. 5, 2002 Arafat: Swords into plowshares? According to a well-placed military source, just before Tanzim commander Raed Karmi was killed, Yasser Arafat was closer than ever to a decision to order the armed intifada to switch to nonviolent civil disobedience. The terrorist attacks and the shootings that followed Karmi's "work accident," as Defense Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer referred to his assassination, postponed the change - but didn't cancel it. At the Palestinian Authority offices in Ramallah, officials are studying the way South African blacks challenged apartheid. Arafat has lately been speaking of a march on Jerusalem. The flood of articles written by Palestinian leaders for the Israeli and American press are an indication of the desire to turn the swords into plowshares. Israel's security services have also heard about the attempt to organize nonviolent demonstrations. At various levels of the army, they are trying to figure out how to cope with a scenario in which thousands of unarmed Palestinians march from Ramallah, Jericho and Bethlehem, toward the army checkpoints with which the IDF has surrounded Jerusalem. One question bothering the field commanders, for example, is what should a platoon commander do if his soldiers are faced with hundreds of women and Palestinian school children carrying only peace placards, walking toward the settlement of Psagot? What if dozens of marches leave at the same time from all over the West Bank, heading toward the settlements that surround them? The answers coming up in the internal discussions are that tanks and helicopters are useless against demonstrators armed with peace posters. The IDF is also preparing for an opposite scenario: how to deal with the PA's own security forces if they launch a coordinated assault on the settlements. What would the IDF do if Jibril Rajoub and Mohammed Dahlan, who have begun coordinating their activities, decide they have nothing left to lose and officially turn the PA into the "enemy"? The answer: tanks and choppers will demolish the police headquarters and reconquer the Palestinian cities. But the tanks and helicopters won't be very useful running occupied Palestinian cities. It turns out that the civil administration has not tried to run hospitals and schools in Ramallah for a long time. The most fashionable expressions nowadays in army slang are "civilian leverage" and "the price of defeat." During military exercises, one can hear a commander urging on his officers with "give them some civilian leverage," or "make them feel the price of defeat." Translation: Cut off the electricity to a neighborhood in Ramallah, or bomb the Palestinian TV station. Along with "security for the residents of Binyamin" - meaning settlers - which leaves no room for doubt about what the IDF is fighting for, the "strategy" coming down the chain of command from Chief of Staff Shaul Mofaz to the unit operations officers is uniform and unified: "The price of defeat the Palestinians have to pay must be as high as possible, to guarantee that our situation in the negotiations after we win the war will be better than it was beforehand." That's the same Mofaz who charged the opponents of military service in the territories with hidden political motives. Ever the tactician After he heard about Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's meeting with the three Palestinian leaders, another Palestinian official, who was not invited to the prime minister's residence, asked an Israeli acquaintance to explain why the premier needed the meeting - and why he then hurried to tell everyone about it as soon as it was over, getting himself into trouble with Benny Elon. "Don't tell me Sharon needs to please the Americans before he goes to Washington," said the Palestinian. "We all know that there's no American pressure on him to change his policies." The Palestinians are convinced that the American-Israeli game is fixed. But, presumably along with the reports of the warm greeting he can expect in Washington, Sharon also has read about the pressure the Europeans, Egyptians and Saudi Arabians are applying on the Americans. The EU's Javier Solana, for example, is telling the Bush administration that the Mitchell report, which Solana helped write, has exhausted its usefulness. The meeting with Arafat's envoys was therefore meant to provide Bush and his people with ammunition for repelling the ideas raised by the Europeans and the Arabs - like holding a Palestinian election or referendum. The Europeans suggest that after the voting, the international observers of the ballot boxes could move over to the Palestinian prisons, to make sure the Palestinians do indeed keep the arrested terrorists under lock and key. Sharon - and Shimon Peres - stubbornly reject the European and Canadian offer to bring the observers in through the back door, by beefing up the small European unit that conducts security coordination in the territories. Its head, Alistaire Crooke, has experience in Ireland and Afghanistan, and is doing a lot behind the scenes to calm things in the territories. But mostly, the late night visit to the Sharon's official residence was meant to serve Sharon's real purpose: to keep Peres shackled to the government. People in the government and Knesset corridors say Peres has his sad sack look. His associates insist that he's been looking for a way out of the government, which makes no effort to even express readiness for a political settlement with the Palestinians. If Peres was looking for an excuse, the meeting between Sharon and the three Palestinians on Wednesday night, and the leak about it on Friday, has undermined the search completely. Coalition games Yossi Beilin, whose political patron was Shimon Peres, has stopped counting on an exodus of his friends from the Labor Party. Last week he and Yuli Tamir went to a meeting where the Peace Coalition decided to start the largest, most expensive peace campaign since the start of the intifada. Yesterday they took off for Germany, to take part in a meeting with Palestinians organized by German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, who wants to prove that Arafat and Sharon aren't everything. Seven organizations are participating in the events that begin the day after tomorrow: Peace Now, Meretz, Labor doves, the Kibbutz Movement, Shomer Hatzair, Netivot Shalom, and Green Line. Hundreds of activists have already begun organizing for a series of demonstrations to take place between now and June. They plan to invade the highway intersections, offering drivers a sheaf of bumper stickers, with slogans like "Leave the territories to return to ourselves," "Leave the territories and clean up the economy," and "Leave the territories and save the state." At the end of a lengthy debate with Tamir, among others, Beilin finally agreed to include a call for "some unilateral steps" that would include immediate evacuation of the settlements in Gaza and in the heart of the Palestinian population in the West Bank. It will be interesting to see if Knesset Speaker Avraham Burg, one of the new activists in the Peace Coalition, shows up on Thursday for the demonstration aimed against the policies of the coalition in which his party continues to star.