Pressure mounts for Sharon to arrive at endgame

For Israeli army officials, the preliminary numbers spell success: 1,100 Palestinians arrested; 50 rocket-propelled grenades, seven explosive devices, and 173 pistols captured as of Wednesday evening, according to an army announcement released yesterday.

Operation Defensive Shield, Israel's name for the incursions into West Bank cities launched after a string of devastating Palestinian suicide bombings, is officially aimed at destroying the Palestinian "terrorist infrastructure."

But beyond the numbers, what does Israel hope the West Bank will look like when it winds up its largest military campaign in a generation? Analysts say that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has left the country in the dark.

Their questions are reinforced by his track-record in Lebanon in 1982, when, as defense minister, he promised a brief, limited antiterrorism campaign and instead took the army all the way to Beirut in a failed bid to smash the PLO and install a pro-Israeli regime there.

Some Israeli analysts believe that one of the major casualties of this operation will be the Palestinian Authority, and they assert that Sharon will expel Yasser Arafat unless he is restrained by the United States and his Labor party coalition partner.

Although President Bush, who spoke yesterday on the Mideast crisis, telegraphed American support for a quick Israeli withdrawal from the Occupied Territories, and for using the Palestinian Authority as a channel to restrain terrorists, his words on Arafat contained a vote of no confidence.

"[Arafat] has missed his opportunities and thereby betrayed the hopes of his people," Bush said. "Given his failure, the Israeli government feels it must strike at the terrorist networks that are killing its citizens."

Analysts looking at Israel's future options differ on whether Sharon is trying to pave the way for a more pliable alternative to the Palestinian Authority's current leadership, or whether he simply thinks Arafat must go and has not planned beyond that.

"The government is saying we killed so and so, but there seems to be no plan and no goal," says Reuven Pedhatzur, a political scientist at Tel Aviv University. "The worst thing a government can do is to go to war without a goal."

Mr. Sharon himself did nothing to solve that puzzle when he told soldiers on Tuesday that their task was to "arrest terrorists and potential suicide bombers" so that Israel could resume discussions on a US ceasefire blueprint and de-escalation steps. "When we finish these stages we will come to a discussion of the political settlement. There are several possibilities. We are not dealing with this now, and we do not have to be dealing with this."

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