Ariel Sharon starts barrage of flak after air raid

By Jeff Abramowitz

JERUSALEM (DPA): Whatever its military achievements, the recent Israeli air strike against Palestinian targets has unleashed barrage of criticism against Israeli Premier Ariel Sharon.

Although Sharon justified the use of F-16 fighter planes, saying that while he would compromise politically, he would never compromise militarily, commentators in Israel were almost unanimous in their analysis that strike was at best an over- reaction, at worst a terrible tactical mistake.

The Israeli strike came hours after a Palestinian suicide bomber killed himself and five Israelis at the entrance to a shopping mall on Friday morning.

The question the analysts -- and the more thoughtful Israeli -- are asking is whether the F-16 strike was launched out of a desire for revenge, or whether it indicated a new Israeli tactic of escalating the conflict.

A source in Sharon's bureau was quoted in the Yediot Aharanot daily Sunday as saying that with the F-16 strike, Israel sent a clear message to Palestinian President Yasser Arafat that if fatal attacks inside Israel should continue then Israel would "be forced to act even more aggressively".

Ze'ev Schiff, doyen of Israeli military analysts, wrote in the Ha'aretz daily that none of the targets chosen for the air strike justified the use of F-16 war planes.

Instead, he said, the air strike "escalated the limited war between Israel and the Palestinians to a new, more extreme and dangerous level".

Commentator Sever Plotzker went even further in the Yediot Aharanot daily, saying outright that the air strikes -- which he called "pointless" -- "intensified the nervousness and feeling that we are deteriorating toward war".

"What we have here is a loss of balance in this whole conflict," former Israeli Air Force commander Eitan Ben-Eliahu told Israel Army Radio.

While the air strike may have satisfied some atavistic desire on the part of Israelis for revenge, the fact that Israel used fighter planes against West Bank targets for the first time since 1967 indicates that the previous policy of using helicopters failed to achieve the aim of forcing the Palestinians to lay down their arms.

Writing in Ha'aretz Sunday, Doron Rosenblum noted that "sending in F-16's ... for a failed strike against a few Kalashnikov-bearing gunmen in Nablus, almost at the end of the aircrafts' runway, symbolizes the depth of the desperation, the dizzy spin, the political and military bankruptcy reached by the Sharon government after 100 days in office".

"What would happen," he asked, "after a terror attack in which 20 people were killed? An atomic bomb on Ramallah?"

All Israeli analysts were unanimous that the Israeli action would not bring about a cease-fire.

"There should be no mistake: more bombing of this type will not make the Palestinians raise a white flag ... After eight months of fighting they say they have nothing to lose and have only one option: to keep fighting," analyst Roni Shaked pointed out in Yediot.

Most Israeli criticism, however was concerned with the diplomatic fallout after the bombing raid, rather than its military usefulness.

"Under the present circumstances and timing, I wouldn't send an F- 16 up into the air because of the consequences of such a step could be extremely harsh," former Air Force commander Ben- Eliahu said.

Respected commentator Hemi Shalev, writing in the Ma'ariv daily, wrote that "military speaking the F-16's achieved rather negligible results, but in terms of diplomacy and public relations, Israel bombed itself in the knee."

In the space of eight months, Shalev lamented, the Israeli- Palestinian confrontations "have gone from the M-16 rifle to the F-16 plane".