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Rehavem Zeevi, 75, a retired general, who founded the nationalist Moledet (Homeland) Party, became the first Israeli minister to die at Arab hands.
His resignation as the head of the hard-line National Union-Yisrael Beitenu was to have taken effect at 2 p.m. today, four hours after he died in Hadassah hospital. Despite strenuous resuscitation efforts, he never recovered from the two head wounds he sustained outside his Jerusalem hotel room at 7 a.m.
The bloc’s co-leader, Infrastructure Minister Avigdor Lieberman, invited to the ministerial emergency consultation called by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon this morning, is expected to suspend or withdraw the six-man bloc’s resignation from the government.
Israel’s response to the murder will be predicated on a number of considerations:
- The carefully planned assassination was carried out by a Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine hit man or hit team. According to one theory, the killers may have posed as foreign tourists staying in the hotel; according to another, they came from Ramallah after the Israeli closure was lifted from the Palestinian town in this week’s package of relaxations.
- PFLP headquarters are located in Damascus. Its spokesman spoke over the Lebanon-based Hezbollah TV station when he announced the minister was slain to avenge the liquidation by Israel of PFLP secretary general Abu Ali Mustafa in Ramallah last month.
- The police and Shin Beit have launched a joint inquiry, to which “international investigators” will be co-opted. The ramifications of the killing of Rehavam Zeevi are therefore extreme and far-reaching. The first response from foreign minister Shimon Peres, a political opponent of the murdered minister, was: “If Arafat does not take measures, everything will go up in flames.” This statement places the Palestinian Authority squarely in the middle of the target area for retaliation.
Clearly any operational decisions taken by the Israeli government will be coordinated with the U.S. government, itself in the middle of a war on international terror.
In this regard, military sources report the United States has been massing naval strength, including Marine units aboard an aircraft carrier, in the eastern Mediterranean opposite the Syrian and Lebanese coasts. The Israeli and Turkish armies, air forces and navies are in a state of preparedness.
Washington has also hardened its tone against Syria’s sponsorship of terrorist groups, 11 of which call Damascus home. U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage in his most recent conversations voiced strong personal condemnation of President Bashar Assad with Arab rulers on the American campaign against world terror. Syria’s deputy chief of staff, Gen. Ali Aslan, was pinpointed as the overlord of Syria’s intelligence and logistical ties with those terrorist groups.
An American diplomat who declined to be named warned that if Syria failed not only to sever its ties with the terrorist world, including the Hezbollah, but to crack down on them, Damascus could find itself at the receiving end of a few Tomahawk missiles. Such harsh words against Syria have not been heard from American officials for many years.
According to intelligence sources, both the U.S. and Israeli governments have received accounts of a stepped-up flow of armaments to the Hezbollah by sea. The new supplies include automatic anti-air 23-mm and 49-mm cannons, which are most effective against helicopters, and various types of Katyusha rockets, including Iranian-made long-range weapons.
The Iranian sealift to the Hezbollah is intended to equip the group to fight off an American or an Israeli assault or, alternatively, to enable the Shi’ite militants to launch their own assault against northern Israel as soon as American troops land in Afghanistan.
Therefore, the crisis emanating from the assassination of Rehavam Zeevi this morning in Jerusalem is closely bound up with the Palestinians, Syria, Lebanon and Washington’s strategy on Afghanistan and Iraq.
President Bush may therefore be presumed to be consulting with his top advisers on the fresh emergency, at the same time as the prime minister’s conference in Jerusalem. Both forums will be considering whether the assassination will lead to a fresh arena being added to America’s war against terror through an armed Israeli retaliation against Syria and Lebanon – not to speak of the Palestinians.
It is possible that the U.S. government will decide to strike separately against Syria or Lebanon. There are increasing indications that the poison substances used in the devastating biological war leveled against America, most probably by Osama Bin Laden and militants of the Egyptian Jihad Islami, originated in Iraq. Thus far, the Bush government has not finalized the hard decision to launch a major offensive against Saddam Hussein. Hitting Syria or Lebanon could buy the Americans more time for this fateful decision.
Strategic experts point to the likely targets of a military offensive in Syria and/or Lebanon if this is decided upon in the coming hours. These include Syrian bases and strategic points in the Lebanese Bekaa Valley, Baalbek, Beirut’s environs and even locations in northern Syria itself.
If an attack is confined to Lebanon, then the assault is likely to focus on the north Lebanese Palestinian center of Naher al-Bared and the Ein Hilweh Palestinian refugee camp near Sidon, where groups linked to Al Qaeda are based.
Judging from the past, there is another option to be treated seriously — that both the United States and Israel will decide not to decide for the moment.
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