From the Bar-Lev Line to Sharon's

In retaliation for the killing of six Israeli soldiers at the Ein-Ariq roadblock, the Israel Defense Forces returned momentarily to its old self and carried out raids using ground forces, primarily against Palestinian roadblocks. Wherever the IDF operated wisely - that is, using surprise tactics - the enemy sustained considerable losses.

These operations were among the few that have really hurt the Palestinian army, demoralizing its soldiers, who ran for their lives, and provoking panic among Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat and his colleagues, who feared that if the micro-offensive were to go on, it would turn back the hands of the clock - Israel would change the nature of the military campaign and reestablish its deterrent power.

Arafat and company quickly set about pleading, through all possible channels, for a cease-fire. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, displaying the behavior typical of a seasoned soldier who knows the secret of exploiting success and the rule that you never stop a successful offensive in the middle of its execution, lost no time in accepting, for the 101st time, Arafat's promise that, this time, he would really keep his promise to uphold a truce.

After the IDF had halted its most effective operation since the outbreak of the present war of terror, the Palestinian leader showed that he knew how to honor agreements: The terrorist attacks perpetrated by his forces over the Purim holiday killed three Israeli citizens and an Israeli policewoman, and wounded about a dozen other Israelis; a roadside bomb was detonated alongside a bus and dozens of additional vehicles were shot at.

Instead of adopting the only language Arafat and his people understand - the language of Ein-Ariq, and mere hours after a terrorist attack had been thwarted in Haifa and three victims of terror had been buried, Shin Bet security service head Avi Dichter and the head of research in the IDF's Military Intelligence division, Brigadier General Yossi Kupperwasser, rushed to speak with the heads of the Palestinian security services in a language that can have only one result (after all, they have been using this same language for nearly a year-and-a-half): more Jews killed and wounded.

The IDF has disappointed Sharon. In his opinion, the army is not displaying sufficient "offensive creativity." Although, in several respects, his criticism is justified, he is prime minister, not head of the Opposition. He has been in office for 12 months and he has had enough time to correct the aberration he is lamenting.

If, from his perspective, it is neither effective nor moral for the IDF to don flak jackets and fortify itself to death, while Israelis remain exposed like sitting sitting ducks for terrorists, as happened in Nokdim and Atarot, he has had enough time to open the top brass' eyes to the negative ramifications of "fortification thinking." If, for example, senior IDF commanders are burying their heads in the sand of defensiveness, Sharon should have continued, the offensive after the Ein-Ariq attack that left six soldiers dead, rather than halting it; he should have utilized the success, thereby signaling to the IDF that if it wants to be a victorious army, this is the kind of successful operation it should be conducting.

From the lofty perch of his "state of the union" address, in which Sharon urged Israelis to be strong and to exhibit resoluteness and staying power, the prime minister offered the public an alternative to the static, fortified approach that has stemmed from recent security thinking. The secret, creative weapon he has invented so as to restore the IDF's image as a highly flexible, offense-oriented fighting force is a dividing line, from north to south, adjacent to the Green Line.

This creative line, which the prime minister would apparently love to have called the "Sharon Line," would be a fence with a network of mines and thousands of soldiers fortifying positions along the length of it - just like another historic line, the Bar-Lev Line along the Suez Canal, which, it may be recalled, thwarted Egyptian raids during the War of Attrition and, with much success, halted the Egyptian offensive in October 1973.

As it may be recalled, Sharon, then a young general, vigorously opposed that defensive line. He said that it would pin down large military formations that would be sitting ducks for deadly artillery attacks. It would be a static line, he passionately argued, while the IDF was a highly mobile army whose relative edge lied in its ability to wage a fast-moving war. The line, he repeatedly warned, would be penetrable by raids and infiltrations and, during an enemy invasion (his rivals, primarily former Palmach commanders, scorned this young defeatist), would simply collapse.

For the sake of historical accuracy, Sharon was one of several individuals who expressed reservations about the Bar-Lev Line (Where are these critics regarding the Sharon Line?), but he was certainly the most vocal and most determined. Along came the War of Attrition, with its hundreds of dead and thousands of wounded, and proved how foolish and deadly the Bar-Lev Line concept was. Along came the Yom Kippur War and proved, at a cost of more than a thousand dead and some 5,000 wounded, how right Sharon and the other critics were when they pointed to the drawbacks of an immobile line that was vulnerable to enemy penetration and pinned down thousands of soldiers who became sitting ducks in the enemy's sights.

Now, when almost the same arguments Sharon used against the Bar-Lev Line can be employed against the Sharon Line, does the prime minister intend to visit the grave of Haim Bar-Lev and beg his forgiveness for the slander he hurled at him before, and especially after, the Yom Kippur War, and to justify, after the fact, the very creation of the line?