Seattle Post-Intelligencer · 6 February 2001

CP-2001-045

Fear detours peace on Israel’s deadly Route 443

Voters angry with Barak are poised to elect hawk Sharon

BY CHARLES M. SENNOTT / The Boston Globe

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Transcribed from the clipping

MODI’IN, Israel — In the long shadows of Friday afternoon, when Israelis are usually rushing home or picking up groceries for the weekend, Route 443 between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem was dead quiet. This stretch of road is the shortest distance between Israel’s two major cities, the thinking commuter’s alternative to the often-jammed eight-lane Highway 1.

Using Route 443, which winds in and out of the Israeli-occupied West Bank, can save you a half-hour on your commute, but these days it can also get you killed. In recent weeks, two Israelis have been shot dead and seven wounded in drive-by shootings by Palestinians.

And as Israelis prepare to vote today for prime minister, this road, and the fact that Israelis are now afraid to drive it, runs straight to the core issue of this election: fear.

After four months of a spiraling Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the collapsing dialogue over a final peace agreement, Israelis interviewed along this road express a sense of vulnerability, a fear for their very survival that they say this country has not known since the war that marked the founding of the Jewish state in 1948.

This grim reality has made voters angry, not simply at the Palestinian leadership, which they believe has directed the violence, but more pointedly at Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who has been unable to stop it, either by diplomacy or by force.

If the public opinion polls are correct, the Labor Party’s Barak is about to face a stunning defeat to opposition Likud Party leader Ariel Sharon, who in Friday’s polls led by 18 percentage points. Campaign signs along Route 443 last week overwhelmingly favored Sharon, the 72-year-old former general and defense minister.

Loathed by the Israeli left and the Palestinian public for leading the bloody 1982 invasion of Lebanon and engineering the expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, the legendary hawk has concocted a campaign slogan his critics find almost surreal: “Only Sharon Can Bring Peace.” Both candidates speak of peace, but the mood is of war.

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