A FIGHT TO

THE FINISH

Ehud Barak tells Tim Luckhurst that the

present conflict is as important for future generations as the second world war

AS the first missiles and bombs flew against Afghanistan. Israel reacted with studied calm. Prime Minister Sharon assessed the situation in a hastily convened meeting with his defence minister, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, and top security officials, but there was no repeat of his 5 October comments, when he compared American coalition-building in the Arab world to the British appeasement of Hitler. He declared, 'Israel will not be another Czechoslovakia' and provoked the White House into condemning his words as 'unacceptable'.

One Israeli diplomat compared the national mood to that at Jewish religious festivals: 'They tried to kill us all. We're still here. Let's eat.' That stoic determination to smile in the face of adversity informed the official advice offered to Israelis by the minister without portfolio, Tzipi Livni. Encouraging citizens to 'enjoy the upcoming holiday' (to celebrate the end of Succoth), Livni said, 'Israel is not currently in danger.. . . This is a war Israel is not an active participant in.'

That was not the view in Gaza or Bethlehem. Osama bin Laden's calculated appeal to Palestinian militants had been heard by Hamas and the gunmen of Yasser Arafat's own Fatah militia. The Palestinian territories burned as rioters fought policemen in internecine violence worse than anything that accompanied Arafat's support for Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait.

Israel watched in alarm as the PLO leadership opened fire on their own child rioters. But fear was being played down, and the unprecedented diplomatic froideur between Jerusalem and Washington had clearly thawed too. President Bush made a personal call to the Israeli leader to brief him on coalition plans 50 minutes before the attacks began. The response was warm.

For all his macho aggression, Sharon is too wise to push Israel's case under Bush's nose when he knows that American eyes are focused on more urgent business. But his fears remain real. Ariel Sharon worries that the nature of the coalition assembled to fight terror will define its strategic objectives. Osama bin Laden and the Taleban will be pursued with ruthless efficiency, but will the requirement to win Arab support persuade America to look with new enthusiasm at the Palestinian demand that the peace process be internationalised? Was that what Bush meant when he broke Republican tradition and referred to the desirability of a 'Palestinian state', so fuelling rumours that. before 11 September, the White House was planning a new Middle East initiative based on the urgent implementation of a two-state solution?

Sharon fears that taking such a course — before Palestinian terror attacks on Israel have stopped — would reward terror and imply a dangerous confusion in the global coalition assembled to fight it. His predecessor, Ehud Barak, understands the concern. Sharon, says Barak, is 'worried by the prospect of categorisation of terror into a bad one, which is of global reach, and a good one, so to speak, which is of only local reach, namely attacking Israel.'

Barak, a former chief of Israel's general staff, hero of the 1967 and 1973 wars and anti-terrorist veteran who once carried out a 'hit' in the Beirut suburbs by disguising himself as an Arab woman, is adamant that no such distinction will be drawn. He says the West is well aware of the links between antiWestern and anti-Israeli terror: `Hezbollah, which has a relationship with the Palestinians, are also active in Chechnya, and they are sponsored by Iran and have good relations with Hamas, which has its own relations with the Osama bin Laden people. And Osama bin Laden's people are well intertwined with the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. So, the people are the same . . . and it will become clear that you cannot put an end to the phenomena without putting an end to all of these elements.'

What, then, if the West decides to call a halt because the Taleban have been toppled and bin Laden killed? Barak is confident. Israel is going to benefit from the global campaign. 'Some people here are worried that the West may pay for the support of pragmatic Arab regimes by asking Israel to make concessions, but I believe that's far-fetched.'

Seizing on Sharon's appeasement allegations, Barak retorts, 'His choice of words in relation to the leaders of the world, calling them the equivalent of Chamberlain, is incongruent with reality and it doesn't serve Israel. If anything, you can say that Bush and Blair are now taking the mantles of Roosevelt and Churchill, not of Chamberlain.'

And Barak does not hesitate to push the analogy further. 'There will be no world order, no way of life of the West, if this struggle is not decided in an unconditional surrender of terror. I believe Bush and Blair understand that, It remains a challenge to convince people of the need to stand firm against many painful moments. I expect bin Laden to launch counterblows. But in the end we have the resources, the fighting spirit and the leadership that are appropriate for this challenge. This is the kind of war in which the magnitude of the meaning for future generations is the equivalent of what happened in World War Two.'

Barak's one-time colleague in the IDF, General Danny Rothschild, a former commander of Israeli forces in the occupied territories, shares this optimism. 'If you read Bush's lips, you'll see that he is saying this is a war which will have to include Iran and Iraq. I don't think Israel will lose at the end of the day.'

Many in Israel are less certain, One seasoned diplomat told me, 'The original rhetoric about principle was quickly rolled back. It ceased to be about morality and justice and became the allies versus bin Laden and the Taleban. If they get those two targets, they'll just stop. This campaign doesn't have enough petrol in its tank. Our fear is that we have always been the victim of efforts to build coalitions in the Middle East. We just ask ourselves why the hell the world doesn't finally understand us. We've been facing this shit for 30 years. Israel hasn't paid a price yet, but this coalition is not robust. It's much less robust than the alliance that confronted Iraq in 1990 and was too divided to finish the job.'

Ehud Barak rejects that, displaying a hint of the optimism about Arab regimes that undermined his premiership. He insists, 'All the Arabs that are supposed to be sitting on the fence and contemplating whether to support us will be happy to get rid of terror, It is pointed against them no less than against us.'

But even Barak acknowledges the danger facing Israel. 'The Arabs are afraid that we will fail along the way; that we will lose our appetite and they will be left alone, prey to the wrath of their own militant Islamic terror groups.' But he declares, 'I am not worried. I headed our intelligence community for a long time and I know from my experience as prime minister that the CIA and MI6 have the same information that we have.'

Barak's Likud predecessor, Binyamin Netanyahu, takes the middle ground between Barak's faith in Western resolve and Sharon's trepidation, In a speech delivered to Congress shortly before the allied raids on Afghanistan began, he warned: 'If we include Iran, Syria and the Palestinian Authority in the coalition to fight terror — even though they currently harbour, sponsor and dispatch terrorists — then the alliance against terror will be defeated from within. Perhaps we might achieve a short-term objective of destroying one terrorist fiefdom, but it will preclude the possibility of overall victory. Such a coalition will melt down because of its own internal contradictions. We might win a battle. We will certainly lose the war,' Netanyahu's cool analysis predicts the debate that must soon dominate Western thinking. It underlines the extent to which Israel's dilemma — what Ehud Barak calls the burden of this 'outpost of democratic and Western values surrounded by an ocean of Arab and Muslim backwardness and militancy' — has become the West's dilemma too. If Washington and London are to finish what they have started, they must heed the warnings evident on the streets of Gaza city and in the cities of Pakistan. Bin Laden has become a hero for millions who yearn for the destruction of Israel and consider that goal umbilically linked to terror attacks against the Great Satan and America's 'staunch friend' and ally, Great Britain. Ehud Barak says, 'I am fully confident,' Drawing on his personal acquaintance with the American and British premiers, he predicts, 'They are top-notch people. I have no doubt that they have not yet exposed or presented to their people the width of their goals and objectives in this campaign.'

Israel prays that is true. A West that stirs the hornets' nest of militant extremism but leaves the job unfinished will expose the only democracy in the Middle East to appalling risks. As the Jerusalem Post explained in an editorial published hours after the bombs began to fall, 'We join with the rest of the civilised world in hoping and praying that the action launched last night will bring about a safer and freer world for all: Arab and Jew, Christian and Muslim.'

Achieving that objective requires the 'moral clarity' for which Binyamin Netanyahu calls, and the martial valour of Ehud Barak who, after a lifetime spent fighting terror, declares, 'It is a winnable struggle.' But Barak is only right if his faith that the West has 'the technology, the resources, the fighting spirit and the leadership that are appropriate for the challenge' is vindicated. Osama bin Laden sees the war in which we are now engaged as a clash of civilisations. Israel, with all her traditions of democracy and dissent, knows that is true. At this time Britain and America can learn much from their only reliable Middle Eastern ally. Dare to think it: perhaps Silvio Berlusconi was right.