Israel, Middle East
Review of the Year OTHER COUNTRIES Israel and the Middle East Israel X HE VIOLENCE THAT BEGAN in late 2000 and continued all through 2001—featuring Palestinian suicide bombings aimed at pro- ducing a maximum of Israeli casualties, and Israeli reprisals—did not abate in 2002; in fact, it intensified. Tough new measures by the Likud- led coalition, including stepped-up "targeted killings'1 of terror kingpins and large-scale incursions into Palestinian areas—such as Operation De- fensive Shield in the spring—brought only temporary halts to the attacks on Israelis and sharp criticism from around the world. An exception to the unsympathetic attitude toward Israel in world cap- itals was that of the American government. Although President George W. Bush became the first president explicitly to call for a Palestinian state, he delivered a speech on June 24 announcing that the Palestinian National Authority would have to undergo democratization, renounce terror, and select new leadership (that is, not Yasir Arafat) first. Toward the end of the year, with a U.S. strike on Iraq looming, the U.S., the UN, the European Union (EU), and the chief European powers promoted a "road map," charting steps that Israel and the Palestinians might take to reach an ultimate settlement. The security crisis loomed large over Israeli life. The economy, already hard-hit by more than a year of violence, suffered further blows. And while the Labor Party left the coalition and brought down the government on October 30 ostensibly over a budgetary matter, what was really at stake was whether Labor could devise a strategy for stopping the bloodshed that would be both different from Likud's and convincing to the voters.
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