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« on: October 13, 2003, 01:41:18 PM » |
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Sharon's Target Is Not Arafat, But Palestinian Solidarity
Guardian (UK) October 10, 2003
Sharon's target is not Arafat, but Palestinian solidarity
Until Hamas is drawn into a political role there can be no peace
Martin Woollacott
Not long after Bush's big speech last summer, in which he called for two states, Israeli and Palestinian, living side by side in peace, important negotiations began. There were the talks between the US, the EU, Russia, and the UN which produced the "road map" for progress towards a final settlement between Israelis and Palestinians. But there were also more clandestine and equally critical encounters between the two main political and military forces in Palestinian life, Fatah and Hamas.
The compelling reason for these two movements to come together was that otherwise any progress towards what outsiders, and the Israelis, would call peace would produce a civil war among Palestinians. The Palestinian Authority under Yasser Arafat had never had the means (nor, the Israelis would say, the intention) of suppressing, as opposed to occasionally harassing, Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
Even less capable of such action was the new Palestinian government under Mahmoud Abbas, which later emerged in the first phase of the application of the road map. This was partly because Arafat denied him full control of the security forces and partly because he, in any case, thought it would be madness, as well as fratricide, to take on Hamas.
The logic for the Palestinians was clear enough well before Mahmoud Abbas took over, however sceptical they were about Ariel Sharon's real plans. To show willingness to meet the conditions laid down for a settlement between Israelis and Palestinians there had first to be a settlement among Palestinians. Violence against the Israelis could only be effectively curbed if there were such a settlement, under which Hamas could look forward to a role in government and a share in power in a Palestinian state.
It is not the least of Ariel Sharon's sins in recent months that he has done his utmost to destroy the possibility that such an internal settlement could be reached, jeopardising all that it might have meant in terms of a halt to, and in time a renunciation of, suicide bombing. And it is not the least of the American administration's failure to "ride herd" on the two sides, to use Bush's phrase, that the Americans have not only let Sharon get away with it but have gone along with his representation of the breakdown as the fault of terrorists and of Arafat. That has been in truth the essence of the deviousness of Sharon and his cohorts.
For all that, Israelis have demonised Arafat. The fulminations about him conceal the fact that Sharon's real target has not been the old man in the Ramallah compound but the capacities and the strengths, including the capacity to resolve its own differences politically, of Palestinian society. As a matter of policy, his government has insisted at every turn that the Palestinian Authority must disarm and dismantle Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and that the combination of truce and ceasefire which Mahmoud Abbas achieved was acceptable only as the prelude to a full assault on them once the authority had the strength to do so. And as a matter of day-to-day tactics, the Israeli government persisted with its assassinations of Hamas and Islamic Jihad leaders in such a way as to provoke fresh suicide attacks. To put it more bluntly, at a time when Hamas might have been embarking on a transition from terrorism to politics, Israel acted in such a way as to close off that possibility. Whether this was wholly calculated cannot be determined. Certainly, it has had the same effect as if it had been.
The Palestinian negotiations began in Qatar over a year ago, and continued on and off in other places until they were caught up, and changed, by the efforts to clear the way for the road map to come into operation. At which point the Egyptian government tried to play the role of mediator. Initially, they were about a national unity government but that was not an immediate option in the context of the road map, given the likely Israeli reaction, so they shifted to discussion of a truce.
Jihad Al Khazen, the distinguished Al Hayat journalist, who has been a consistent opponent of suicide bombing, played a part in bringing the two sides together for their early meetings in Qatar and elsewhere. He later watched in dismay as the truce frayed with each Israeli strike against Hamas and Islamic Jihad and with the retaliatory attacks which followed, in part because Hamas lost control of its own hierarchy.
The new Palestinian prime minister, Ahmed Qureia, has Arafat's backing in a way which his predecessor did not, and he is armed with a decree proclaiming a state of emergency. Yet, just like Abbas and for the same reasons, he is pursuing a restoration of the truce, but under worse circumstances. Hamas is in a deeply suspicious mood after attacks on its political leaders, another red line which Israel recently crossed. Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, who escaped one such attack, accused President Bush of "declaring war on Islam".
According to Jihad Al Khazen, the attitude of Hamas and Islamic Jihad leaders is "better to fight than to be killed at home with our children". Even so, some of their statements this week can be interpreted as meaning that if the Israelis called off their attacks and ceased demanding a crackdown by yet another new Palestinian government, the truce can be put back together again.
Whether that might be achieved depends in large part on the Israelis. Why, some may ask, should they not want it? One answer is that the road map says nothing about Palestinian deals and a great deal about dismantling terrorist structures. Yet the road map is not immune to amendment, as the Israelis, who proposed scores of changes to it and reserved their position on many points, well know.
Another answer is that the Israelis have no faith in a transformation of Hamas. Here the Israelis have an argument, and Hamas may well have used the truce, as they say, to recuperate and re- arm. Yet trying to draw Hamas into a political role is surely a better gamble than attempting its destruction by military means, either directly or by proxy, since such methods are so often counterproductive. Yet a third answer is that the Sharon administration is instinctively opposed to an internal Palestinian political bargain because it would strengthen the Palestinians and, especially, make them more resistant to any settlement that fell short of the 1967 borders. Hamas might conceivably decide to accept a 67 state and let its motto of "from the ocean to the river" stay in the land of rhetoric. But it would not stand for much less than 67, which is what Sharon has in mind.
At bottom, Sharon's strategy seems to be to break the Palestinians so completely that they can be cowed into accepting any political entity that he or a successor decrees. It is a strategy to which a Bush administration looking to keep its rightwing Christian votes (and to gain Jewish ones) offers only token resistance. It is not one which will bring peace.
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