HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK ---------------------------Israel and Palestine
From here to Palestine
From The Economist print edition
By accident, Ariel Sharon may have created an opportunity for peace
ARIEL SHARON invaded the West Bank in order, he said, to uproot terrorism and isolate Yasser Arafat. In the casbah of Nablus, the Jenin refugee camp and other towns and villages, Israeli soldiers appear to have killed several hundred armed Palestinians, and by most accounts many unarmed ones too. But it is Mr Sharon, not Mr Arafat, whom this onslaught has isolated. By defying the demands to withdraw issued by the United Nations, the United States and almost everyone else, Mr Sharon has enraged Israel's enemies, alienated its friends, and blackened its name in the court of world opinion.
To judge by his rising popularity at home, Israelis consider their international reputation a price worth paying for better odds of not being blown up on the bus to work. But the personal safety Mr Sharon promises them is illusory. The daily suicide attacks that provoked Israel's invasion stopped for nine days after the army went in, only to resume on the tenth. If Mr Arafat's fief were a state, it might be deterred from future violence by Israel's overwhelming force. But it is now even less of a state than it was before, less able than before to restrain the suicide bombers even if Mr Arafat wanted to. And in the meantime it is not only Israel's good name that Mr Sharon is destroying. He is also destroying something more precious: the belief of Israelis and Palestinians alike in the possibility of a just compromise between the claims of the two peoples.
Trapped in their endless blame game, each side accuses the other of killing hope. Both are right, in that both have failed. Mr Arafat has failed to honour his promise under the Oslo accords to prevent the territories he controls from being used as a springboard for guerrilla and terrorist attacks on Israel. But Mr Sharon has failed to offer Palestinians any believable prospect that they might realise their aims by non-violent means.
If this were just a case of refusing to bend under fire, Mr Sharon's failure might be forgivable; most Israelis believe that surviving depends on showing no weakness. The trouble with Mr Sharon is that he seems not to accept the principle upon which any imaginable peace must rest, namely Israel's evacuation of most of the land it conquered in 1967, so that a viable Palestinian state can arise in the West Bank and Gaza. Right now, he weeps crocodile tears over the collapse of the Oslo process he never supported. But under cover of fighting terrorism, he shows every sign of wanting to resurrect the vision of a “Greater Israel”, for ever in charge of the West Bank, which inspired Likud governments in the 1970s and 1980s.
In the Knesset this week, Mr Sharon promised to withdraw his army from the newly occupied territories, but only to “buffer zones”; to negotiate with a “responsible” Palestinian leadership, but not with Mr Arafat; and to seek a “long-term interim agreement”, not a final peace. He also expanded his government to take in the National Religious Party, led now by an ultra-nationalist who opposes any Palestinian sovereignty west of the River Jordan and predicts the eventual migration of the Palestinians out of the country.
If this is the fate that awaits the Palestinians after a ceasefire, Colin Powell, America's secretary of state, will have been wasting his time trying to arrange one. For such a ceasefire has absolutely no prospect of lasting. Having endured 35 years of long-term interim occupation, the Palestinians are in no mood to submit again to Israel's iron fist. As for Mr Arafat, it is no use Mr Sharon calling Mr Powell's decision to meet the Palestinian leader a “tragic mistake”. Like him or loathe him, whether he has condoned terrorism or not, he is the only leader whose legitimacy the Palestinians and therefore the rest of the world are prepared to recognise. If there is to be any sort of negotiated peace, it is going to need Mr Arafat's imprimatur.
A negotiated peace looks more remote than ever. So the priority of George Bush, wary of tangling himself as Bill Clinton did in the arcane grievances of Arabs and Israelis, is to put out the fire before it spreads and complicates his plans for Iraq. But what a pity if this were the limit of his ambition. If the present mayhem shows anything, it is that the fire cannot be doused without also reviving hope. Israelis need to be able to hope that the terror will end without their soldiers having to stay in the West Bank to fight it. And Palestinians need to be able to hope that if the terror ends, the occupation will end too.
If America is serious about restoring hope, it cannot rely on its existing three-step plan for ending the intifada: a ceasefire, followed by resumed security co-operation, followed by confidence-building measures such as a freeze on Jewish settlements. For a paradoxical consequence of Mr Sharon's war is that this progression of modest steps now looks even less realistic than an immediate “leap” to a final peace. The Palestinian policemen fighting today alongside Palestinian gunmen cannot be expected to turn their brethren over to Israel tomorrow. Israel cannot be expected to trust them to. And even if some miracle eventually got them to the negotiating table, the gap between Messrs Sharon and Arafat looks unbridgeable.
This is why it is now time to risk that leap to a final settlement. This can no longer be based, as Oslo was, on the two sides making their own agreements and learning over time to trust one another; the gradualism of Oslo built hate, not confidence. So outsiders will have to do the work. For example, since Mr Arafat cannot or will not clamp down on terrorism, why not send an international force—armed, not just “monitors”—to take charge of security in the areas under his control? Since the parties cannot negotiate secure borders, as Resolution 242 of 1967 asked them to, why not have world powers—the “quartet”, say, of America, the UN, the European Union and Russia—map out such borders for them, and set a deadline for Palestinian independence? None of this would help a jot unless those powers, and especially the superpower, put sustained pressure on both sides to comply. But how disgraceful it would be if the answer to those “why nots?” was that the world at large, while calling piously for both sides to see reason, simply lacked the will to save them from each other.
http://www.economist.com/opinion/displayStory.cfm?story_id=1077489
--------------------------- ANTI-NATO INFORMATION LIST
==^================================================================ This email was sent to: archive@jab.org EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84x2u.a9617B Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] T O P I C A -- Register now to manage your mail! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/register ==^================================================================
