10 - 16 May 2001
Issue No.533
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 10 - 16 May 2001 Issue No.533 |
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Isolating Sharon
The Mitchell report was less than most Palestinians wanted and more than Ariel Sharon bargained for. But what can be done with it, asks Graham Usher from Jerusalem
Nearly seven months after it was commissioned by the Sharm Al-Sheikh summit on 17 October, the fact-finding committee led by former US Senator George Mitchell presented last weekend its preliminary report into the causes of the present "Israeli-Palestinian violence", otherwise known as the Al-Aqsa Intifada.
Mohamed Hajo mourns his four-month old daughter Iman, killed during the Israeli bombardment of a refugee camp in Khan Yunis. (photo: AFP)See: Appeal of the Palestinian people to the world on the occasion of 15 May
Handed simultaneously to both the Israeli government and the PLO on 5 May, the two sides now have seven days to suggest changes to the text. It will then be presented to the US president as a possible basis to end the violence and resume negotiations.
On receipt of the report Yasser Arafat immediately called for a "second" Sharm Al-Sheikh summit to establish a "mechanism" to put Mitchell's recommendations into practice. PLO negotiator Yasser Abed Rabbo, who received the report on behalf of the Palestinian leader, also declared that Mitchell's recommendations, together with the Egyptian-Jordanian initiative, contained "elements" that could bring about an end to the present conflict.
On the surface, PLO officials' "positive" and "initial" endorsement of the report is surprising, since its recommendations square with neither their public analysis of the causes of the uprising nor with the minimum Palestinian opinion would appear ready to accept.
For example, and contrary to every official Palestinian declaration for the last seven months, the report does not find Ariel Sharon's visit to the Al-Aqsa mosque compound on 28 September the cause of the uprising, although "it was poorly timed and its provocative effect should have been foreseen". More significant, the report continues, was "the decision of the Israeli police on 29 September to use lethal means against Palestinian demonstrators" at Al-Aqsa and "the subsequent failure of either party to exercise restraint".
Nor does the report support the Palestinians' call for an "international force" to provide protection to Palestinian civilians in the occupied territories because "to be effective such a force would need the support of both parties".
Finally, and more damagingly, the report reinforces a spurious equivalence between the violence of an occupying power and the violence of a people under occupation. It thus condemns in equal measure the "lethal force of the Israeli soldiers against unarmed demonstrators" and the "Palestinian gunmen [who] have directed small arms fire at Israeli settlements and army positions from within, or adjacent to, Palestinian areas".
But the report does accept that "a cessation of Palestinian-Israeli violence will be particularly hard to sustain unless the Israeli government freezes all settlement construction, including the 'natural growth' of existing settlements". Moreover, Israel "should give careful consideration to whether settlements which are focal points for substantial friction" with the Palestinians "are valuable bargaining chips for future negotiations or provocations likely to preclude the onset of productive talks" -- a diplomatic way of calling for these settlements' removal.
It was these recommendations that rattled Ariel Sharon and Shimon Peres, who were anticipating the usual generic criticism of Israel's settlements but not a specific demand to end their construction. On the other hand, for the Palestinian leadership these clauses were the gold in the quartz, especially for that wing that has long wanted an out from the uprising.
This is not because anyone is so naive as to believe a government that includes Sharon as premier, Nathan Sharansky as Housing Minister and Avigdor Lieberman as Infrastructure Minister is going to approve a freeze on settlement construction. It is rather that Mitchell's trade-off of a freeze for a cease-fire is now the diplomatic fulcrum around which a consensus can be built to isolate Sharon's government, internationally and domestically.
That consensus is starting to coalesce. Its basis lies in the Egyptian-Jordanian initiative, which also calls for "a total and immediate freeze on all settlement activities" and which, as a formula for the resumption of negotiations, has won the backing of several European states, Russia and, implicitly, the UN's special envoy to the region. It has also started to puncture the hitherto wall-to-wall Israeli consensus behind Sharon that there can be no negotiations without "the complete cessation of hostilities".
On 6 May a poll in Israel's Yediot Aharonot newspaper found that 62 per cent of Israelis supported a settlement freeze for a cease-fire in the occupied territories, a remarkable finding given that a similar percentage expressed themselves "satisfied" with Sharon's handling of the crisis. This mass opinion galvanised dissident Labour Party members like Yossi Beilin, the Meretz opposition and the dormant Peace Now movement to form an "alternative peace coalition" to the war coalition currently governing Israel.
The great imponderable in this emerging coalition remains the Americans. On the one hand, there are signs that the US is becoming a little peeved with Israel's rampant settlement policies, with the State Department on Tuesday condemning Sharon's recent decision to invest another $350 million in settlement growth in the occupied territories. On the other, say Palestinian sources, rarely has the White House been so cold to Palestinian entreaties that the "security" provided by a cease-fire must be coupled with the political achievement represented by a settlement freeze.
As for Sharon, he will almost certainly use every means available, from incursions into Palestinian-controlled areas like Beit Jala to bombardments of Palestinian civilian areas in Khan Yunis, to elicit a Palestinian military response, scupper all talk of a cease-fire and lift all pressure for a settlement freeze.
These responses will come unless the world, for once, calls Israel's bluff. For the Israeli "peace coalition", this means taking to the streets in favour of a settlement freeze and regardless of the level of hostilities in the occupied territories. And for Europe and the Arabs, it means using the various instruments they have in their hands to sanction Israel economically for its settlement policies and quarantine it politically for its ongoing war crimes against Palestinian civilians.
Then Israeli Jewish opinion may start to get the message: it can have a cease-fire and a negotiating process with the Palestinians and the relative sense of security these bring or it can have settlement expansion and Sharon. It cannot have both.
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