27 Sep. - 3 Oct. 2001
Issue No.553
|
Al-Ahram Weekly Online 27 Sep. - 3 Oct. 2001 Issue No.553 |
||
| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Current issue | Previous issue | Site map | ||
Reality-check
The empire struck back this week -- and not only against the Palestinians. Graham Usher reports from Jerusalem
Two weeks after the attacks on America, and at the sixth attempt, Yasser Arafat finally met Shimon Peres yesterday at Gaza airport to consolidate the cease-fire the Palestinian leader had declared on 18 September.
The two men agreed on a statement, drafted in advance, based on the document drawn up by CIA chief George Tenet in June. The Palestinian Authority will resume security cooperation with Israel and take action to "apprehend, question and incarcerate terrorists in the West Bank and Gaza." Israel will gradually lift its blockades in occupied territories, withdraw soldiers from Palestinian towns and allow some permits for Palestinians to work.
There will be another meeting between Peres and Arafat in a week or so to assess how the "maximum efforts to sustain the cease-fire" are faring. This is definite, Peres told a meeting of Labour Party ministers on Tuesday. "It is not dependent on events".
The comment was wrapped in barbs. For the ostensible reason the meeting had been continually postponed were "events", particularly the Palestinians refusal to observe the "48 hours of quiet" Ariel Sharon had set as its condition. The refusal continued all the way to the wire.
Less than five hours before the meeting took place, and three miles from Gaza airport, a bomb exploded beneath an Israeli army base on Gaza's border with Egypt, leaving three soldiers wounded. Clashes then erupted between soldiers and Palestinians in Rafah, leaving a 16-year old youth dead and about a dozen wounded.
Would the meeting be postponed? Of course not; "new realities" now obtain in the region. Old "conditions" have been swept aside.
In fact, it had been Sharon's refusal to accept these new realities that lay at the root of the meeting's endless deferral. Like a suddenly dethroned monarch, he could not understand that his writ for the occupied territories had gone up (temporarily at least) in the smoke of the World Trade Center.
Very simply, the plan had been to steadily escalate Israel's oppression against the Intifada, draw a violent Palestinian response and use this as a pretext for consolidating new geo-political facts in the occupied territories.
For example: following the suicide bombing at a West Jerusalem pizza restaurant on 9 August, itself a response to a wave of Israeli assassinations of Palestinian leaders, Sharon closed Palestinian political institutions in occupied East Jerusalem. After the killing of Popular Front leader Abu Ali Mustafa on 27 August, and the violent uproar it caused, he sent tanks into Beit Jala.
After two suicide bombings in Israel on 9 September, the army encircled Jenin and then, aided by the diversion of the attacks in the US, invaded much of it for seven days. Sharon also quietly authorised his generals' recommendation that a 20-mile "closed military zone" be established along the West Bank's northern border with Israel.
This, says Sharon, is simply a "buffer" to shield Israeli cities from Palestinian suicide bombers. It is actually a de facto annexation forcing 24,000 Palestinians to live under direct army rule and within a web of apartheid-like pass laws. It is "one of the most dangerous actions the occupation has taken" in the year-old uprising, thundered a PA statement on 24 September.
But where Sharon saw carte blanche in the carnage in America, others spied opportunity. Aware that Washington would need Arab and Islamic covenant for the revenge it would exact, UN and European Union diplomats counselled Arafat that he may now have leverage with a US administration that had hitherto spurned him.
They urged him to declare a cease- fire. This would not only blunt Israel's offensive in the occupied territories: it might gain "promises" of a greater American engagement in any political process that emerged from it. Arafat took their advice and not only decreed a cease-fire but acted to enforce it. And "engagement" commenced.
US Secretary of State Colin Powell telephoned Sharon "three times a day" and told him America rejected his comparison of Arafat as "our Bin Laden" and wanted the Peres meeting sooner rather than later. Peres threatened to take "a leave of absence" from the Foreign Ministry after Sharon had torpedoed two planned meetings with the Palestinian leader in four days. Rallying behind their most senior figure, Labour ministers warned they would follow him out of the government.
For the first time since it was formed Sharon's "national unity" coalition was fractured between the religious and right wing parties on one side and the Labour Party on the other, between what are in effect its "anti-American" and "pro- American" wings.
Despite the right's numerical majority, Sharon sided with his "American" foreign minister and agreed to a meeting with Arafat, despite the absence of Palestinian "quiet". Every other prime minister in Israel's history would have made the same choice.
But it must have been a chastening experience. For it demonstrated three "realities". There is but one superpower in the region. It isn't Israel. And even Ariel Sharon understands this.
© Copyright Al-Ahram Weekly. All rights reserved
 |
|
|||||||||||||||||
| ARCHIVES Letter from the Editor Editorial Board Subscription Advertise! |
WEEKLY ONLINE: www.ahram.org.eg/weekly Updated every Saturday at 11.00 GMT, 2pm local time weeklyweb@ahram.org.eg |
 Al-Ahram Organisation |
Recommend this page