11 - 17 October 2001
Issue No.555
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 11 - 17 October 2001 Issue No.555 |
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Mount Sharon erupts
Sharon blew his top with America's new activism in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is not clear that he had grounds to. Graham Usher reports from Jerusalem
Having smouldered through a week's "cease-fire" that had been imposed upon him, Ariel Sharon, last week, erupted. It was like watching an intern rip open a straitjacket with his teeth.
"Do not repeat the horrible error of 1938" when "the enlightened democracies of Europe decided then to sacrifice Czechoslovakia in favour of a convenient temporary solution," he spat and hissed at the US during a press conference in Tel Aviv on 4 October. "Do not try to appease the Arabs on our backs. Israel will not be Czechoslovakia. Israel will fight terrorism."
Sharon's sudden lava triggered the worst rupture in Israel-US relations in the seven months of his watch. Washington met the challenge, reminding all that Bush in the current cast of characters is supposed to be Winston Churchill (not Neville Chamberlain). And Israel is not so much Czechoslovakia as an irritatingly small spanner in the works of building an Arab and Islamic coalition to avenge the attacks on America.
"The Prime Minister's comments are unacceptable," said White House spokesman Ari Fleischer the next day. "Israel has no stronger friend and ally in the world than the US," he added, with biting accuracy.
Not for the first time in his career, Sharon was forced to parachute from the flights of his passion. By 6 October he was expressing "sorrow" to American journalists that his Czechoslovakia analogy had "not been understood correctly." He failed to explain how else it could have been understood.
A Palestinian student throws a rock at Police officers in Gaza on Monday. Protestors opposed to US air strikes on Afghanistan waged a gun battle with Palestinian police at the Islamic university, leaving two dead and 50 injured. Street battles between both sides were described as the worst internal Palestinian fighting in years (photo: AP)
By the 7th, once the Tomahawk cruise missiles had started to plough into Kabul, normal wartime relations had resumed. "Israel offers and will continue to offer assistance" to "the bold and courageous decision of the US president to fight terrorism," ran a statement from the prime minister's office. That is to say, Israel "is not taking part in the war."
But what brought Sharon to the lip of the volcano? He had entered the press conference with news that a Siberian airliner carrying 76 passengers and crew (51 of them Israeli citizens) had exploded above the Black Sea and after a violent 48 hours in Israel and the occupied territories that had left nine Palestinians and five Israelis dead.
Yet it soon transpired that neither the downed plane, nor Hamas' raid on the Alei Sinai settlement in Gaza, nor even random Palestinian shooting in the Israeli town of Afula had pricked Sharon's rage. It was rather the realisation that the fallout from the 11 September attacks had sucked the Americans back to where he least wants them: at the political centre of the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
Sharon had been sniffing the breeze all week. First there was inordinate US pressure on him to allow Foreign Minister Shimon Peres to meet Yasser Arafat on 6 September, dismissing with an imperial wave of the hand the 48 hours of "quiet" in the occupied territories Sharon had set as the condition. Then Colin Powell froze anti-PLO legislation about to pass through Congress: a clear message that whatever else Yasser Arafat is to the State Department he is not yet their Bin Laden.
Then came Powell's visible reluctance to "designate" Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Hizbullah in quite the same "terrorism" category as Osama Bin Laden's Al-Qa'ida organisation. Lastly, there was George Bush's rehearsed remark on 2 October that "the idea of a Palestinian state has always been part of a [US] vision" in the Middle East. "Always" or not, this was the first time the president had revealed it.
But the real scare came with a flurry of articles in American newspapers "leaking" that, prior to the carnage of 11 September, the US administration was about to unveil a new "diplomatic initiative" to end a year's worth of violence in the occupied territories. Details of the initiative remained vague, and for no one more so than Sharon. For the first time that anybody could remember, a US president had not consulted an Israeli prime minister about "peace in our time."
According to the New York Times on 2 October, "the initiative would take into account progress at the Camp David negotiations during the Clinton administration last year -- but would stop well short of the specifics Clinton gave in January in a speech in New York before leaving office."
According to Israel's Haaretz newspaper on 4 October, citing both Palestinian and other sources, the initiative is a "reprise" of Clinton's January proposals. In other words, a "viable and sovereign Palestinian state" in Gaza and most of the West Bank, some form of shared sovereignty in Jerusalem, and a vague formula for the refugees based on resettlement in host countries and/or "return" to a state in the West Bank and Gaza.
Where all leaks converge is that the initiative begins with implementation of the Mitchell report, with an absolute freeze on settlement construction in the occupied territories, including "the natural growth of existing settlements."
This is why Mount Sharon erupted. For Sharon's "vision" is a long- term interim arrangement based on a Palestinian state in about 50 per cent of the West Bank and 70 percent of Gaza with undivided Jewish sovereignty in Jerusalem. It also requires not only the permanence but also expansion of all existing settlements, including the 25 new settlements established since his election in February.
Sharon blew his top on 4 October because he understood what the initiative signifies: the end of him and the end of that vision.
What the initiative means to the Palestinians and other Arabs is less clear. Is the new US activism in the peace process merely tactical, invoked solely to put a coalition in place but, ultimately, to be buried along with the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden? Or is it strategic, with America at last aware that the road to a political solution lies not only in Arafat's ability to bring the Intifada to heel, but equally in an open confrontation with Sharon and his "national unity" coalition?
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