3 - 9 January 2002
Issue No.567
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 3 - 9 January 2002 Issue No.567 |
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Blind rejection
Sharon is seeking to forestall US peace efforts before they begin, reports Khaled Amayreh from Jerusalem
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has sought to place more hurdles in the way of US envoy Anthony Zinni, due to arrive in Israel today in a fresh effort to get Israel and the Palestinian Authority to restart peace talks.
US State Department officials said that Zinni will be seeking to convince both parties to begin implementing the recommendations formulated nearly 10 months ago by an international panel headed by former American Senator George Mitchell, and then supplemented by George Tennet. The recommendations call for the restoration of calm in the occupied territories and a series of confidence-building measures to be followed by the resumption of negotiations.
But a statement issued by Sharon's office yesterday underlined the Israeli prime minister's hard-line stand. He would not, the statement said, agree to resume political contacts with the Palestinian Authority "unless there was complete and absolute calm." The statement added that Sharon had not abandoned his condition -- a week without attacks against Israelis -- for a formal truce.
The US does not fully back Sharon's demand, and US officials have indicated privately that a few days of calm should be considered sufficient, a discrepancy that looks set to generate friction between Sharon and Zinni.
A senior Sharon aide, Cabinet Secretary Gideon Saar, said that while the volume of Palestinian attacks on Israelis had fallen by about 50 per cent since Palestinian President Yasser Arafat declared a cease-fire on 16 December, the violence-free week demanded by Sharon has yet to begin. "I don't think anyone has started the clock," Saar told Israel's army radio.
One Israeli has been killed, apparently by infiltrators on the Jordanian border, since Arafat demanded militants cease attacks. That compares with more than 40 in the weeks before his call.
Israeli forces, meanwhile, have killed 14 Palestinians since Arafat's appeal. Six others have been killed in clashes between Arafat's security forces and militants.
On Tuesday, Sharon further underlined his intransigence, ordering Israeli President Moshe Katsav not to travel to Ramallah to address the Palestinian legislative council. The invitation had been extended to Katsav by former Arab Knesset member Abdel-Wahab Darawshe.
Several Israeli officials have criticised Sharon's position. Dalya Itsek, a Labour party minister in Sharon's coalition government, said the prime minister's stance was projecting the government as "one of rejection."
For its part, the Palestinian Authority has denounced Sharon's position as driven by malice, and a desire to perpetuate violence and bloodshed.
"He is demanding the impossible and we can't be held hostage to his whims. The US should immediately demand that Israel begin implementation of the Mitchell recommendations and the Tenet Report," said PA official Saeb Erekat.
"How is it that the whole world can see the calm in the West Bank and Gaza Strip while Sharon cannot?" he added. "Either the world doesn't see well, or Sharon has something wrong with his mind."
President Arafat, who remains confined in Ramallah, said in a speech marking the 37th anniversary of the Palestinian revolution that the PA was willing and ready to implement the recommendations immediately. He accused Sharon of prevarication, saying "he doesn't want peace, straight and simple."
Meanwhile, the PA has denied Israeli reports about a relaxation of its blockade of Palestinian towns, dismissing the reports as "for media consumption only."
"Far from relaxing the hermetic closure on our population centres, the Israeli army is actually tightening restrictions on the movement of our people from and to their places of residence," the PA radio quoted a Palestinian security official as saying.
Israel announced yesterday that it would relax the stringent measures the Israeli army had imposed on Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Israel's state-run radio said the army would allow Palestinian civilians to move more easily outside their immediate towns and villages. Yet by Wednesday afternoon there was no evidence suggesting any relaxation of Israel's crippling measures on the ground. And in some places, including Hebron, Israel appeared to be tightening existing measures, barring Palestinians from travelling to Bethlehem.
Yesterday, Israel's Foreign Minister Shimon Peres told Labour party officials that there was no sense in "rewarding Arafat's efforts (in restoring calm) with more repression and more roadblocks" in an explicit criticism of Sharon's line.
Since the outbreak of the Palestinian uprising against Israeli's occupation nearly 15 months ago the Israeli army and paramilitary Jewish settlers have killed almost a thousand Palestinians, a third of them children. In the same period 245 Israelis have been killed.
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