Going nowhere

Violence in Gaza this week presents new challenges to Egypt vis-â-vis its role in Ariel Sharon's disengagement plan. It is unlikely to surmount them, writes Graham Usher in Jerusalem

---

Click to view caption

A Palestinian girl flies a kite in Beit Surik, near Jerusalem, as part of an event attended by Israeli and Palestinian children protesting the construction of the separation wall

For most of last week Israeli ministers and generals were lauding themselves after the publication of figures that showed a marked decline in Israeli casualties from Palestinian armed attacks. This, they said, was due to three policies, all central planks in Ariel Sharon and Defence Minister Shaul Mofaz's military "conception" for crushing the Palestinian Intifada.

The first is the construction of the separation wall, which, in the northern West Bank, has succeeded in reducing Palestinian penetration into Israel and its settlements to a trickle. The second is the tidal army raids of West Bank cities, such as the one that on 26 June killed seven Palestinians in Nablus, including the local militia leaders of Hamas, Fatah and Islamic Jihad. The third is the assassinations and incursions policy in Gaza that killed Palestinian leaders like Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and Abdul-Aziz Al- Rantisi and has driven scores of others underground.

These successful policies, said Mofaz, would continue for the foreseeable future, regardless of Israel's decision to disengage from Gaza. Sharon has intimated they would also continue after it or until "Palestinian terrorism" is defeated. Wiser Israeli analysts warned that leaders were living a dream. This week they were proven right.

On 27 June, Hamas guerrillas killed an Israeli soldier and destroyed an army outpost in the Gaza Strip. They did so by burrowing a 350-metre long tunnel literally under the noses of the salient. This excavation did not originate in Egypt but rather from the sprawling town and refugee camp of Khan Younis. Nor was the attack Hamas's long awaited reprisal for the assassinations of Yassin and Al-Rantisi. On the contrary, it was "a consistent continuation of the armed struggle everywhere possible", said Hamas spokesman in Gaza, Sami Abu Zuheri.

The next day a barrage of mortars hit the town of Siderot on Israel's border with Gaza, the latest of 300 missiles launched out of the Strip during the Intifada. For the first time they claimed victims, a 49-year old man and three year old boy. Hamas claimed that hit too, urging that the Palestinian Authority (PA) forget about disengagement and/or any return to political avenues like the roadmap and concentrate rather on "armed struggle".

Israel responded as usual. It invaded and then sealed Beit Hanoun, the Palestinian village facing Siderot and home to 20,000 Palestinians. It rocketed "terrorist infrastructure" in Gaza, including a ten-storey building in Gaza City housing many local and international media networks. It also killed six Palestinians, including a 12-year old boy. Few believe the retaliation will end there. Mofaz said the incursion would create a "new reality" in Beit Hanoun and could take "months".

The consequences of all this for Egypt's "role" in Sharon's disengagement plan are stark. Last week Egyptian intelligence chief, Omar Suleiman, agreed an ambitious timetable with the PA in which both security reforms and a new Palestinian ceasefire would be in place by September. Following this, steps would be taken to disarm the various Palestinian militias, preferably by absorbing them into new "reformed" PA security forces.

But Israel has made it clear that no decision on the evacuation of the settlements in Gaza -- and so no military withdrawal -- will be taken until March 2005. The idea that the Palestinian militias will hold their fire or disarm while the occupation remains intact in Gaza is illusory. Palestinian ceasefires under such conditions have never held in the past; they will not do so in the future, the presence of Egyptian "security advisers" notwithstanding.

The only way such a truce might endure is if it were met with Israeli reciprocity. According to the PA's national security adviser, Jibril Rajoub, this means not only "a comprehensive and complete Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip" but also "a parallel one in the West Bank and implementation of the roadmap". It is a line echoed by numerous Egyptian government officials.

It is also not going to happen. Sharon has made it clear that Israel's "freedom of action" in Gaza and the West Bank will continue after and during the disengagement as well as before it. He has also ruled out all Egyptian talk of a multi-national force being stationed at Gaza's sea and airports as cover for the old Palestinian attempts to "internationalise" the conflict. Finally, he has repeatedly asserted that the disengagement is not a prelude to the roadmap but its replacement.

This, says Israeli analyst Yossi Alpher, is why Sharon is so dismissive of Egypt's demand that Israel reopen the safe passage between Gaza and the West Bank. Sharon's plan is not intended to re-integrate Gaza and the West Bank but rather to "cut Gaza loose, thereby giving him more freedom of manoeuvre to hold onto large parts of the West Bank". The maximum role Sharon will allow Egypt is one that will enable the PA to get a grip on the militias so that the disengagement can proceed smoothly, he says.

This is a withdrawal that helps no one except Israel. For that reason, it is a role Egypt cannot fulfil.