Looking to America

Mahmoud Abbas is hoping that at some point Washington will come to his rescue -- it is a dangerous gamble, writes Graham Usher from Ramallah

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The message is insistent. "There are two approaches," Russia's President Vladimir Putin told his Israeli hosts in Jerusalem last week. "You can pressure [Palestinian President Mahmoud] Abbas or you can support him. I believe you prefer to press him. [But] pressure on him will do damage to both Israel and the Palestinians. The extremists are gaining power and may even get into power."

Three days later, Turkish Prime Minister Recip Tayyip Erdogan said the same to the same hosts: "You have to help [Abbas] more so he can succeed in the [Palestinian Authority parliamentary and local] elections and have the power to meet his commitments".

These sentiments -- echoed by European, Arab and other diplomats -- have so far made not the slightest bend in Israel's iron wall. Ariel Sharon told Erdogan what he had told Putin. "If [Abbas] opts for talking to them [the Palestinian resistance factions], it won't be possible to move forward with him to implement the roadmap, and terrorism will resume and be enhanced.

Meeting with two US senators one day later, the Israeli prime minister went further, launching perhaps his harshest broadside yet against Abbas. "His course is not the right one and contrary to the roadmap," he said. "Instead of working to disarm the terror organisations, he is working to strengthen them. He is not willing to fight them and is not willing to dismantle their infrastructure."

Nor is the escalation simply verbal, intended to appease the right wing ahead of Sharon's decision to evacuate settlers from their colonies in Gaza and the northern West Bank. It is operative, with Israel resuming search and arrest operations in Palestinian areas and in violation, says the PA, of the understandings reached at the Sharm El-Sheikh summit in February.

On 30 April a senior Islamic Jihad leader was arrested in Tulkarm and, two days later, an Israeli soldier and Islamic Jihad fighter were killed in a gun battle in Seideh, a village near the town that is now supposedly under PA control.

The Israelis said the slain Palestinian, Shafiq Abdul-Ghani, was wanted for planning a suicide attack at a nightclub in Tel Aviv in February that left five Israelis dead and was a "ticking bomb" about to detonate again. They pointed out he had been arrested by the PA after the bombing only to escape from jail, implying that Abbas has a revolving door policy with Palestinian fugitives.

The PA answer was that it could not track down "violators of the truce" when it had no charge over its territory. Islamic Jihad's answer was to fire two mortars at Sedorot, an Israeli town on the Gaza border.

Despite the "insufferable Israeli violence", Abbas told Putin and Erdogan that the PA was determined to continue the dialogue with Israel as well as fulfill its commitments under the roadmap. Abbas could barley say much else -- it is the only strategy he has.

One reason is domestic, with Abbas hoping that a new anti-lawlessness campaign by his security forces will bolster his and his Fatah movement's standing ahead of local elections this month and parliamentary elections in July. The new broom is starting to be swept in Gaza. On 2 May, the PA demolished three homes belonging to senior police officers built illegally on public land. It also arrested 23 drug dealers.

But another reason has to do with Abbas critical meeting with President Bush in Washington later this month. "Abu Mazen [Abbas] has to dispel the impression that he is a weak leader, not only to his people, but also to the Americans," says Palestinian analyst, Mamdour Nofal.

In return for his law and order reforms -- as well as his readiness to "coordinate" the Gaza disengagement with Israel -- Abbas has two demands of the US president, say his aides. One is for him to press Sharon to implement Israel's side of the Sharm El-Sheikh understandings, particularly the redeployment from the West Bank cities, the major source of Palestinian "disappointment" with their new leader according to polls. The other is strategic.

"Abu Mazen has to get the US to address Israel's ongoing construction of the settlements and the wall and how this squares with a viable peace process," says an advisor, who refused to be attributed. "This is what lies behind his demand that the two sides implement the roadmap and go directly to the final status of negotiations. In other words, he has to get Bush to put some flesh on his vision of two states for two peoples."

In essence this would mean Abbas getting the same kind of guarantees from Bush that Sharon received in April 2004, when disengagement was rewarded by Bush's endorsement of two long standing Israeli positions: that in any final peace agreement Israel would not be expected to withdraw to the 1949 armistice lines or accept the repatriation of Palestinian refugees to Israel.

In return -- says the aide -- Abbas would want US guarantees that Jerusalem would become the capital of two states and that any Israeli annexation of West Bank territory would be compensated by lands of equivalent value transferred to a Palestinian state from inside Israel. He also would seek concerted US action that Israel would comply with its roadmap obligations, above all the freeze on settlement construction.

He is unlikely to get them. According to a report in Palestine's Al-Quds newspaper on 2 May, US diplomats are telling their European counterparts that as far as Bush is concerned the only game in town is the Gaza disengagement and that there will be no US pressure on settlements until its successful completion, let alone guarantees over the future status of Jerusalem. This is why Washington -- every bit as much as Israel -- shot down, as soon as it was floated, Putin's proposal for an international conference to re-launch the roadmap sometime in the fall.

If this is in fact all Abbas gets in Washington, then Sharon will have the PA exactly where he wants it -- administering the Gaza interior while Israel controls its borders, airspace and coast. As for the West Bank that will be disposed in much the same way as Gaza -- via bilateral negotiations not between Israel and the PA or Egypt or even the Quartet but between Israel and the US.