Abu Mazen's yellow brick roadmap

Mahmoud Abbas went to Washington with the hope of unfolding the roadmap -- he returned with nothing except an endorsement of Israel's unilateralism, writes Graham Usher

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A Palestinian man collects items at a building hit by an Israeli missile in Beit Hanun, Gaza.

Writing in The Wall Street Journal on 20 October Mahmoud Abbas, was typically candid as to why George Bush occupies such a central place in the Palestinian president's strategy.

The "climate of peace needs the help of the US and international community. For without sustained pressure on the Israeli government to sit down and negotiate Israel will only bolster those within Palestinian society who do not share the majority's desire for peace -- Israel acts as if it can resolve the Middle East conflict unilaterally -- Palestinians cannot pursue the roadmap alone," he wrote, referring to the long dormant peace plan the US leader launched in June 2003.

It looks like they will have to. At the meeting with Abbas later that day in Washington, Bush effectively enshrined Israeli (and Palestinian) unilateralism as the governing principle for the roadmap, at least in the immediate term.

True, he rehearsed the usual mantras that Israel should remove "illegal" settlement outposts, freeze settlement construction and ensure that the West Bank wall is "a security barrier rather than a political barrier". But he made it clear there would no "pressure" until the Palestinian Authority "earned the confidence of its neighbours by rejecting and fighting terrorism".

The only gain is that Abbas appears to have persuaded Bush (who, he hopes, will persuade Israel) that it would be ill-advised for the PA to try to disarm Hamas and other Palestinian militia before the PA parliamentary elections in January. Bush's acknowledgement, said White House officials, was less out of a conviction that Abbas's approach of "integrating" Hamas was the right one. It is simply that the Americans know an unable leadership when they see one.

The US also appears to have become a little more engaged in issues still unresolved from Israel's disengagement from Gaza last month. One day after the Washington meeting, a letter from the Quartet's point-man for disengagement was leaked to Israel's Haaretz newspaper.

In the most diplomatic terms, James Wolfensohn blamed Israel for the failure to re-open Gaza's Rafah crossing into Egypt (closed since 7 September); establish a Palestinian passage between Gaza and the West Bank (closed in October 2000); and remove the settlement debris from Gaza (agreed in August 2005). "Until (these) issues are resolved -- we will be hard- pressed to convince governments or investors that anything much has changed" in Gaza, he wrote.

In fact the only "success" he could cite was the retention of 3,000 Palestinians jobs in the former settlement greenhouses in Gaza -- a "concession" Wolfensohn helped fund himself and which actually benefits the Israeli economy far more than the Palestinian.

Abbas expected little more from the parley. According to one of his few Israeli friends -- former Justice Minister Yossi Beilin -- Abbas's sole aim in Washington was to dissuade the US from adopting Israel's terms for Hamas's participation in the January poll -- disarmament and renouncing its founding charter calling for Israel's destruction.

This was not only because of the ongoing Palestinian turmoil that rules Gaza. (In the last two months, Abbas has seen over 70 abductions in the Strip, mostly in turf wars between the various Fatah militias but also involving the occasional aid worker or journalist). He has also seen a revival of armed resistance in the West Bank.

On 16 October three Jewish settlers were killed in an ambush near the West Bank's Gush Etzion settlement bloc. Fatah's Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade (AMB) claimed the attack as retaliation for Israel's assassination of several AMB and Islamic Jihad cadres, the latest a Jihad man near Jenin the night before.

Israel used the attack to establish the post- Gaza disengagement order in the occupied territories, very much the way it had exploited a barrage of mortars fired from Gaza in September. In Gaza it consisted in a siege and merciless military assaults to pound the Palestinians into submission. In the West Bank it consists in separation, realised not only by the wall and the "Palestinian free" and "Palestinian restricted" areas determined by the settlements but also, now, by prohibition of all private Palestinian traffic on the major West Bank roads.

Israel's defence minister, Shaul Mofaz, says the ban is temporary. Few believe it. According to Israel's Maariv newspaper, the system of Israeli and Palestinian only roads is going to be one plank in a raft of strategic measures whose aim is to "totally separate the two populations in the West Bank". Another is the West Bank wall, which, once built, will prevent all Palestinian infiltration into Israel and the 10 per cent of West Bank territory that lies behind it. A third is the progressive ending of Israeli companies employing Palestinian labour so that, by 2008, there will be no Palestinian workers in Israel from Gaza and the West Bank.

The PA has denounced all three measures as "the end of the two-state solution". The UN's special rapporteur, John Dugard, has called the separate transport systems a form of "road apartheid".

Bush made no mention of the road plan in his meeting with Abbas. Neither did the Palestinian leader. So dependent on the Americans -- and, to a lesser extent, on Hamas -- has Abbas become that the priorities now are not Israel's rampant West Bank colonisation; they are governance in Gaza, elections in January and the prayer that, over the rainbow of both, there will be the yellow brick roadmap. But, here too, the Palestinians cannot travel alone.

On 23 October, 15 Israeli armoured personnel carriers entered the West Bank town of Tulkarm and shot two Palestinians dead, including the local leader of Islamic Jihad's Al-Quds Brigade, Loai al Saadi, allegedly the brain behind suicide operations in Tel Aviv and Netanya earlier this year. Soldiers apparently ensnared their quarry in a house and shot him on the stairwell. "He could have just as easily been arrested," observed the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights.

As an "initial response", Jihad fired mortars into Israel from Gaza. Israel responded by launching artillery into northern Gaza and F16s flying ear- splitting sorties over the rest of the Strip. It is unlikely the skirmish will end there. "We will not stand while the blood of our fighters is being shed. Let the calm go to hell," read an Islamic Jihad statement after the killing of Saadi.

This will not trouble Ariel Sharon unduly. He now has the Palestinians, Abbas and the roadmap precisely where he wants them: fighting a useless war in Gaza while Israel imposes its own separate two-state solution inside the West Bank.

A Palestinian man collects items at a building hit by an Israeli missile in Beit Hanun, Gaza. The Israeli army launched artillery and air attacks on two Gaza Strip targets, allegedly in retaliation for the first rocket attacks on Israeli soil by Palestinian militants since they declared an informal truce last month (photo: AFP)