After the fall
Ariel Sharon and the Palestinian leadership have felt the tremors from Iraq. But they have yet to make either change their ways. Graham Usher writes from Jerusalem
"The conquest of Iraq has created a new situation in an old world," Ariel Sharon told Israel's Yediot Aharonot newspaper on Wednesday, one of a slew of interviews the Israeli prime minister has given for the Jewish Passover holiday. It is an accurate description, applying equally to him and the Palestinian Authority's Prime Minister designate Mahmoud Abbass (Abu-Mazen). Both men are trying to graft the "new situation" into old casts and finding that mould does not always fit.
Sharon is trying to sound old and new, presenting himself as a peacemaker while dispatching aides to Washington with 15 reservations on the "roadmap" which, were they to become part of the plan, would bury all prospects for peace, say Palestinians.
In an interview with Israel's Haaretz newspaper on 13 April, he agreed the end of Saddam Hussein's Iraq had created a "new period of opportunities for Middle East peacemaking which we must not slip by".
He was ready to recognise a Palestinian state because "we should not rule over another people nor run their lives". Moreover, "if we reach a situation of true peace, real peace, peace for generations -- there will be a parting from places that are connected to the whole course of our history," such as "Bethlehem, Shilo and Beit El" (a Palestinian city and two Jewish settlements in the heart of the West Bank).
But then the old Sharon took over. To reach these horizons a new Palestinian leadership would have to fight "terror", dismantle the Palestinian "terrorist organisations" and observe a prolonged period of "quiet" in the occupied territories. As for the roadmap's requirements that Israel more or less immediately freeze settlement construction and remove the dozens of settlement outposts established under Sharon's watch, this is "a delicate issue that should come up in the final phase of negotiations".
But for the refugee issue -- which, in the roadmap, should come up in the final phase of negotiations -- the Palestinians would have to "make it clear from the start" that they forgo the right of return. "They call it the right of return. I call it the right to destroy Israel as a Jewish state," said Sharon.
The general Israeli consensus on the Passover interviews was that it was either the old Sharon dressed up in new post-Iraq clothes or perhaps a more extreme version of the vintage.
"In the past Sharon had expressed a willingness to recognise a Palestinian state in the framework of an interim agreement," wrote Israeli political analyst, Nahum Barnea, in Yediot Aharonot, on 14 April. "Now he is making an agreement on a Palestinian state contingent on a Palestinian waiving of the right of return." This is a sure way to "torpedo" any agreement, roadmapped or otherwise, he added. The Palestinian leadership agreed. An up-front Palestinian renunciation of the right of return is a "non- starter", said PLO negotiator Nabil Sha'ath.
Abbass is also having trouble starting his new Palestinian order in the teeth of opposition from the old.
Since his appointment as Palestinian Authority prime minister last month, he has been listening to all and sundry on the make up of his new government, the latest milestone President Bush has laid for publishing the roadmap. On 13 April he submitted his new cabinet to the Fatah Central Council (FCC), hoping to please everyone. He found himself in the Yasser Arafat-like position of pleasing none but his staunchest supporters.
The biggest fracture was over the Interior Ministry position, responsible for drumming some order into the PA's undisciplined police forces and the most important post in the new government after the president and prime minister.
Abbass had initially wanted to give the job to the PA's former security chief in Gaza, Mohamed Dahlan. Dahlan is also the preferred choice of America, Egypt, Jordan and the European Union, all of which are supposed to help "restructure" the PA police forces, according to the roadmap. Suspicious of precisely these links, many in the FCC wanted the Interior Ministry to remain with the veteran Fatah leader, Hani Al- Hasan, or another of his ilk.
To square the circle, Abbass proposed himself as interior minister, with Dahlan in the new post of "Minister of State for Interior Affairs". The FCC rejected the compromise. So did Arafat, with aides saying he was "not happy" about the removal of Al-Hasan as well as other stalwarts like Intissar Al-Wazir (Umm Jihad) from the Ministry of Social Affairs and Ahmed Abdul- Rahman as PA cabinet secretary. "There is a crisis, but we are trying to resolve it," said FCC member Sakher Habash on 14 April. "It's not an easy task but I believe that Arafat and Abbass will overcome the obstacles."
They will probably will. And this is because the divisions within Fatah are now not over Abbass as prime minister or his policies to do with accepting the roadmap, ending the "armed" Intifada and instituting reforms. They are over whom from within its ranks will staff the PA leadership to implement them.
The graver question Palestinians have is whether Abbass strategy will go anywhere.
The PA has accepted the roadmap "as it is"; meaning that, in parallel with its efforts to reform and curb Palestinian violence, international pressure must be exerted on Israel to withdraw from the Palestinian cities, freeze settlement construction and end punitive policies like the closure, house demolitions and assassination. Sharon wants the latter predicated on the former. And Washington, apparently, wants both, promising the Palestinians that the roadmap will be published "unamended" while reassuring Israel that its "reservations and revisions" will be taken on board once the "process" kicks in.
If that remains the American position, "then we will not be at the beginning of the roadmap, but at the end," says a PA minister, pointing that it was the same sequence of publication then revision that sunk the Mitchell report, the last international attempt to resolve the Israel-Palestinian conflict. "The leadership may not say so explicitly. But that will be the consequence. And that will be a setback for Abu-Mazen and a big problem for the Palestinians."
Al-Ahram Weekly Online : 17 - 23 April 2003 (Issue No. 634)
Located at: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/634/sc4.htm