Palestine: Flawed Road Map

Yohannan Chemarapally

AFTER the formal presentation of the much-awaited "road map" to peace by the Bush administration, diplomatic efforts are under way to give the impression that the Bush administration and its client state, Israel, are serious about giving peace a chance. The American secretary of state, Colin Powell, visited the important capitals of the region in the second week of May to sell the road map to the Arab governments. The Israeli government has already expressed its support for the new American plan, albeit with many conditionalities. The Bush administration has already given in to more Israeli demands, including the de-recognition of Yasser Arafat’s leadership.

POWER SHARING ARRANGEMENT

The Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, has long been saying that Arafat is an impediment to the kind of settlement the proponents of Greater Israel want. During his visit to Israel, Powell publicly stated that the American government would deal only with the newly appointed prime minister, Mohmoud Abbas. As part of his efforts to sideline Arafat and the Palestinian Authority, the Bush administration had delivered a virtual deadline for Arafat to either share power with a prime minister or risk even more isolation.

Arafat was never opposed to the creation of the post of a prime minister. Many influential Palestinians had also called for power sharing. Mohmoud Abbas, popularly known as Abu Mazen, was appointed the prime minister designate in March. He is a close associate of Arafat but his public pronouncements on the need to "abandon" the armed intifada in favour of diplomacy and calls for reforms in the Palestinian administration, have been somewhat controversial. They echo demands made by the American and Israeli governments to justify the non-implementation of the many accords signed since Oslo.

After his appointment, Abbas took more than a month to finalise his cabinet.  Washington and Tel Aviv had indicated that they would prefer the former Palestinian security chief of Gaza, Muhammad Dahlan, to be the new minister in charge of security. Dahlan's tough stance on law and order issues coupled with his commitment to crack down on radical Palestinian elements has been appreciated in the right quarters.

When the list was finally announced in the last week of April, Dahlan got the coveted portfolio of state minister for security despite the obvious misgivings of Arafat. The prime minister designate himself will hold the sensitive interior ministry. As part of the compromise package, many Arafat loyalists were also promoted and given important portfolios. The prime minister as well as his cabinet will have to be approved by the Palestinian legislature. 

KINDS OF REACTIONS

Nabil Shaath, the newly designated foreign minister, described the new developments as positive and an example of "power sharing." However, Washington and Tel Aviv have been openly talking about the need for "regime change" in Palestine. The Bush administration has been advising other governments not to deal with Arafat.

Significantly, one of the first announcements Abbas made after the new cabinet was announced was that he would not undertake any diplomatic missions outside Palestine till the Israeli authorities lifted the restrictions on the movements of Arafat. For more than a year, Arafat has been forced to remain incommunicado as the Sharon government has virtually quarantined him in his office in Ramallah. In the last week of April, the Sharon administration allowed high level international delegations to call on Arafat.

That the Palestinians are not too happy with the latest developments was illustrated by the suicide attack against an Israeli target immediately after the new cabinet was announced. The suicide bomber belonged to the Al Fatah --- the group to which the president and the prime minister belong. Most of the recent attacks have been carried out by either the Hamas or the Islamic Jihad guerrillas.

The new road map which was drafted by the quartet of the US, the UN, the European Union and Russia in December last year calls for simultaneous concessions from both sides that would lead to the resolution of all disputes and eventually lead to the creation of an independent state of Palestine in three years time. Palestinians still remember all the accords they have signed with Israel, with American blessings, since the Oslo accords. The accords signed at the Wye River and Sharm-el-Sheikh were never implemented by the Israeli side, with the tacit approval of Washington.

SHARON’S GAME PLAN

Despite recent talk of having to make "painful concessions," Sharon's game-plan is to preclude the creation of a Palestinian state by expanding Israeli settlements, expediting the land expropriation and accelerating the economic dispossession of the Palestinian masses. Sharon told the Israeli paper Ha'aretz, after the capture of Baghdad by American troops, that "a new period of opportunity for Middle East peacemaking which we mustn't let slip by" has arrived. Sharon, whose dream is to create a "Greater Israel," stretching from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean, was playing to the international gallery.

The new "road map" envisages the creation of a Palestinian state by the year 2005 --- a goal unacceptable to the Likud ideologues. Likud's coalition partners representing the orthodox religious parties and settlers are already threatening to bring down the government led by Sharon if any existing Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza are removed. Sharon had told Ha'aretz that some of the settlements in the occupied territories would have to go when a Palestinian state comes into being.

The "road map" has proposed that Israel immediately dismantle settlements built after March 2001, freeze all settlement activity and withdraw from all occupied Palestinian cities. The Palestinian Authority is then supposed to reciprocate by cracking down on the violence on the West Bank. 

Going by the recent statements of senior ministers in the Sharon cabinet, the Israeli government is not in a mood to make even token concessions. Israeli officials are saying that the American "road map" is only a sop for the British.  The British prime minister, Tony Blair, in his efforts to hardsell the war against Iraq, has been promising the international community that the Bush administration would turn its attention to solving the Palestinian problem, once Saddam Hussein is defeated. 

The Israeli finance minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has virtually ruled out the possibility of an independent Palestinian state emerging any time in the near future. This former prime minister, whose hawkish views are similar to that of Sharon, told an Israeli newspaper that there would be international pressure but the Israelis would have to resist it. The Likud-led government has influential friends in the Bush administration. The pro-Israeli cabal running the Bush administration is not really serious about peace between Israel and Palestine.People like the deputy defence secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, the number three in the defence department, and Richard Perle, till recently with the US defence advisory board, were advisers to Netanyahu during his successful campaign for the prime minister's post in the mid-nineties.

CO-AUTHORS OF LIKUD POLICY PAPER

During the Clinton presidency, Feith and Perle had co-authored a policy paper for Likud that advised the Israeli government to end the Oslo peace process, reoccupy the territories and crush the Palestinian Authority. This is viewed by many American commentators as implementation of the Likud party's foreign policy in West Asia. Sharon advised the Bush administration in the last week of April that the US should now turn its attention to Syria and Iran, the two last real adversaries of the Zionist state in the region.

Earlier he had let the Bush administration know that his government would submit more than a hundred amendments to the proposals contained in the road map. Sharon also wants the Palestinians to recognise Israel as a "Jewish state" and the renunciation of the Palestinian "right to return." After the Powell visit, the Palestinian prime minister categorically stated that he would under no circumstance compromise on the right of the exiled Palestinians to return to their homeland. Millions of Palestinians are still living in refugee camps in many Arab countries.

The Israeli foreign minister, Silvan Shalom, has said that the Palestinian side must first curb terrorism and violence. According to the minister, Israeli concessions will only follow after an unspecified period of time. The hawks in the Israeli government want the Palestinian Authority to crack down on the radical elements in Palestinian society who are currently in the forefront of the resistance against the occupation.  Leaders of Hamas, the main Islamist party, have said that they are willing to halt violence if the Israelis withdraw from the occupied territories. This view is shared by the overwhelming majority of the Palestinian people.