Rather than examining ways of
preventing renewed warfare in the region after the peace process's
collapse, I would wager that Israeli decision makers are now
thinking of how to justify an armed offensive against the Arabs.
If this is true, they have passed the "feasibility study" phase by
now, determined that military action is the only way out of the
present deadlock and are currently in the process of devising
practical scenarios for the theatre of operations.
Although this assessment may
seem alarmist and purely speculative (few hard facts are readily
available), any realistic reading of the impasse in peacemaking
efforts given rising tensions over the past year inevitably leads
to this conclusion.
Developments in 2000 cast into
relief two major events that reveal the Arab-Israeli conflict's
true nature in an unprecedented way. The first was the Camp David
II summit, at which then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak
tendered a proposal to end once and for all the
Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The second was the Al-Aqsa Intifada,
the uprising that expressed the Palestinians' collective rejection
of this proposal. The two events are inextricably connected and,
together, triggered a series of interrelated reactions at all
levels, which in turn have served to remind us of several
axiomatic truths that the "peace process" had almost obliterated
from our memories. Most importantly, the Arab-Israeli conflict is
not over borders but over the right to exist. The Israelis have
always been conscious of this reality and prepared to act
accordingly; sadly, not so the Arabs.
In Israel, virtually all major
political forces denounced the package deal Barak offered Arafat,
then moved to topple the prime minister's coalition even before
the conference at which he made this proposal had ended. Clearly,
Israeli society was not mentally equipped to accept such a
settlement; even if Barak had managed to secure Palestinian
approval of the deal, it is very unlikely that he could have
pushed it through the Knesset.
If Israeli society had been
psychologically prepared for a settlement that met the
Palestinians' minimum demands, Barak would not have been as
erratic as he was before, during and after Camp David. Indeed, he
could have come up with a flexible proposal as soon as he came to
power and given the Israeli public time to digest it. But then, it
seems that Barak himself was not prepared for such a settlement,
which is why his offer appeared sudden, ambiguous and underhanded
to both sides and why, when he encountered opposition from his own
camp, he panicked and acted even more recklessly, bringing about
his own downfall.
On the other hand, no
Palestinian, Arab or Islamic leader, however moderate and
flexible, could have seriously entertained the deal Barak offered
at Camp David. Above all, it is impossible to accept
co-sovereignty with Israel over Al-Haram Al-Sharif. The formulas
put forth, such as Palestinian sovereignty above ground level and
Israeli sovereignty underground, would have been laughable had
Israel's intention not been to secure rights over this area that
would give it the pretext to demolish Al-Aqsa Mosque and rebuild
the Temple. Nor did Israel offer a reasonable solution to the
question of the Palestinian refugees in accordance with Security
Council Resolution 194. Indeed, Barak was adamant in his rejection
of any responsibility for their plight and any notion of a right
to return. The most he conceded was the return of some refugees
under a general humanitarian "family reunification" scheme, which,
if implemented over the 20-year time frame he proposed, would
permit for the return of no more than 150,000 of the four million
refugees.
To even a novice political
analyst, it would be obvious that Arafat could not have signed a
settlement based on such absurdities. Not only would he have
turned at least half his people against him -- the millions of
Palestinian refugees who have been waiting to return to their land
for over half a century -- he would have isolated himself from the
rest of the Islamic world. When he realised that it was either
Barak's deal or nothing, he could only back away from the wall
against which Oslo had pushed him. He could only regain his
stature, he knew, when he resumed his leadership of a people
fighting for their legitimate rights, not when he was being
cornered in a secluded room and bullied into reaching a settlement
at any price.
The arrogance and determined
blindness with which the Israelis, at both official and popular
levels, responded to the Intifada were staggering. Even the
Israeli left did not attempt to understand Palestinian demands and
to ponder the suffering and frustration that would drive a
defenceless people to engage in such desperate resistance. Instead
of giving Arafat and Barak time to reach an agreement that seemed
closer at hand than ever before, the Israeli people closed their
minds to everything the Palestinian Intifada stood for and mounted
an "intifada" of their own and voted by an unprecedented majority
for Ariel Sharon, whose rightful place is in the dock of an
international court for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The Israeli people, in other words, gave a known butcher their
mandate to massacre the Palestinian people and to bully and
intimidate any party that dares support them. In this frenzy, any
doves there were in Israel took flight as the hawks dug their
talons into the reins of political control.
Now, even the most moderate
voices in Israel believe that a unique opportunity for a
settlement has been lost and that Arafat is primarily responsible.
They also cast a significant portion of the blame on the Arabs,
particularly Egypt and Saudi Arabia, for having either failed to
encourage Arafat to accept the deal or goaded him into rejecting
it.
The less "moderate" voices,
grounded in flagrantly racist arguments, are seething with a
belligerency unheard-of since Oslo: the PLO is a terrorist
organisation whose members should be apprehended or expelled, they
say; Israeli forces should attack PA targets, decimate Hamas,
Jihad and Hizbullah, and threaten anyone moved to lend moral and
material assistance to Lebanon or the PA. Some of the more rabid
have urged strikes against Syria, Iran and Egypt's High Dam.
Against this background of mass
hysteria, the "national unity" government led by Sharon has no
plan or even desire to reach a settlement. What Sharon proposes is
as far from a peace accord as could possibly be. It is an extended
capitulation agreement that at most would provide for an unarmed
Palestinian state lacking territorial integrity and occupying at
most 56 per cent of the Gaza and the West Bank, excluding
Jerusalem. As for the refugees' right of return, the Palestinians
would be expected to drop that demand all together. One thing is
certain: an agreement along these lines, however it is marketed,
will meet with the approval of the Palestinian people only over
their dead bodies.
Israel's "counter-intifada" has
placed all parties, including the Israeli government, in a
difficult predicament. That government came to power on a pledge
to achieve the impossible -- national security and the safety of
the Israeli people without yielding one inch of "Greater Israel"
-- within 100 days. Over twice that period has elapsed, and not
only has the government failed to deliver on its promise, but the
Intifada continues and the ability of the Palestinian people to
resist Israeli brutality appears greater than ever. The longer
this situation persists, the more vulnerable the government will
become. Inevitably, Sharon will soon have only two options: either
to negotiate with Arafat or to impose a military solution
beginning with the reoccupation of the West Bank.
At that point, it will be not
Sharon but Arafat, or at least the international community, who
will be dictating conditions for negotiations. Sharon knows that
his ruling coalition will collapse the moment Arafat enters the
negotiating room undefeated. His only real alternative, therefore,
is to raise the military stakes and create an opportunity to
impose his will by force of arms.
Sharon has succeeded in
shunting aside the Egyptian-Jordanian initiative, temporarily at
least, now that it has been abridged in the recommendations of the
Mitchell report, which do not oblige him to resume negotiations
from the point they left off in Taba or to accept international
guarantors for any results negotiations bring. He has also managed
to ignore the Mitchell report (again for the time being), since it
has been reduced to the Tenet plan, under which he does not have
to bring a complete halt to settlement construction before
resuming negotiations. Now he is hoping to wriggle out of the
Tenet plan, and will probably succeed in bringing the second
"cooling-off" phase to a freeze. Since it will be impossible to
transform that freeze into a permanent situation, however, some
movement will be inevitable; and as long as Sharon is in power,
Israel will move toward military escalation, not resolution.
The Sharon government has
trapped itself. To save itself it is playing a dangerous game of
brinkmanship, raising the stakes with every accusation and threat
it hurls at Hizbullah, Syria, Lebanon, Iran or Egypt. The Israeli
people, meanwhile, have abandoned any pretence of honest
introspection. They will blame anyone rather than themselves and
their government. War, thus, seems imminent, because the majority
of Israeli society, not just Sharon, is pushing in that direction.
Israeli public opinion has convinced itself that war is the only
way of dealing with all those who refused to accept the most
generous deal tendered by the Israeli left -- a term that is now
only derogatory in Israel. Perhaps this should provide a reality
check to all those in Egypt and the rest of the Arab world who are
still trying to sell us the illusion of a settlement.
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