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The guaranteed failure of the road map
Every few months, a "peace plan" is pulled out
of the drawers of the white house and keeps the public discourse busy for
a few weeks. Although this ritual has a fixed pattern and predetermined
end, it is curious that many in Israel are still tempted to believe that
this time it is different.
The Road Map announces that this time "the
destination is a final and comprehensive settlement of the
Israel-Palestinian conflict by 2005". To check if it offers anything
concrete in this direction, it is necessary to first get clear regarding
what the conflict is about. From Israeli discourse one might get the
impression that it is about the right of return: the Palestinians are
trying to undermine the mere existence of the state of Israel with the
demand to allow their refugees to return, and they are trying to achieve
that with terror. It seems that it was forgotten that in practice this is
a simple and classical conflict over land and resources (water). The Road
Map document as well manifests complete absence of any territorial
dimension.
The demands from the Palestinians are clear:
to establish a government that will be defined by the U. S. as democratic,
to form three security forces which will be defined by Israel as reliable,
and to crush terror. Once these demands are fulfilled, the third phase is
to begin, at which the occupation will miraculously end. But the document
doesn't put any demands on Israel at this third phase. Most Israelis
understand that there is no way to end the occupation and the conflict
without the Israeli army leaving the territories and the dismantlement of
settlements. But these basic concepts are not even hinted at in the
document, which only mentions freezing the settlements and dismantling new
outposts, already the first stage.
The first stage is more substantial, because
it repeats the Tenet plan. In this stage Israel is expected also to
"withdraw from Palestinian areas occupied from Sept 28 2000... [and to
restore] the status quo that existed then". There is no doubt that
fulfillment of this demand can contribute greatly to establishing some
calm, even if a temporary one. Had I believed that the European
representatives in the quartet could bring this plan to implementation, I
would have welcomed it. But there is no basis for such a belief. The Tenet
plan has come into the spotlights many times before. The last round was
what appeared to be an American cease-fire initiative in March 2002, for
which Zinni and Cheney were sent to the region. Already then Sharon
clarified that he does not agree to this demand, and he only agrees to
easing the conditions for the population in areas in which quiet will be
preserved (Ha'aretz, Aluf Ben, 19.3.02). This did not prevent the U.S.
from pointing at the Palestinians as the side that refused the cease fire.
With the end of this initiative, Israel embarked on the "Defensive Shield"
spree of destruction, with the blessing of the U.S.
Israel responded also to the Road Map with the
same old objections. It further emphasized that a negotiated halt to
terror is not sufficient and what is required is a visible clash between
the new security forces and the opposition organizations (namely, a civil
war). Israel even demands that a Palestinian declaration of end of
conflict and renunciation of the right of return must be given as a
precondition at the beginning of any process, and not at the end. Again,
none of this undermines the U.S. position that Israel is the side that is
seeking peace, the side "whose security is the key to the security of the
world", as Condoleezza Rice put it. The U.S. is ruled today by hawks whose
vision is an unending war. Israel, whose leaders are always eager to go on
another war, is an asset in this vision. There is therefore no basis for
the belief that the U.S. will allow anyone to force Israel to make any
concessions.
In March 13, 2002, at the eve of Zinni's peace
visit in the previous round, the Israeli army welcomed him with an attack
on the Jabalya refugee camp in Gaza, in which 24 Palestinians were killed
in one night. Now it has welcomed Powell with a wave of arrests and
deportation of international peace activists. In the Pax Americana, there
is no room for peace activists. Peace will be brought by the tanks.
Tanya Reinhart is a professor
in Tel Aviv University and the author of "Israel / Palestine: How to End the 1948 War."
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