The Situation

Monday-Friday mid-day reports from Israel by Robert Rosenberg
Images by Silvia Rosenberg (unless otherwise noted)

Hudna in the air

Tuesday, November 04, 2003

Maybe the bloody land belongs to the cows, acrylic on paper, 70x50 painting by Silvia Rosenberg

Over the last month it has been possible to perceive a gradual change in official Israel's approach to Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei'. When he first took up office after Mahmoud Abbas resigned, the Israelis almost immediately referred to him as a puppet in the hands of Yasser Arafat, and used the same patronizing terminology about him first proving himself against terror before they deign to deal with him that they used with Abbas. For the political echelon, it also did not escape their attention that Qurei' was to a large extent Shimon Peres' counterpart in the Oslo negotiations. For the security echelon, Qurei's insistence that he would not undertake a war on terror made it clear that there was not much point in making any efforts to help him, particularly since it Qurei announced after a few days in his emergency role that he was considering quitting.

But gradually, it has become clear to the Israelis that Qurei is the only game in town – unless they want to deal directly with Arafat which of course they refuse to do. And just as gradually, and no less inexorably, they have come to recognize, as Chief of Staff Moshe Ya'alon said last week, that if Israel wants any movement forward, it needs to combine military action against terror with political action that first of all gives some hope to the Palestinian population. Therefore, in the last week there have been a flurry of reports about high level contacts between the Israelis and Palestinians, including a meeting between Shin Bet chief Avi Dichter and Jibril Rajoub, formally the secretary of Arafat's National Security Council – and perhaps more significantly, the beginning of reports about quiet but effective cooperation from Palestinian security services with Israeli security. Such a report appears today in Haaretz.

Now Qurei is in the final stages of forming a normal, not an emergency government. In Moscow, Prime Minister Sharon says he expects the emergence, ‘soon,' of a Palestinian leadership that does not support terror – and it is hard to tell if that is public relations, another of his promises that the solution to terror has been found or that the peace process is only a few moths way because Arafat is ailing, or merely a way to placate Russian President Putin, who wants to move the roadmap to the UN Security Council. In any case, as has become routine with the establishment of Palestinian governments, the last stumbling block is the dispute with Arafat over who control over the security forces. Qurei' wanted as his interior minister – and therefore in charge of all security forces -- Gen. Nasser Yusuf , a Fatah old timer who was once close to Arafat. But Yusuf refused to accept only partial control over the security forces, and refused to be sworn in as interior minister without getting all the forces under his authority. The talk now in Ramallah, say Israeli press reports, is that Qurei' is wrestling with Arafat over a number of possibilities, including Qurei holding the interior ministry portfolio himself. In any case, however, the Israeli reports are saying that the pressure on Arafat to relinquish security controls to Qurei's government is greater than ever. Wishful thinking? Perhaps.

Meanwhile, for the first time in its history, Israel has taken the offensive at the UN, circulating a proposal in the General Assembly calling for the protection of Israeli children form Palestinian terrorists. It's a nearly mirror image of a Palestinian proposal about protecting Palestinian children from Israeli troops; Israel's position seems to be that it is testing the General Assembly's integrity. It would accept passage of both proposals, or the shelving of both, but if the Palestinian resolution is passed and Israel's is rejected, it will be proof, say Israeli officials, of an unnatural bias against Israelis.

In another development, Hezbollah's Sheikh Nasrallah is sang he believes Sharon is getting cold feet about the prisoner exchange deal that has turned controversial in Israel because it won't include any information about the fate of Ron Arad, the airman missing for the last 17 years.

Domestically, reverberations of the appearances of a revival of the Israeli peace camp at Saturday night's rally in memory of Yitzhak Rabin continued to rumble through the press, as Rightist commentators complain that the memorial services for Rabin seem to exclude the. But that controversy will soon be over: the government's budget reached the Knesset today, and the first reading votes are tomorrow. There's plenty to fight about in the legislation accompanying the quarter trillion shekel budget that has been described as more Thatcherite than anything Thatcher presented.

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