The last holiday

Wednesday, October 06, 2004

There was very little in the press on the events in Gaza, where fighting continued overnight, or New York, where the U.S. vetoed a UN Security Council resolution that condemned the Israeli operation in Gaza but made no mention of the Qassam rocket attacks on Sderot that prompted the incursion. Much more was made of the false alarm about a bomb on board a Lufthansa flight to Israel than about the rising death toll in Gaza, which was meanwhile heading for the 100 mark. Dozens of Palestinian civilians have been wounded, most early this morning, when a tank shell aimed at a group of armed men in Beit Lahiya struck a residential building, killing three people and wounding at least 10 children. While most of those killed have been armed men, but UN sources in Gaza say that at least 24 of the casualties have been children since ‘Operation Days of Penitence’ began last week. UN-affiliated agencies based in Gaza are meanwhile warning that a humanitarian crisis is emerging in the Strip.

The goddess loves -- Mixed media on paper, 50x70 cm by Silvia Rosenberg

ot that the UN has much credibility with Israel, where penitence is probably being paid somewhere along the chain of command for the fiasco of portraying a long narrow object carried by a UN paramedic as a Qassam and not a stretcher. The Israelis were awaiting a visiting UN team sent by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan to investigate their allegations of UNRWA complicity with terrorists – and demanding that any Hamas-affiliated Palestinan working for UNRWA be fired. With some 10,000 Palestinians in the territories (and another 10,000 overseas) working for UNRWA, it is difficult to believe that there are no Hamas sympathizers or even activists on the UNRWA payroll. Israel will complain to the UN investigators about UNRWA boss Peter Hansen’s distinction between the political and military wing of the Hamas, which as far as Israel (and the U.S.) is concerned is pure and simple a terror organization. But of all those 10,000 employees, only 13 have actually been prosecuted by Israel for aiding and abetting armed Hamas men. Annan has indicated he expects an apology from Israel if the investigation, as expected, proves that the original Israeli accusations about the paramedic carrying a Qassam were false.

By this weekend, the holiday season will be over and the political system will head into stormy times as Prime Minister Ariel Sharon plows ahead with his disengagement from Gaza and the northern West Bank plan. The conventional wisdom nowadays is that Sharon’s plan is to forestall any negotiations or movement out of most if not all of the West Bank, by moving ahead with the disengagement.

Dov Weisglass, the lawyer who successfully sued TIME Magazine for libel on behalf of his client Ariel Sharon 20 years ago, and served him as bureau chief – and emissary to the White House for the last two years -- told Haaretz in a lengthy interview due to appear on Friday that ‘the significance of the disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process.’ Weisglass is known for his good relationship with the White House, particularly Condoleezza Rice, with whom he claims to have a special relationship. Recently, he left his post as chief of staff in the Sharon bureau, to resume command of his law firm, but he still holds a consulting position in the Sharon office. The interview with Haaretz’s Ari Shavit goes further than even the prime minister has gone in explaining the strategy behind the disengagement idea.

This morning, Haaretz reported some of the most salient quotes from the interview, including: ‘When you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda. And all this with authority and permission. All with a presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress. … The disengagement is actually formaldehyde. It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians.’ Asked why Sharon hatched the disengagement plan, Weisglass said, ‘Because in the fall of 2003 we understood that everything was stuck. And although by the way the Americans read the situation, the blame fell on the Palestinians, not on us, Arik [Sharon] grasped that this state of affairs could not last, that they wouldn’t leave us alone, wouldn’t get off our case. Time was not on our side. There was international erosion, internal erosion. Domestically, in the meantime, everything was collapsing. The economy was stagnant, and the Geneva Initiative had gained broad support. And then we were hit with the letters of officers and letters of pilots and letters of commandos [refusing to serve in the territories]. These were not weird kids with green ponytails and a ring in their nose with a strong odor of grass. These were people like Spector’s group [Yiftah Spector, a renowned Air Force pilot who signed the pilot’s letter]. Really our finest young people.’ He explains that the main achievement of the Gaza plan is the freezing of the peace process in a ‘legitimate manner … That is exactly what happened. You know, the term ‘peace process’ is a bundle of concepts and commitments. The peace process is the establishment of a Palestinian state with all the security risks that entails. The peace process is the evacuation of settlements, it’s the return of refugees, it’s the partition of Jerusalem. And all that has now been frozen.... what I effectively agreed to with the Americans was that part of the settlements would not be dealt with at all, and the rest will not be dealt with until the Palestinians turn into Finns. That is the significance of what we did.’ The full interview appears in Friday’s newspaper.

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