Police chief worries

Tuesday, December 21, 2004

In a speech widely reported this morning, Karadi said that he is worried that what he called ‘public opposition’ to the plan could prevent it from taking place – in other words, that the police and army, preparing for the evacuation, might be overrun by opponents of the move. Karadi is devoting some 5,000 police – two for every Jewish settler adult in Gush Katif – to the operation, while the army will be devoting at least the same number. The police will not carry arms, the army will be armed and ready to deal with both Palestinians who try to fire on the disengagement as well as any extremist settlers or settler supporters who might use a weapon to prevent police from removing them from their homes.

The Karadi comments came as the Yesha Council and Yesha rabbis came out in support of Pinhas Wallerstein's call for mass disobedience of the evacuation-compensation law. The attorney general has ordered an examination of the calls for civil disobedience, to determine if Wallerstein, a regional authority civil servant, broke the law against incitement or sedition. Meanwhile, aYitzhar, one of the most radical of the West Bank settlements, setters sabotaged an army jeep and cut off water to the army outpost at the settlement stationed there to provide security for the settlement, because the army company commander turned off an illegal water connection Yitzhar settlers made to an illegal outpost near the settlement. No arrests have been made yet.

Nor did the army respond this morning – yet – to anti-tank rocket fire into one of the settlements in northeastern Gaza. One of the rockets hit a synagogue during early morning prayers. Although nobody was hurt, though the building was said to be extensively damaged, the symbolism was not lost on Israel Radio’s editors, who made it the lead story all morning today. For the past few days there have been reports that the IDF is planning a move into northwestern Gaza in another attempt to halt Qassam rocket fire aimed at Sderot, similar to the moves last week in southern Gaza, where the army tried to put an end to mortar fire from Kha Yunis and Rafah into Gush Katif.

On the diplomatic front, a host of international statesmen are coming through the country, meeting both with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and with the Palestinian leadership. Tomorrow, British Prime Minister Tony Blair is due to arrive and is expected to try to explain to Sharon that Blair’s plan for an international conference soon after the January 9th presidential elections in the Palestinian Authority, is not meant as a full-scale peace conference, but rather as a conference to support the new Palestinian leadership. Israel – backed by the White House – is leery of any international peace conference until several of the preliminary steps on the roadmap are taken, most specifically, security reforms in the PA consolidating all the PA security forces into no more than three forces and all under a uniform command – with the goal of once and for all putting an end to the ‘armed intifada,’ as Mahmoud Abbas, the anticipated winner of the January elections refers to it.

Meanwhile, World Bank President James Wolfensohn is here for meetings with Israeli and Palestinian officials to gauge their reactions to World Bank plans for rehabilitating the Palestinian economy after the pullout. The PA currently gets $930 million a year in international aid, and the World Bank wants to raise this by $500 million. But it wants Israel to lift checkpoints and closures, and the PA to institute economic, legal and security reforms for that extra money to start flowing.

And on the coalition front, while the coalition deal is done in principle, the Labor Party is embroiled in an internal struggle over who will become ministers – nor will it actually sign the deal until a bill is passed through the Knesset that enables Shimon Peres to get the title ‘vice premier,’ even though he will not be chosen to substitute for the prime minister if Sharon is incapacitated. That privilege is reserved for the Likud vice premier, Ehud Olmert.

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