Sharon’s year, Monday, October 03, 2005

Sharon’s year, Monday, October 03, 2005

There’s no questioning that the man of the outgoing year was Ariel Sharon. He’s been hated twice, wrote a columnist this morning, once by the Left for the settlements and the war in Lebanon, and once by the Right for his removal of settlements and an apparent turn Leftward, not as far as Meretz-Yahad, but into a Center, which is where a majority of Israelis are now to be found.

He won’t say so – at least not yet – but he has laid the course for the final boundaries of Israel. He’s doing it as he has always done things, with few words but much action on the ground, in this case, the construction of the so-called separation/security fence/wall. Ironically, only two years ago he was as against the fence as he was against unilateral withdrawal from Gaza settlements.

It’s only one third-built so far, but the outline he drew on the maps he knows so well lay claim to eight percent of the West Bank, to include the so called ‘settlement blocs’ – Ariel east of Tel Aviv, Maale Adumim east of Jerusalem, and Gush Etzion south of Bethlehem.

The negotiations with the Palestinians, if they ever come, will be about territorial exchanges, while the Israeli High Court of Justice, if it continues its practice of forcing the fence to stay away as much as possible from Palestinian property, will probably reduce that eight percent to around five percent or less.

The most controversial section, of course, is in and around Jerusalem, cutting off some Arab neighborhoods from both the city and the West Bank, creating anomalies that the courts are now trying to solve. Logically, Israel should not be interested in adding 250,000 Palestinians to the ranks of its citizenry. But Jerusalem is an emotional issue for both Jews and Muslims, Israelis and Palestinians, probably more difficult an issue to solve than the Right of Return for Palestinian refugees, who will be able to resettle in the Palestinian state that the Center and Left in Israel agree is inevitable.

That convergence of the Center with the Left means that new elections, now most likely next fall, will lead to a coalition that will marginalize the Right as much as the Left has been marginalized for the last five years since the intifada broke out. In another ironic turn of history, while the Israeli Left and the Oslo process were discredited by the intifada’s bloody toll, it also knocked sense into the Israeli majority that it is impossible to sustain the occupation, which even Sharon has called ‘bad for Israel.’ Thus, like the old story about George Bernard Shaw and the lady at dinner, agreeing that the only issue was the woman’s price, not her profession, Sharon – and with him the still partyless Israeli Center – have decided all that is left to decide is the price of the two state solution, as long as the Jews can have the hegemony – and a democracy – in one of those two states.

Sharon and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas spoke on the phone yesterday and agreed to meet after the New Year holiday. Coincidentally, there was a showdown in Gaza yesterday between Palestinian police trying to enforce the law prohibiting anyone not in PA uniform from carrying a weapon, and four Hamas men, one of whom the son of assassinated Hamas leader Abdel Aziz Rantisi. The police stopped a car carrying the four Hamas men, who resisted arrest with gunfire, prompting the police to shoot back. The incident in the Shati refugee camp only ended after three people were killed – a PA major, one of the Hamas men, and a 10-year-old, and dozens were wounded from stray bullets. It was another disaster for Hamas in Palestinian public opinion after the incident two weeks ago in Jabalya, when a Hamas car carrying munitions blew up in the middle of a ‘victory parade’ celebrating the Israeli evacuation of Gaza.

The attempted arrests yesterday in Gaza were a sign that while Abbas continues his efforts to mainstream Hamas through the electoral process, he is also managing to convince the officers of the PA security forces, which have still not been fully unified into three main forces, that it is the Palestinian national interest to end the anarchy in the streets of Gaza that result from the proliferation of weapons. The tension in Gaza, said Israel Radio, continues, even though the actual fighting was over. It’s not yet civil war, but there are clearly signs that the Palestinian street is fed up with the Hamas military bravado. There were reports of Palestinian civilians rushing to help the PA forces by challenging others who tried to help the Hamas men.

Sharon, who told Yedioth Ahronoth that he would like to visit Abbas in Ramallah but his security advisors are still against it, will happily host Abbas, particularly before the PA president goes to Washington on the 20th of this month for a meeting with President Bush. But Sharon won’t get down to the real business of negotiations with the Palestinian president until Hamas is neutralized – or on its way to neutralization -- as a military force.

The Israelis might not like Hamas but they understand that they can’t prevent it from taking part in the upcoming Palestinian elections. However, they have persuaded the Americans – and the Europeans – that as long as Hamas remains armed it is a threat not only to Israelis but to the Palestinian state. And Abbas seems to know that as well. So, if the PA police keep up their efforts to keep guns off the streets, an Israeli announcement of prisoner releases and other goodwill gestures to Abbas will be likely either right before or soon after the Sharon-Abbas meeting.

Meanwhile, hundreds if not thousands of Israelis who had planned to spend the holiday month in Sinai have been deterred by a terror alert from the National Counter-terror Staff, an intelligence group in the Prime Minister’s Office, saying that Hamas activists from Gaza exploited the week-long chaos on the Philadelphi Corridor in southern Gaza’s border with Egypt, to link up with al Qaida operatives in the Sinai peninsula who were responsible for two rounds of terror attacks against tourists in Taba, two years ago, and Sharm el Sheikh earlier this year. The Israeli counter-terror authorities are also taking very seriously threats from Hamas and Islamic Jihad activists that they will kidnap Israelis to hold as hostages for prisoner exchanges.

And in the Jordan Valley, there was a relatively weak 4.3 earthquake at 7 this morning, 30 kilometers north of the Dead Sea. The earthquake was felt from Nahariya to Tel Aviv, with no casualties or damage reported. The Jordan Valley is on the Afro-Syrian Rift and minor earthquakes are routine as the tectonic plate of Africa and Asia move away from each other. But there have been earthquakes of enormous destructive power in the area, not least the destruction of the Biblical-era towns of Sodom and Gomorrah.

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