The last holiday of the season, Monday, October 24, 2005

The IDF, which has killed more than two dozen West Bank Palestinians since the disengagement and arrested more than 1,000, announced this morning that it killed the head of the Islamic Jihad in the West Bank. Meanwhile, Quartet envoy James Wolfensohn, a diplomat not known for harsh language, has written to his masters that Israel is behaving ‘as if the disengagement never took place,’ essentially keeping Gaza under lock and key and acting in the West Bank as if nothing had changed since the Gasza withdrawal. No wonder the prevailing wisdom in Israeli political-security circles is that a third intifada is brewing.

The Islamic Jihad was promising ‘unprecedented’ retaliation for the death of Luai Saadi, the head of Islamic Jihad's military wing in the West Bank. According to the army, Saadi commanded the cell responsible several attacks on Israeli targets, including the suicide bombings at the Stage nightclub in Tel Aviv in February and outside a Netanya mall in July. The army said that Saadi and another gunman, an Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade member who was also killed, opened fire when the army showed up at the Tul. Karm refugee camp to make arrests. The army, in any case, was still in the refugee camp this morning while it made 20 arrests overnight in several West Bank locations. Many of those being arrested are political activists in Hamas and the Islamic Jihad, but Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades cells are also being targeted.

Wolfensohn’s letter to the U.S. UN, EU and Russia said, ‘The Government of Israel, with its important security concerns, is loath to relinquish control, almost acting as though there has been no withdrawal, delaying making difficult decisions and preferring to take difficult matters back into slow-moving subcommittees.’ According to Haaretz, the letter said, ‘The Special Envoy was disappointed that none of the key movement issues has been resolved,’ and that ‘without a dramatic improvement in Palestinian movement and access, within appropriate security arrangements for Israel, the economic revival essential to a resolution of the conflict will not be possible.’

There is no substantive sign that Israel is taking steps to create that ‘dramatic improvement’ in Palestinian movement. But there are reports it has dropped the idea that a new border crossing from Gaza, through an Israeli security check, into Egypt, be created at the Kerem Shalom junction on the southern Israeli border with Gaza.

The Rafah crossing, between Gaza and Egypt, was meanwhile opened again by Egypt for two days yesterday, in a humanitarian gesture. It is the only exit for Gazans from the Strip that does not lead through Israel, and the Egyptians are keeping it mostly closed, perhaps fearing a massive influx of Gazans desperate for work.

Unemployment in Gaza is now said to be close to 80 percent, while almost all commerce has ceased because of Israeli imposed security slowdowns at the Karny industrial zone, where every truck carrying goods in and out of Gaza is completely unloaded and checked by Israeli security officials, before making its way to Israeli ports for export, or to Israeli markets, or to the West Bank.

The U.S. meanwhile has given strict instructions to Israel for its government officials to keep their mouths shut over the events in Lebanon and Syria in the wake of the Mehlis report on the Hariri assassination and the Larsen report on Syria’s withdrawal from Lebanon. The reports, delivered to the UN, denounce Syria as complicit in the assassination of the Lebanese billionaire and as not fully withdrawing its troops from Lebanon.

Former premier Ehud Barak is not a government official nowadays, so he didn’t feel bound by Washington’s plea for Israeli self-restraint, explaining last night to the popular and prestigious current events show, Channel 10’s London and Kirschenbaum, that the events in Lebanon and Syria were essentially started by Barak’s withdrawal of Israeli troops from Lebanon five years ago, in May 2000.

Barak said that the events in Lebanon in particular were positive for Israel, and while he refused to make a specific prediction about what would happen in Syria, he said that a weakened Syria that makes a ‘Gaddafi-like’ move toward cooperation with the West could lead to a peace deal on the Golan. He denied that it was ’50 meters of beach’ that foiled the deal President Clinton tried to hammer out in 2000 with Hafez Assad, saying that the real problem was that Assad wanted all his conditions met before the negotiations took place. As for Bashar Assad, the Syrian president, Barak said it was unlikely that Bashar and his brother Maher and their older sister Bushara (who is married to the all powerful Assef Shawkat, named in the Mehlis report as being involved in the Hariri assassination) could hold onto their family-run regime without the various Syrian officials named in the Mehlis report who might face some sort of international criminal proceedings if the final report names them outright. Syria meanwhile is trying to drum up support for its position that it had nothing to do with the Hariri assassination, reportedly writing to Security Council countries with whom it has good relations – Russia, China and Algeria – that it hopes they block an expected U.S.-French-British resolution to tighten the sanctions noose around Damascus.

On another front, more instructions have reportedly come in from Washington to Jerusalem, essentially telling Israel that the U.S. has accepted Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ method for disarming Hamas – after the upcoming Palestinian Legislative Council elections, when Hamas will be represented in the PLC. Current polls show Hamas winning around 25-30 percent of the seats in the newly reconstituted PLC. Even Justice Minister Tzipi Linve, who has been pressing European countries to block Hamas from running in the elections, has admitted Israel will not take actions to prevent the elections from taking place, even if Hamas runs. But Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom, with one eye on the hawkish Likud central committee, his power base, has repeatedly issued calls to prevent Hamas from taking part.

PA Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei’ who was held up at an Israeli checkpoint for 45 minutes yesterday because the soldiers did not recognize him and did not know he was supposed to be traveling through their checkpoint, meanwhile has announced that the Fateh will be disbanding the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, integrating the irregular militiamen into the PA security forces.

Israel’s reaction to the Qurei’ announcement was a simple, ‘we’ll believe it when we see it,’ with an emphasis on not believing that the dozens of cells – many of them rogue groups that don’t obey anyone except their local leader – would obey the Fateh-PA instructions or that the PA would impose its will on the Fateh’s armed wing.

Meanwhile, today is Erev Simhat Torah, the last of the Jewish New Year holidays. Wednesday, presumably, the country’s workers return to full time work – at least those who haven’t made a bridge from the mid-week holiday to next weekend. Only next week will government offices, schools, and other large institutions like the banks and post office resume a normal schedule after a month of being mostly closed. November is shaping up as a critical political month, including Labor’s primaries to select a leader, the resumption of Knesset activity, including the budget vote, and a burgeoning movement among opposition parties to try to overcome their differences and vote in unison to bring down the government. We’ll see.

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