A flurry of messages, Wednesday, October 26, 2005

The retaliation was expected, the police admitted as much, the only question was where. The fact that it took place in Hadera, where Israel claims the two and a half years of quiet there was due to the separation barrier, only rubbed in the message being sent by the Islamic Jihad to Israel and the PA -- we're not in the elections, so we don't care that 75 percent of the Palestinians agree with their president, Mahmoud Abbas, that the guns have to be put away.

The Islamic Jihad's message came after Abbas appeared before the Palestinian parliament in the morning, with a speech that even Jerusalem praised for saying the right things; in effect Abbas' message seems to be that just wait until after the elections to the new PA parliament to see how Hamas is disarmed.

And there were other messages that came after the end of the month-long Jewish New Year that kept the country self-absorbed. Indeed, the TV stations only gave the terror attack their first third of their show for the day, with the second lead an underworld bombing that killed three men in Jaffa. Police said it probably was a work accident, meaning at least one of the dead men was putting together the bomb, preparing it for somewhere else to go off.

The U.S, messages were clear to all three parties: shape up. They told the Syrians that the Assad family of the Shiite Alawite sect has another two months in which to either get on the American bandwagon or face further isolation. Who knows which way the London-educated ophthalmologist, Bashar Assad, will turn – and if he even controls the Baath regime. Ehud Yaari of Channel 2 in Israel last night highlighted the appearance of a Syrian intellectual saying on Syrian TV that maybe it’s time for Syria ‘to rethink its position vis a vis the Americans and the West,’ an unprecedented kind of liberal statement for the tightly controlled Syrian media. Ironically or fatefully, the UN investigation into the Hariri assassination will continue for another two months with the focus on Assad’s brother and brother-in-law, as well as Lebanese President Emil Lahoud, as suspects in the assassination, which took 22 lives and wounded hundreds. This coming year –and it could even happen this year – will be the year of Syria, for sure. It will either align with Iran or turn completely Westward, like Libya did under Gaddafi. It all depends on whether Bashar can create what Yaari likes to call ‘a Baath Lite’ regime, which liberalizes its media, and eventually allows opposition parties to function as the essentially middle class society of Syria turns democratic – or will the pseudo-socialist fascism of one-family rule continue to rely on essentially Stalinist methods to maintain stability at all costs.

The U.S. message from George Bush’s office to the Palestinians was that yes, Hamas can run in the elections, but the elections should be about putting away the guns, and to the Israelis, in the wake of James Wolfensohn’s letter to his masters of the Quartet, that Jerusalem’s foot-dragging on finalizing the arrangements for the disengagement – meaning reaching agreements on passages from the West Bank to Gaza and the world, as well as conditions in the West Bank -- is intolerable. Condoleezza Rice delivered that message personally.

It’s not at all clear that the Palestinians understood the Americans fully, or perhaps it is the natural inclination of the Arab world to distrust the Americans – in any case, the Hamas response to the international demand for disarmament was that as long as the occupation continues, there is reason for the Hamas to keep its weapons. That Hamas message came in the form of an unprecedented interview by Gaza’s Hamas leader Mahmoud a Zahar with an Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, in which a Zahar is also quoted as saying that ‘there is a Palestinian consensus regarding the 1967 borders and some people think this is a strategic alternative and the end of the story. But Hamas regards these borders only as a stage in the struggle, which will be decided by a change in circumstances. Some Israelis think when we speak about the West Bank and Gaza it means we have given up on the historic war and this is not the case.’

But despite a-Zahar’s scorn for Oslo and the PA, the Hamas is taking part in elections to the Palestinian Legislative Council, which Zahar admits is a creation of Oslo, and that legislature, though relatively powerless, is the legislative branch of the PA. The a Zahar rhetoric about Oslo and the PA being zero could end up as relevant as the claim by the Likud’s Herut faction that both banks of the Jordan River rightfully belong to the Jews.

Meanwhile, a burst of Islamic Jihad Qassams out of Gaza into Israel that followed the killing of their top commander in the West Bank, who was accidentally uncovered by an Israeli force on a routine arrest mission against an Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade functionary, was followed by a few IDF artillery shells that landed in the area where the Qassams were fired, some sonic booms over Gaza and two missile strikes against two buildings used by the Islamic Jihad and Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade in Gaza. Several Palestinian civilians were wounded, but nobody was killed in that exchange.

When the Qassam fire did not resume, a ‘senior IDF officer’ was quoted as saying the Islamic Jihad ‘got our message.’ More likely, however, it was the Palestinian’s street’s reaction to the Islamic Jihad’s threats of ‘shaking Israel with our retaliation’ for the killing of the man considered the brain of the organization that conducted suicide attacks this year on a Tel Aviv nightclub and a Netanya mall, that silenced the Islamic Jihad’s Qassams. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, with a popularity rating in the 60-70 percent region, called the Islamic Jihad’s threats ‘silly,’ and while he condemned the Israeli killing – and by implication, its nightly arrests of West Bank political functionaries for Hamas as well as suspected terrorists’— he also denounced the Qassam fire as against Palestinian interests.

Israel, meanwhile was so self-absorbed in its month long holiday season that the cross-fire of diplomatic and military messages to which Israel woke up on ‘the first day after the holidays’ were somewhat shocking. Rice’s comments were lost in the race for Israeli attention in a crowd ranging from a reported letter by Assad to the Americans promising suspects in the Hariri killing will be put on trial, to the usual complaints by Yuval Steinitz, the Likud’s chairman of the once-prestigious Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, that Egypt is plotting against Israel and that the Hamas is about to overcome the PA. As on the Palestinian side, there are plenty of doomsayers on the Israeli side, but the only voice that counts right now in Israeli politics, is rarely heard and for the first time in years did not make himself heard in the press throughout the entire holiday month – the prime minister, Ariel Sharon.

The hero of disengagement will be heard tonight – he’s meeting with the Likud rebels, to discuss ways to preserve unity in the ruling party. There, too, an exchange of messages will take place. Sharon, presumably, will vow to continue do what he believes best for Israel, while the rebels will insist that means he do nothing to disrupt the settlement enterprise in the West Bank. Some might add the caveat, ‘without winning our approval, first,’ though not Uzi Landau, nor the Rightist ideological flanks shoring up Binyamin Netanyahu’s support in the Likud central committee.

After the holidays means a resumption of Israeli political mongering, which includes nowadays rumors that Netanyahu is thinking about dropping out of politics altogether, perhaps deciding that Israelis seem to like their prime ministers to be old, like Sharon and even Shimon Peres and that still in his mid-fifties, he could return in another decade or more. Of course, as the sages said, only fools have had the gift of prophecy since the Temple was destroyed.

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