OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, 27 May 2003 — The days of choreographed diplomacy that culminated in Sunday’s vote by Ariel Sharon’s Cabinet to accept the US-led “road map” to end the Middle East conflict have failed to persuade the Palestinians that President George Bush is committed to his own plan for peace.
The Palestinians are privately more certain than ever that Sharon is not committed to the plan, but that the only person who can force his hand is Bush. In the loosely worded deal hammered out in Washington at the end of last week, the White House promised to “address” Israeli objections to the road map, and Sharon delivered his Cabinet’s lukewarm “acceptance” of the process without any commitment to its goal of a viable, independent Palestinian state. It looks to the Palestinians more like an escape route than a breakthrough.
Bush has been under pressure from Tony Blair and Us Secretary of State Colin Powell to stick to the commitment he made in Belfast when he pledged to put as much effort into resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as the British prime minister had into finding peace in Northern Ireland.
Sharon, who could hardly snub the president of the country that keeps the Israeli economy and military afloat, has sought to buy time. But neither he nor Bush has yet convinced the Palestinians they are serious about making the road map work.
“Sharon doesn’t want to comply with the road map,” said the head of the Palestinian negotiating team, Yasser Abed Rabbo. “This is the ground he has to give to keep the Americans happy, and he won’t go any further than the White House forces him to.”
“But I believe it’s the American policy that’s in real crisis now ... It’s not a Palestinian plan, it’s their plan. If they show hesitation in dealing with the Israelis and don’t show commitment, this will lead us nowhere. “Sharon is counting on support from certain persons inside the administration and Congress, and counting on Bush to lose interest as the (US) election nears.”
Sharon sought to strengthen the hand of pro-Israeli hawks at the White House by dispatching his tourism minister to Washington — the far-right settler Benny Elon, who loudly advocated that Israel should keep the West Bank and turn Jordan into a Palestinian state.
A few days earlier Powell had walked into a meeting with Sharon in Jerusalem to discover Elon waiting with another far- right Cabinet minister, Avigdor Lieberman. The pair told the secretary of state that they were settlers and not prepared to give up an inch of ground settled by Jews.
All this was intended to make Sharon look moderate but constrained by an Israeli Cabinet in which half the parties are openly hostile to the creation of a Palestinian state.
Sharon has told the US that without the significant changes he wants, his government could be brought down.
Sunday he described 14 of those changes — affecting timescales, monitoring, whether the process will be performance-driven, and Palestinian obligations to “fight terror” — as a “red line” he is not prepared to cross.
But critics say there is little to suggest that he wants to see the road map work at all.
In recent weeks, Sharon has further undermined Israel’s previous commitments to contain the expansion of settlements, and said he would like to extend Israeli sovereignty to incorporate major settlements.
He also told his Cabinet he wants to extend the highly controversial “security fence” now under construction, so that it will effectively cage the bulk of the Palestinian population on the West Bank. He has presented a vision of a Palestinian state as an emasculated dependency, without an army or control over its borders or airspace.
Sharon has also demanded a Palestinian renunciation of the “right of return” to Israel for refugees and their descendants.
Above all, he has done little to bolster his new Palestinian counterpart, Mahmoud Abbas. The Palestinian prime minister, who is better known as Abu Mazen, was appointed at Israeli insistence after Sharon and the US refused to have any more to do with Yasser Arafat. Some Palestinian officials believe Sharon has considerably weakened Abbas by refusing to accept the road map, and by demanding that he “combat terrorism” before Israel eases pressure on Palestinian towns or ends its “targeted assassinations”.
Still, Abbas has proved less pliable than Sharon had apparently hoped. At a meeting a week ago, the Palestinian prime minister declined Sharon’s offer to hand over responsibility for security in northern Gaza, and instead insisted that the Israeli leader first commit himself to the road map.
