Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas must have had another moment of acute hesitation in the early hours of Saturday morning after he was told about the suicide bomb which killed five Israelis in Tel Aviv. For the attack has markedly underlined the pressures of what must be one of the world’s most daunting political jobs.
It is hardly surprising that public calls for him to do by military means what he has been trying to do by negotiations, namely eradicate violence by the armed factions, have increased since last Friday. With a security apparatus still far from up to the task after four years of conflict, he must have known after the bombing that his honeymoon, if he ever had one, was over.
That said, he could hardly avoid coming to London to attend the Middle East conference, especially given the presence of a new US secretary of state; it may even be — within limits — worth his while.
But the international help Abbas needs extends well beyond the practical measures. For there is still a series of competing visions of where the process is going in the short term. Abbas emphasized, in his interview with the British newspaper The Independent on Sunday, the importance of an Israeli military pullback to its positions before the intifada started well over four years ago because he believes, not unreasonably, this would help him to stop attacks; Israel sees the halt to violence coming first, the pull back second.
But the differences go way beyond that, to the nature of the political horizon itself. Abbas again made clear to The Independent that he wants to move, within his and Sharon’s political lifetime, to “permanent status” talks on a final settlement of the conflict. Some of the more reasonable people around Sharon are much less contemptuous of the road map, per se, than they were in Yasser Arafat’s time. Instead, they argue that the two leaders’ internal political problems make it impossible to reach the compromises needed for permanent status, even if they were inclined to do so. So why not make the only foreseeable goal Phase II of the road map and the “provisional” state envisaged in it with — as yet ominously unspecified — temporary borders? The British and, interestingly, some well-informed Israelis believe that US President George Bush disagrees — and instead want the historic prize of a permanent status settlement in his political lifetime. It is possible that Washington does now get a fairly obvious fact — namely that Abbas’s problems in keeping the peace would become well-nigh impossible if the best he could hope for was an interim “state”, quite possibly with the hated separation barrier as its border. (That still leaves a different US problem: Bush’s curious preoccupation with “democratizing” the Palestinian polity — even though it is for all its manifest imperfections, the most democratic in the Arab world.) There is one modest step Washington could take to show its faith that the road map’s final destination is achievable within a foreseeable future. It would not solve many of Abbas’s problems. It would not be a guarantee against a return of the cycle of violence. But it would at least lend some degree of international credibility to the vision Abbas is pursuing. And that would be for Bush to outline, and in writing, the concessions he expects Israel to make in any such final settlement — especially on borders and the division of Jerusalem — in the manner that he so spectacularly assured Sharon in Washington last April he expected from the Palestinians.
So far he has shown no clear sign of doing so. It may be that he shares the Israeli vision of a long-term interim “solution”, one which surely invites the outbreak of a third intifada. Maybe, however, he has been persuaded that Sharon’s majority for disengagement from Gaza is so fragile that it would be imperiled by such a gesture, limited though it would be. After disengagement, assuming it is completed on time, there would be much less excuse. If nothing else, the choice Bush makes, and no later than the second half of the year, will be an instructive — though by no means exhaustive — test of whether all the warm words that will surely be uttered about helping Abbas, have any lasting political meaning.
