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Friday, Jul 10, 2009
Liberal Israelis and Palestinians say President Bush's embrace of Ariel Sharon's proposal may have killed the last chance for peace.
Apr 17, 2004 | Fareed Taamallah, a liberal Palestinian activist who frequently works with Israeli peace groups, has given up on a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. He's eating a falafel in a windowless restaurant in Bedia, a Palestinian village just a short walk from the new Israeli security wall that slices through the West Bank, surrounding Israeli settlements that look like suburban Florida neighborhoods magically transferred to the Levant. It's the day after George W. Bush stood beside Ariel Sharon and, in the eyes of many here, gave him the green light to annex this region in exchange for pulling out of squalid Gaza. Watching it, liberal Israelis and Palestinians alike saw the death of the peace process. The event, they fear, will herald an even more violent and anguished phase of the intractable war between two small populations whose hatreds reverberate all over the world.
"Sharon wants to destroy the peace process and the Palestinian people as a political entity," Taamallah says. "There is no limit to what Sharon can do because he got the green light from the States."
In much of Israel and Palestine, Wednesday's meeting between Bush and Sharon, scheduled to broadcast during prime time here, is seen as a huge, possibly career-saving victory for Sharon and a debilitating blow to liberals on both sides of the Green Line, the border that separated Israel and Palestine before the 1967 war. Despite what Bush said, few here see Sharon's proposal to pull out of Gaza while solidifying control of much of the West Bank as being consistent with the "road map," the peace plan supported by the United States and the other three members of the so-called Quartet (Russia, the European Union and the U.N.), which requires that Israel stop settlement building and the Palestinians stop terror attacks as part of a process leading to the creation of an independent Palestinian state by 2005. Instead, it's seen as the death notice of Bush's stillborn proposal and the beginning of a new stage in Israeli politics in which Israel, rather than negotiating a settlement with the Palestinians, negotiates one with America.
By overturning the decades-old official U.S. position that the dispute over borders and refugees had to be resolved by direct negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians, Bush in effect conceded huge areas to the Israelis in advance of those negotiations. It's true that in any peace deal, some large Israeli settlements were likely to be folded into Israel proper -- with the Palestinians being given compensatory land -- and true as well that no wholesale right of return was likely to be acceptable to the Jewish state. But by prejudging these issues, Bush fundamentally shifted the entire dynamic of the process -- and, many here believe, killed it altogether.
Palestinian moderates who had urged concessions have been rendered irrelevant. The last embers of Palestinian faith in a Bush-brokered two-state solution have been snuffed out. And Israeli opponents of the occupation have been cut out of the debate inside their country.
Sharon isn't the only winner, though. "Hamas and Islamic Jihad have been very much strengthened," says Daniel Levy, a Middle East analyst at the International Crisis Group and co-drafter of the Geneva Accord, an unofficial peace initiative put forward by liberal Israelis and Palestinians, including several key participants in the Camp David and Taba peace talks and two of Israel's most famous writers, Amos Oz and David Grossman. "The whole unilateral thing strengthens them. The guys who have spent 10 years sitting with Israelis, negotiating, are humiliated."
It's not that anyone to Sharon's left disagrees with leaving Gaza -- it's what he's demanding in return that troubles them. "Israel should never have built settlements in the Gaza Strip in the first place, so dismantling the settlements is a positive step," says Adam Keller, spokesman for Gush Shalom, an Israeli peace group that advocates Israel withdrawing to its 1967 borders. The problem is that Sharon "is sacrificing the Gaza Strip in order to better control the West Bank. He's like a chess player who sacrifices a knight to save the queen."
Sharon's huge victory is just the latest in a long career in which he has come back from the political graveyard again and again. (The most dramatic was his rehabilitation from findings by an Israeli commission of inquiry that he was culpable in the notorious massacre, by Israel's Lebanese Phalange allies, of hundreds of Palestinian civilians in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. Sharon, who was the driving force behind Israel's disastrous invasion and occupation of Lebanon, was dismissed as defense minister.) This time, Sharon has been facing indictment on corruption charges that could force him to step down. Israeli liberals, meanwhile, had seized the initiative on creating a workable settlement.
Last October Yossi Beilin, architect of the Oslo Peace Process, and former Palestinian cabinet minister Yasser Abed Rabbo introduced the Geneva Accord, which both sides presented as a workable plan for a final settlement between Israel and Palestine. As the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported, "At the heart of the proposal is a Palestinian concession on the right of return to lands within the State of Israel" -- a nearly sacrosanct issue for many Palestinians, who've long dreamed of return to the homes they lost when the Jewish state was created -- "in exchange for sovereignty over the Temple Mount. The plan also calls for an Israeli withdrawal from most of the West Bank and the entire Gaza Strip." The plan does not differ substantially from the last official peace proposal on the table at Taba in 2001, which Ariel Sharon, who was elected prime minister on an anti-Oslo platform, broke off upon taking office.
Considering the dramatically worsened political climate in both Israel and the occupied territories since the end of the Taba talks and the new intifada, the Geneva Accord stood little chance of being implemented in the short term, but for a while it dominated the debate over Israel and Palestine. "When Geneva came along, it made such a big storm that even those who disagreed had to respond," says Levy, who is an advisor to Beilin.
Many current and former leaders worldwide endorsed Beilin and Rabbos' proposal, including British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, former President Bill Clinton and former Soviet Union president Mikhail Gorbachev. Blair sent Lord Michael Levy -- Daniel Levy's father -- to represent him at the Geneva Accord signing ceremony in Switzerland on Dec. 1, and released a statement saying, "I hope that this initiative will also show that Israelis and Palestinians remain capable of finding partners for peace and working together, and encourage a return to the negotiating table."
