Changing the Israeli-Palestinian Equation

...And this January the election of Mahmoud Abbas as Arafat's successor installed at the head of the Palestinian mainstream one of its few political figures who advocated dialogue over violence from the start of the intifada...

...As for Abbas, his path is no less heavily strewn with land mines than Sharon's...

...In the absence of any more palatable way out of the deadlock with the Palestinians, Sharon saw these steps as removing most of the friction points between the hostile camps and winning—at least in the case of the Gaza evacuation—political credit from the international community...

...Yet he has swiftly attained a surprising aura of authority in spite of his low-key personality, because of the power vacuum in the wake of Arafat's death and the deep weariness of the Palestinian people after four years of armed struggle...

...Some actually began to wear orange Stars of David on their clothing to emphasize the analogy...

...The peacemakers hope a cease-fire, however fragile, will take root and lead to the kind of tangible benefits for the Palestinians that will persuade even the diehards among them life is more attractive than death...

...Although not immediately perceived, Sharon's use of the word "unilateral" in his pullout proposal signaled a very different approach...

...If after the evacuation Palestinian militants continue to unleash rockets and mortar shells at Israeli targets, the response will be tougher than anything seen until now, say Israeli officials, since it will not be subject to the restraints of an occupying power...

...It would give up its Gaza settlements without asking anything of the Palestinians in return...

...The object will be to produce a show of strength so overwhelming that the settlers will offer little more than token resistance...

...In hesitantly talking about this option, Israeli officials have suggested that residents of Gaza target areas would be warned beforehand so they could evacuate their homes...

...The West Bank barrier is likewise seen as reducing the danger from suicide bombers seeking to enter Israel from there...

...It will begirt with a large-scale mobilization of reserves to bolster the standing IDF...

...The "fat don" at the head of the government is executed— hung—together with his sons and other members of the elite after brief trials...

...The idea of abandoning the Gaza settlements was first raised in government circles two years ago by Brigadier General Eival Gilady, then head of the Israel Defense Forces' (IDF) Strategic Planning Division...

...Aircraft would doubtless be employed as well, and the IDF could at any time return in force...

...Abbas has made it clear that he wants to discuss final status, not interim...

...Israel wanted a separation, not an embrace...

...Even, remarkably, Egypt...

...An insight into Sharon's thinking was offered by his chief political adviser, Dov Weisglass, in an interview with Haaretz four months ago...

...is the only outside force with real influence on Israel, they are welcoming American intervention—their feeling that Washington is biased toward Israel notwithstanding...

...So too the danger of assassination...

...But there have been suggestions, too, that indiscriminate rocketing of Sederot or Ashkelon inside Israel would be met with indiscriminate shelling of Palestinian towns...

...In any event, resistance is expected to be fierce—much fiercer than the dramatic confrontation during the evacuation of the town of Yamit in northeast Sinai in 1982, carried out as part of the peace agreement with Egypt...

...Since Sharon floated his disengagement plan, Mubarak has been on the phone to him frequently and has openly boosted him in the Arab world as the best hope for peace...

...The IDF will undoubtedly take steps to thwart such a gesture, but some Jewish militants are likely to get through...

...Abbas' election, though, has altered the equation...

...Toward this end he hopes to co-opt the ultra-Orthodox Shas Party, whose spiritual leader, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, has thus far rejected disengagement precisely because it offers no visible quid pro quo from the Palestinians...

...The Oslo architects believed a peace treaty would bring security...

...Graffiti reminding him of the fate of Yitzchak Rabin 10 years ago has appeared on the walls in Israeli cities...

...But the Palestinians have not lost belief in the justice of their cause...

...Some of the troops are to undertake the biggest incursion yet made into Palestinian areas of the Gaza Strip...

...So it promises to be an interesting year in the Middle East...

...Right-wing rabbis have urged religious soldiers to refuse orders to participate in evacuations and activists have warned of massive defections of soldiers—warnings discounted by the IDF and by moderate religious leaders...

...In the absence of a Palestinian peace partner, Israel would create its own rules...

...The hopeful prospects being opened are hanging by a thread so fine that it could be severed with a single bullet...

...The operation, as planned at present, will resemble a reinvasion of the Gaza Strip more than a retreat from the sliver of territory captured in the 1967 Six Day War...

...It was expected that the 200,000 Palestinians who worked in Israel before the intifada would return, and that sufficient mutual trust would be built up to enable the parties to tackle the differences at the heart of their dispute—final borders, refugee status, Jerusalem—in a final status agreement...

...He was indeed rewarded handsomely by President George W. Bush who, after the Gaza pullout announcement, gave his public blessing to retention by Israel of some West Bank settlement blocs and also rejected the right of Palestinian refugees to return to Israel...

...The subject will remain hypothetical until next fall when the Gaza pullout is to be completed, itself a formidable task far from being in the bag...

...His credibility has been established by his public opposition to the intifada when it was at its height and his outspoken views placed him in jeopardy with Palestinian militants...

...After relentless suicide bombings, no trust remained...

...In fact, as I write, the two men are scheduled to meet...

...Yet a tenuous respite, andjustpossibly something more enduring, suddenly seem feasible...

...Threats of civil war, Jew fighting Jew, were not far behind...

...Sharon, for his part, is bound to be uneasy about external pressure, but he is in no position to reject the U.S.' active involvement...

...Sharon can no longer say there is no one to talk to...

...These formidable options, it is felt, offer a reasonable chance that the Palestinians will restrain themselves once Israel has withdrawn...

...Despite his mild manner and not having any background as a fighter, this gray figure is a far more formidable challenge to Sharon than was the flamboyant, pistol-packing Arafat...

...Antievacuation rhetoric in Rightwing circles is already virulent and the battle is not yet fully joined...

...Three elderly politicians are responsible for what is happening—one by dying, one by renouncing his lifelong political agenda, and one by clinging to his...

...He is undeniably a partner for peace, the ultimate partner...

...This whole package called the Palestinian state has been removed from our agenda indefinitely," he said...

...UNILATERAL DISENGAGEMENT in Gaza, with its broader West Bank implications— the only plan on the Sharon government's table—was effectively nullified by the death of Yasir Arafat, Israel's once seemingly interminable "nonpartner,' and the ascendancy of Mahmoud Abbas...

...Once Arafat's encouragement of terror as a political tool was undeniable...

...That notion exploded with the outbreak of the intifada in September 2000...

...Besides their objections to the evacuation of Gaza per se, the settlers and their sympathizers will want to make the pullout as traumatic as possible to deter the current and future governments from undertaking similar West Bank evacuations...

...Apart from political survival, Sharon has ample cause to be concerned about his physical survival...

...The Return of Mahmoud Abbas Changing the Israeli-Palestinian Equation By Abraham Rabinovich Jerusalem That SOUND emanating from the near end of the Middle East is not the familiar grinding of tanks warming up but of tectonic political masses beginning to move...

...Oslo's theme was coexistence and porous borders...

...The thrust of the Gaza departure and of the security barrier, Gilady said in a rare interview two months ago, was the opposite of that which impelled the 1993 Oslo agreement...

...Abraham Rabinovich is the author of The Yom Kippur War: The Epic Encounter That Transformed the Middle East...

...Sharon is wicked, but not stupid," he told the newspaper Ha'aretz...

...Yitzchaki, one of the minority of nonreligious settlers in Gaza, describes the story as a "legend" aimed at deterring...

...They speak of hundreds of thousands of supporters streaming to their defense to make the evacuation impossible...

...Their purpose will be to prevent the launching of mortar or rocket attacks by militants determined to create an impression that the settlers are being driven out under fire...

...In contrast to the West Bank, where the impetus for Israeli settlement came from below—from religious and nationalist circles eager to plant the national flag in the Biblical heartland—settlement in the Gaza Strip was conceived in the 1970s at the Labor-led government level for strategic rather than ideological reasons...

...He wants to talk, not shoot...

...The likelihood of Abbas' cooperation in the pullout will enable Sharon to argue to Yosef that the evacuation is no longer "unilateral," with the quid pro quo likely to be security assurances...

...Final status talks would be left until the Palestinians proved themselves able to establish a viable, rational society capable of living in peace alongside Israel...

...their resort once again to violence is always a possibility...

...Sharon has raised the possibility of responding to such a crossborder attack with artillery, a powerful arm Israel has not yet called upon in the intifada...

...In the West Bank, however, it would settle down behind its security barrier along lines of its own choosing for an interim period...

...After four years of head-on slugging, Israel and the Palestinians are gingerly shifting mindsets as they seek a way out of the bloody mess...

...The death of Palestinian Authority President Yasir Arafat last November was the key to the current turning...

...Almost the exact opposite of his predecessor and longtime colleague/adversary, Abbas, who lacks charisma and oratorical skill, is consistent in his policies, rational, and opposed to violence as a means of achieving political objectives...

...Under the Sharon strategy, Gilady told the Jerusalem Post, security would lead to peace, not the other way around...

...A major settlement planner, the late Ra'anan Weitz, himself a political dove, explained to me more than 20 years ago that the insertion of a Jewish wedge in the southern part of the Gaza Strip was intended to prevent a possible continuum of Egyptian-Palestinian settlement along the Mediterranean shore that could in time pose a threat to Israel by its sheer demographic mass...

...If he is faced with determined force, he will step back...

...even those foreign entities that sympathized with the Palestinians and despised or feared Sharon came to support him...

...Given the fluid state of Israeli coalitions, Sharon's first concern is to keep his government alive in the face of powerful opposition within his own Likud Party...

...It was eventually adopted by Sharon, along with a plan to construct a security barrier separating the bulk of the West Bank from Israel...

...Ehud Barak, in his last months as prime minister, had desperately pushed for a final status agreement with Arafat and failed, despite his reportedly offering to return the entire Gaza Strip and over 95 per cent of the West Bank...

...Since the Palestinians recognize the U.S...

...The bulk of the force, however, will be deployed to deal with Jews, not Arabs...

...Its president, Hosni Mubarak, referred disparagingly to Sharon in public after his election and refused for years to speak with him...

...Even the European Union...

...The Shin Bet security chief, Avi Dichter, has warned of 200 Rightwing Israelis who would welcome Sharon's assassination, some of whom would be prepared to carry it out themselves...

...But half a year earlier Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had already put a major engine for change in place when he abandoned his role as patron of the settlement movement and proposed an Israeli pullout from Gaza...

...Nor does anyone here expect Washington to pass up the chance to succeed on the IsraeliPalestinian front now that the election in Iraq seems to have brightened that picture...

...But given the frayed nerves and hair-trigger fingers on both sides, not to mention the almost total absence of trust, this will be almost impossible to achieve without a credible intermediary...

...The Palestinians would have no say about either, and "interim,' Sharon indicated, could mean a very long time...

...Clashes with settlers lead to a general civil war, and in six days the rebels triumph...

...He has become an authentic vessel for Palestinian national will by not attempting to impose his own will through the use of force against the militants...

...Some settlers have not hesitated to compare the removal of the 8,000 Jews from the Gaza Strip with the Holocaust...

...The Israelis who grasped at the opportunity to settle in Gaza, though, were infused with the same religious-nationalist fervor that motivated their counterparts in the West Bank...

...The fevered mindset of the Rightwing fringe can be glimpsed in an article written by Aryeh Yitzchaki, one of the more extreme Gaza settlers and the author of some 30 books on Israeli history and geography...

...Palestinians would be permitted to enter the country under Sharon's plan, but on a much reduced scale—perhaps 10 per cent of the pre-intifada number—and only for specific tasks and periods of time...

...The weariness, and the widespread recognition that Israel is too strong to defeat, has given resonance to Abbas' call for coming to terms with the Jewish state through negotiations...

...Even though incomplete, it has already resulted in a sharp drop in terror attacks...

...The evacuation is scheduled to be carried out in the summer so that children in the settlements can finish the school year where they are in June and begin the next one in September wherever their new homes will be...

...In the article, which even Right-wing papers refused to publish, Yitzchaki describes a "fictional" Middle East country that attempts to withdraw from part of its territory...

...It is not yet apparent what Washington's all-important position will be on the matter...

...For him, the threat of civil war is a reality...

...The campaign was abandoned after a few days at the urgent request of mainstream settler leaders embarrassed at this excess...

...As Gilady would put it, "The whole vision of the security fence and the disengagement is based on the premise that no final status agreement is feasible...

...He will lead as long as the Palestinian consensus accepts his view that negotiations will bring them better results than the cyclone of violence Arafat chose to ride...

...But any resort to arms is considered highly unlikely...