Sharon's
Unilateral Steps
Joel Beinin
(Joel
Beinin is professor of history at Stanford University and an editor
of Middle
East Report. He contributed this article from Cairo.)
December 31,
2003
As the Israeli
army reimposed a nearly complete lockdown on the West Bank in
the aftermath of the Christmas Day 2003 suicide bombing outside
of Tel Aviv, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has reportedly
deputized a top general to draw up the "separation plan"
he threatened seven days earlier at the annual Herzliya conference
on security issues. As widely predicted in the pre-performance
publicity, at Herzliya Sharon announced that Israel would take
unilateral measures to "disengage" itself from the Palestinians
if Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Ahmad Qurei does not crack
down on the armed Palestinian factions and engage in negotiations
on Israeli terms.
Sharon's
much advertised oration contained nothing new and no details on
when and how his proposals would be implemented. He did name some
of the unilateral steps to be taken, including accelerated construction
of what commentators variously call the "separation barrier,"
"security fence" or "apartheid wall" (depending
on political persuasion) and "a change in the deployment
of settlements, which will reduce as much as possible the number
of Israelis located in the heart of the Palestinian population."
The reception of the Herzliya speech provides yet another example
of the politico-cultural chasm between what even the most moderate
Palestinians might consider an acceptable Israeli-Palestinian
peace settlement and the self-referential rhetoric of the Israeli
government and its supporters.
AMBIGUOUS
INTENTIONS
The absence
of specifics in Sharon's speech allowed other cabinet ministers
to interpret his intentions. Justice Minister Tommy Lapid of the
middle-class, pro-free market Shinui Party believes the Palestinians
have three months before Sharon's plan, which he supports, is
put into effect. Deputy Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of the Likud,
a recent convert to a kind of two-state solution, announced that
tens of thousands of settlers might have to move. Olmert made
the rounds of Israeli talk shows promising to avoid the menace
of a binational state by implementing a version of Sharon's plan
that would ensure Israel an 80 percent Jewish population (the
current figure is 78-79 percent). Ultra right-wing members of
the cabinet from the National Union Party, as is their custom,
hysterically proclaimed that they would leave the government if
a single settlement was abandoned.
The outcry
on the far right gave rise to speculation that Sharon was anticipating
early elections in 2004. His present coalition government may
remain in office until early 2007 as long as it maintains a Knesset
majority, which the far right's defection would erase. Alternatively,
the Labor Party, or at least its right wing -- those elements
identified with former Prime Minister Ehud Barak and former Minister
of Defense Benjamin Ben Eliezer -- might join a government led
by Sharon which would pursue some permutation of the Herzliya
plan. After all, "separation" between Israel and the
Palestinians, which would be identified in the United States as
segregation, has been a slogan of the Labor Party since the 1980s.
FACTS ON
THE GROUND
Such machinations
aside, the fact remains that most of the major elements of Sharon's
plan were being implemented well before his December 18 speech.
The 90-mile northern section of the separation barrier has been
completed, and the Israeli cabinet recently approved construction
of a 228-mile southern section. According to a recent UN report,
these two components of the barrier would isolate 274,000 Palestinians
in small enclaves. An additional 400,000 Palestinians would have
restricted access to their agricultural fields, jobs, schools
and hospitals controlled by the Israeli army. The final route
of the separation barrier, still a subject of debate among Israelis,
could effectively annex about half the West Bank to Israel. Several
recent protests by Palestinians and Israeli and international
peace activists at locations along the barrier bespeak the widespread
sense that the fence-and-wall complex is yet another "fact
on the ground" with which Israel can alter the terms of a
future comprehensive peace deal in its favor. Israeli troops fired
upon one such demonstration on December 31, wounding at least
17.
As Sharon
and Olmert speak of "relocating" existing settlements
in the Occupied Territories, new ones are being established. Before
Sharon became prime minister, there were 145 settlements officially
recognized by the Israeli government and some 400,000 settlers
(including the exclusively Jewish neighborhoods in and around
East Jerusalem). According to Mustafa Barghouti, secretary-general
of the Palestinian National Initiative, 56 new settlements have
been established in 2002-2003. Of the eight settlement "outposts"
Sharon claimed to dismantle in the spring of 2003, in his very
partial and selective implementation of Israel's obligations in
stage one of the "road map" sponsored by the so-called
Quartet of the US, the UN, the European Union and Russia, five
have been rebuilt. The Bush administration has mildly protested
the continuing settlement activity by deducting less than $300
million from the $11 billion in loan guarantees Israel is receiving
in the current fiscal year. This amount is supposedly equivalent
to what Israel has spent on construction in the settlements, but
it is trivial in relation to the combined aid Israel receives
from the US and Israel's total expenditures on settlements.
The latest
settlement project is in the center of the village of Jabal Mukabbir,
near Jerusalem. Its strategic purpose is to thicken the circle
of Jewish settlements surrounding East Jerusalem. On December
20, about 500 Israeli peace activists from Peace Now, Ta`ayush
(Coexistence) and other groups demonstrated peacefully against
construction of the settlement, named Nof Zahav, jointly with
Palestinian residents of the village. The press release of the
demonstrators quoted the speech of MK Ran Cohen of the dovish
Meretz party who said, "We, Israeli and Palestinian peace
activists, are demonstrating here against the lies of Sharon.
At Herzliya he spoke of dismantling settlements, and here, in
the heart of a Palestinian village of 15,000 residents, they are
building a new settlement! Sharon spoke of activating the road
map -- and here, at Jabal Mukabbir, they are not going for peace
at all, but are sending in the bulldozers to destroy peace! Sharon
talks of separation -- and here, we see invasion by yet another
settlement!" These fine words (at least for supporters of
the road map) obscure the inactivity of Meretz, Peace Now and
other elements of the Zionist peace camp since the outbreak of
the second intifada.
As of late
December 2003, there are 757 roadblocks in the West Bank. Earlier
in the month, Sharon announced measures to ease the movement of
Palestinians through these roadblocks and of Palestinian merchants
seeking to cross the Allenby Bridge into Jordan and the Rafah
border post into Egypt. However, workers from the West Bank and
Gaza Strip will not be allowed to enter Israel. When Defense Minister
Shaul Mofaz visited Washington in November, he presented a plan
to create jobs for Palestinians by establishing enterprises in
Israeli settlements and industrial parks along the "seam
line," a term referring not to the Green Line which demarcates
Israel's internationally recognized eastern boundary, but to the
new effective border between Israel and the Palestinian territories
created by the separation barrier. The Mofaz proposal would render
Palestinian employment contingent on de facto recognition of the
permanence of at least some settlements and Israel's annexation
of parts of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Responding
to these Israeli proposals, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State
for Near Eastern Affairs David Satterfield criticized Israel at
a donors' conference for the Palestinians on December 10 in Rome.
He said Israel had done too little, too late to alleviate the
human distress in the Palestinian territories and questioned the
security rationale for the roadblocks.
NO "RELATIVE
CALM"
Yet just
weeks after being announced, even Israel's limited measures to
ameliorate Palestinian suffering have been annulled. A total closure
on the West Bank and Gaza Strip has been proclaimed and non-resident
Palestinians have been prohibited from entering Jerusalem in response
to the suicide bombing carried out by Said Hanani, a member of
the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, at the Geha
Junction in Petah Tikva on December 25. The murderous attack took
the lives of three victims in addition to Hanani and wounded 16.
This bombing
was preceded by several Israeli army raids on Nablus in which
at least five Palestinians were killed. On December 23, the Israelis
assaulted the area of Rafah bordering Egypt in an effort to discover
tunnels used to smuggle weapons from Egypt into the Gaza Strip.
Nine Palestinians were killed and 42 wounded in this operation.
Egyptian authorities claimed the tunnels did not reach into Egypt.
Only minutes before the Petah Tikva attack, Israeli helicopters
executed the extrajudicial killing of Muqlid Hamid, an Islamic
Jihad leader in Gaza. Four other Palestinians were killed and
12 were wounded in the assassination. These events ended 81 days
of what the Israeli and Western media commonly designate as "relative
calm." Ahmad Qurei has suspended all negotiations with Israel,
and there is no indication when they may resume.
Indeed, there
were no aerial assassinations or suicide bombings during those
81 days. However, Israeli raids killed 117 Palestinians during
that period. Geha Junction bomber Said Hanani hails from the village
of Beit Furik, which is surrounded on all sides by Israeli checkpoints.
He, like most young men of the village, was unemployed and had,
as Gideon Levy wrote in the liberal Israeli daily Haaretz, "no
reason to get up in the morning other than to face another day
of joblessness and humiliation." As Levy hinted, neither
the "disengagement" outlined at Herzliya nor the status
quo offer a solution to the dehumanizing conditions of intensified
occupation.
KNOWING THE
AUDIENCE
In light
of the already thoroughly unilateral measures with which Israel
is pushing ahead in the Occupied Territories, why did Ariel Sharon
need to make a speech at Herzliya at all? He surely knew that
his words would inconvenience at least some members of the Bush
administration and antagonize the entire Palestinian Authority.
The answer is that Sharon does not have and never has had any
intention of negotiating a peaceful resolution to the conflict
with the Palestinians. He has long advocated imposing a unilateral
settlement on Israel's terms, and he has been consistent in his
view of how much territory -- 42-50 percent of the West Bank and
an unspecified percentage of the Gaza Strip -- the Palestinians
should be allotted. The only change is that Sharon is now prepared
to allow the Palestinians to call these territories a "state."
Sharon's
principal audience was the Israeli Jewish public. In the weeks
before his Herzliya speech, Sharon's standing in public opinion
polls had been declining. The media was regularly reporting corruption
and influence peddling scandals involving his sons. Four former
heads of the General Security Service had publicly criticized
his policies towards the second intifada. Twenty-seven air force
pilots had announced that they would no longer carry out extrajudicial
executions. An internationally publicized trial of five high school
graduates who refused to be drafted into the Israeli army concluded
on December 16 with their conviction. The five were among the
organizers of open letters signed by over 300 high school seniors
over the course of two years announcing their refusal to serve
in an army of occupation. Three days after the speech, 13 members
of the ultra-elite General Staff Commando unit declared they would
refuse to perform military service in the Occupied Territories.
Finally,
two recent unofficial initiatives -- a plan devised by Ami Ayalon
and Sari Nusseibeh and the Geneva Accord negotiated between Palestinian
and Israeli teams headed by Yasser Abed Rabbo and Yossi Beilin
respectively -- proved that a negotiated Israel-Palestinian agreement
is possible and contradicted the Sharon-era mantra that "there
is no one to talk to" among the Palestinians. While both
of these plans fall short of a comprehensive solution to the conflict
based on international law and human rights, they demonstrate
conclusively that Israel's illegal settlements in the Occupied
Territories and Israel's aspirations to annex parts of the West
Bank are the main obstacles to a Palestinian-Israeli agreement.
Facing such
pressures, Sharon was compelled to advance his own "plan"
in order to avoid dealing with the Quartet's road map or the other
plans which are even more generous to the Palestinians. His promise
to separate Israel and the Palestinian Arabs resonates with the
deep-seated racism in Israeli Jewish culture. His proposal to
enact unilateral measures draws on the historic unilateralism
of the Zionist movement. "What matters is not what the goyim
[non-Jews] say, but what the Jews do," said David Ben-Gurion,
Israel first prime minister, on many occasions.
The spirit
of Sharon's speech also draws on the Bush administration's legitimation
of unilateralism, at least for reliable clients of Washington,
despite the initial cavils of the White House at the speech's
letter. The Forward, a Jewish weekly published in New York, reported
on December 26 that a "senior White House official"
had summoned key journalists to inform them that the Bush administration's
vocal disappointment at the unilateral measures floated in Sharon's
speech was only for public consumption. In fact, this official
claimed, the Israeli premier had shown the White House a draft
of the speech beforehand. In any case, the US now prefers to highlight
the part of the speech where Sharon affirmed Israeli support for
the road map -- a document which Israel officially declined to
"accept" and to which it appended 14 reservations.
PELTED WITH
SHOES
Arab clients
of Washington continue to be humiliated before their populations
by such indulgence of Ariel Sharon by the Bush administration.
On December 19, Egypt's semi-official al-Ahram newspaper asserted
that the White House had rejected Sharon's threat to take unilateral
measures against the Palestinians. The next day the same paper
reported Israel's arrest of Adnan Asfur, the Hamas spokesperson
in the West Bank. Asfur is generally considered a moderate within
Hamas. Yet he bizarrely stated in an interview with al-Ahram only
hours before his arrest that Sharon's speech was an important
achievement for the Palestinian resistance because it was an indirect
admission that the occupation was unsustainable. On December 21,
al-Ahram reported that the Palestinian Authority had denounced
the Bush administration's positive reception of Sharon's speech
as consistent with the road map -- without noting the contradiction
between this news and its original report.
The most
spectacular embarrassment for the Egyptian government connected
to this affair was the attack on Foreign Minister Ahmad Maher
by Palestinians in Jerusalem on December 19. Maher was pelted
with shoes during Friday prayers at al-Aqsa mosque. After a long
period with very limited official Egyptian presence in Israel,
Maher had come to meet Sharon in an effort to help restart Israeli-Palestinian
talks. The Islamic radicals who attacked Maher are allegedly members
of the Islamic Liberation Party, a tiny group whose Egyptian branch
was liquidated after attempting to incite an armed insurrection
in 1974. They do not, as the al-Jazeera satellite TV channel insinuated,
represent any broad segment of Palestinian opinion despite the
spontaneous outburst of anger directed at Ahmad Maher.
The public
assault on Egypt's foreign minister in Jerusalem underscores the
impotence of the regime of his boss, President Husni Mubarak.
Egypt is too dependent on Washington to do more than quietly protest
while the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands deepens. Moreover,
Mubarak is too frightened of a potential domestic upheaval to
mobilize the already existing popular outrage against Washington
and Israel. At the same time, most of the Egyptian opposition
forces are mired in a politics of rhetoric in which loquacious
denunciation of Israel and American imperialism and conspiratorial
thinking substitutes for the hard work of building a popular constituency
for democracy and economic equity. Such are the multiple impasses
to which Sharon's determination to defeat Palestinian national
aspirations continues to contribute.
