Middle East: Into the Abyss?

Each incremental raising of the ante may not look like much in itself, but taken cumulatively the pattern is unmistakable: No longer bound by a peace process, Israel and the Palestinians have jumped into the abyss. Israeli tanks and troops were poised to move into Palestinian-controlled villages near Bethlehem late Tuesday, following the incursion earlier in the day into the West Bank town of Jenin, where some 70 Israeli tanks destroyed a Palestinian police station. Israeli forces also seized three houses in the PA-controlled village of Beit Jallah to counter gunfire on an adjacent Israeli neighborhood. And last Friday, following a suicide bombing that killed 15 people in Jerusalem, Israel had seized control of Orient House, the Palestinians' unofficial headquarters in East Jerusalem. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon warned Tuesday that these actions were the price of Yasser Arafat's failure to rein in suicide bombers. The Palestinians greeted them as a declaration of war. And the United States urged restraint on both sides.

The growing disregard for the boundaries established by the Oslo Accord — described as a "provocation" by Washington — suggests that Sharon is betting on a long, low-intensity war with the Palestinians rather than on any resumption of the peace process. And Arafat appears to be pinning his hopes on some form of international intervention. Both sides will continue to pay lip service to the Mitchell Report and the cease-fire brokered by CIA director George Tenet, but only in as much as such lip service is necessary to achieve their goals. Sharon plainly believes that military action to turn up the heat on the PA will succeed where negotiation has failed in putting an end to attacks on Israelis. And yet those attacks show no sign of abating, as Israel's every raid simply grows the pool of young Palestinians willing to volunteer as suicide bombers for Hamas or Islamic Jihad, while their terror strikes carry overwhelming approval on the Palestinian streets.

Would-be mediators maintain that the increasingly violent deadlock arises because Sharon insists that Arafat act against the Islamists before he'll consider any of the Mitchell Report's "confidence-building" mechanisms, but that Arafat is unable to rein in the violence unless he's rewarded with political concessions. But that may be a moot point, right now, because the current sentiment on the Palestinian street severely limits his ability to act against the militants, even if he chooses to. His own Fatah organization has formally abandoned the cease-fire and resumed its grassroots alliance with Hamas and Islamic Jihad in order to fight the Israelis. As much as they're intended to force Arafat to act against Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the most recent Israeli actions may have only succeeded in making it more difficult for him to do so.

Israel's actions are intended to force Arafat to act against Hamas and Islamic Jihad, but they've only made it more difficult for him to do so

While a bottom-up "unity government" begins to take shape on the Palestinian street, Sharon's own unity government is showing a few signs of strain. Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, architect of the Oslo Accord, criticized last week's seizure of Orient House as a tactical mistake — and it's easy to see why. The move brought fierce international criticism, even from Washington, and turned the focus of the international community away from the suicide bombing. It also painted Sharon into a corner: Because Orient House had no official status in Israeli-Palestinian agreements, it will be politically difficult for the prime minister, who has sworn to keep Arafat's authority out of Jerusalem, to return the building. And yet that's exactly what everyone from President Bush on down is insisting that he does. The PLO has moved to initiate a meeting of the United Nations Security Council to discuss the issue, which despite U.S. and Israeli objections could reinforce calls for the deployment of international monitors in the West Bank and Gaza.

But as Sharon appears to be flailing in search of a magic bullet to end the violence, Peres can see the prospects of a renewed peace process slipping further beyond reach. That's prompted him to seek out Palestinian leaders for talks, although Sharon insisted that Peres be chaperoned in any discussion by one of Israel's top generals — whose function, presumably, is not simply to ensure the foreign minister's personal protection. Still, Palestinian leaders have dismissed talking to Peres as a waste of time, and in the present mood of outrage, that may not be simply posturing.

Where the Bush administration had been leaving it up to the two sides to find their own way back to the Tenet cease-fire, pressure on Washington to take a more forceful role may begin to grow as the daily escalation of violence makes each side's path back to the cease-fire all the more treacherous. Since the outbreak of the current intifada, both sides have couched the terms of their confrontations in terms of existing political agreements and cease-fires, even as those appeared to have diminishing relevance to the daily clashes. The idea that Arafat would round up terror suspects on his side of the line while the Israelis would keep their own forces on theirs is, after all, an Oslo principle. But Oslo looks like so much history, now. And the Israelis and Palestinians may already be into a low-level state of war, with potentially catastrophic consequences.