Three Years On: Rallying in support of Arafat at a Gaza refugee camp
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Although his hard-line tactics failed to bring Israel the security he promised, Sharon was reelected last year with an even stronger mandate. His closest challengers today come from within his own party — finance minister Benjamin Netanyahu, foreign minister Silvan Shalom — and the Labor Party is in decline and disarray. Conventional wisdom even in the center of the Israeli spectrum now holds that Oslo was a tragic mistake.
The hardening of Israeli hearts was mirrored on the Palestinian side, of course, where Hamas, too, moved from the margins into the mainstream. In 1996, Arafat ordered a hundreds of arrests of Hamas activists to stop a wave of bus bombings inside Israel, and made clear that he would not tolerate the organization attacking Israelis over his head. These days, Arafat's envoys hold polite negotiations with Hamas in the hope of forging a consensus over a cease-fire; Hamas, more often than not, demurs. And nobody expects that the security forces of the Palestinian Authority, whose members have fought shoulder-to-shoulder with gunmen from Hamas and other groups against Israeli incursions, are likely to turn their guns on their erstwhile comrades in order to achieve security for Israel.
What now?
In the early days of Oslo when Hamas continued to mount terror attacks, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin famously insisted that Israel would "pursue peace as if there was no terrorism, and fight terrorism as if there was no peace." Today, some Palestinian leaders such as Abbas and his security chief Muhammed Dahlan believe it's the Palestinians' turn, and that their cause will be lost unless they fight terrorism as if there was no occupation. But Abbas tried and failed — not only because Arafat was determined to sabotage him, but also because the fate of the Palestinians' "hudna" cease-fire showed that the rank and file fighters of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the various Fatah militias are simply not prepared to accept a unilateral truce that brings little basic changes in the conditions of occupation.
The hardships and hatreds engendered by three years of bloodletting and the absence of any significant progress toward a political solution has strengthened the hand of rejectionists on both sides. Israelis point to ongoing Palestinian terror attacks and insist there can be no political concessions or even dialogue. Instead, they are girding for a long-term siege of Palestinian population centers on the West Bank that they hope will eventually break the Palestinians will to resist. The Palestinians believe Israel was never serious about ending the occupation or withdrawing its settlements, and those counseling against violence have little to show for diplomacy. The men of violence believe the Palestinians have little to lose, now, but that the cost of the war of attrition must eventually break the will of the Israelis to maintain the occupation.
Still, neither side has been able to impose its will by force of arms. Israeli society has not buckled under the weight of the terror assault and demanded that its leaders withdraw from the West Bank; instead it has become more resolute in support of Sharon's tactics. But those tactics — from assassinations to massive military incursions, closures and economic strangulation — have neither eliminated the terror threat nor altered the fundamental political demands of even the most moderate Palestinian leaders.
Drawing borders
Sharon had hoped the combination of military, economic and diplomatic pressure would lower Palestinian expectations and force them to settle for less than had been offered by the previous Israeli government of Ehud Barak. That hasn't happened. Political negotiations have not been held since the Taba talks a month before Sharon's election, but the basic expectations of the Palestinian leadership remain unchanged. Abbas may have disagreed with Arafat and other Palestinian leaders over their tolerance for violence, but like those around Arafat his view of a political settlement is based on the proposals broadly agreed at Taba — Israeli retreat to a modified version of its 1967 borders, withdrawal of settlements, a creative interpretation of sovereignty to allow both sides to call Jerusalem their capital, and addressing the plight of Palestinian refugees principally via financial compensation and granting them the right to settle in the future Palestinian state.
If the Taba deal remains the minimum acceptable to the Palestinians, it's way beyond where Sharon has signaled he's willing to go. The Prime Minister had opposed Oslo because it pointed inexorably towards Israel ceding control of the West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem's Arab neighborhoods, which Sharon believed would put Israel in mortal danger. In the 1980s, he had touted his own solutions involving Palestinians in the West Bank cities being given "autonomy" at the local level, while Israel would control the land all around them. And that, in essence, is the current situation. Israel controls most of the West Bank; what's left of the Palestinian Authority — and the welfare wing of Hamas — handles the civil administration in the cities.
The map of Palestinian population centers surrounded by Israeli soldiers and settlers appears to be guiding the construction of the "security fence." Sharon has displayed a Clintonesque ability to borrow the most popular ideas of his domestic opponents in embracing the fence proposal, which had originated in the Labor Party. Labor, of course, wanted it built along the "Green Line" that marks the 1967 border between Israel and the West Bank — with the settlements on the outside. The fact that the fence would be a de facto border was not seen as a problem by Labor, precisely because it would broadly follow the Taba map. But Sharon and his right-wing political base initially rejected the idea, having no intention of giving up on the settlements. But the idea was supported by two thirds of Israel's electorate, as a means of keeping out suicide bombers. So he ordered it built according to his own map, not between Israel and the West Bank but around the Palestinian population centers that comprise around 40 percent of the West Bank — a topography that Washington realizes makes nonsense of the idea of a viable Palestinian state.
Indeed, many observers on both sides of the fence suggest that its construction severely erodes prospects for a two-state solution. That leaves Jews and Palestinians living, as they do to all intents and purposes right now, in a single political entity running from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean. And the majority population in that single entity will soon be the Palestinian, despite the fact that they have no rights of citizenship. That, U.S. officials have warned, will destroy Israel's Jewish and democratic character, codifying what Israeli peaceniks see as an apartheid arrangement as untenable as it is unjust.
The bad news: More to come
For now, however, there are no signs of any intervention to reverse the perilous drift in the situation. Left to their own devices, recent events have shown that the two sides between them will almost certainly consign President Bush's "roadmap" to the burgeoning archive of failed peace proposals. The momentum and ferocity of their combat will ebb and flow, as it has done over the past three years, but without achieving a qualitative transformation of the situation. Both sides know that the only intervention that can significantly transform the situation would have to come from the United States, and yet neither side expects to see much out of Washington in an election year. So it's a relatively safe bet, at the end of the third year of the intifadeh, that there will be a fourth year.