March 3, 2002	Sunday	Zilhaj 18, 1422

WASHINGTON: Most of the Israeli prime minister Ariel Shaorn’s televized speech last Thursday was a poorly delivered pep talk, asking Israelis to keep a stiff upper lip in the face of terror attacks and suggesting that dissent strengthens the enemy.

There was reason for his embarrassment on that point, as there was for the pep talk. A year after his election on pledges to end terror and bring peace, Sharon has little to show but a rising death toll. Sharon has decided on “separation” of Israel from the West Bank.

But it is hard for him to own up to it or to carry out the idea in the way its many advocates suggest. That would require not just amorphous “zones,” but marking a border on the ground.

It would mean acknowledging that any solution to the conflict will require dividing the contested land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River between Israel and a Palestinian state. It would mean admitting that Israeli settlements beyond the new border must eventually be evacuated. Those are admissions Sharon does not want to make.

Successive Israeli governments have blurred the line between Israel and the occupied territories. For the right, that was ideology: Sharon’s Likud party and its partners wanted to annex, not concede, land. For the centre-left Labour party, it was mostly a negotiating strategy: Labour leaders wanted borders to be set in peace talks and feared that any line Israel drew on its own would be the starting point for negotiations.

As for principle, ruling the West Bank is a dead end. Already, as a top government official noted in a closed meeting recently, there may be more Arabs than Jews between the river and the sea. Israel can only remain both democratic and Jewish if it is a smaller Israel.

The Oslo process created hope of agreement with the Palestinians on a border between two states living in peace. Since the process collapsed, one alternative raised by centre and left-wing politicians is for Israel to set the border itself. Others argue that unilateral moves will make it even harder to reach a peace agreement. That is not Ariel Sharon’s criticism. Sharon placed many of the settlements on the map and wants to keep them there. Yet with Israelis demanding safety from terrorists, he has to act.

Caught between ideology and reality, between “addiction” to settlements and their price, Sharon will satisfy no one. His buffer-zone plan will apparently put a fence only along short stretches of the border area.

It falls far short of recognizing the fundamental fact of Middle East peacemaking: Not only must Palestinians end violence and live in peace with Israel, Israel will have to end its rule of the West Bank. Yet the plan angers Sharon’s right-wing allies and calls his own programme into question. No wonder he did not want to talk much about it. —Dawn/LAT-WP News Service (c) Newsday.