June 25, 2002	Tuesday	Rabi-us-Sani 13, 1423

LONDON: The idea of a provisional Palestinian state as an antidote to 21 months of Middle East bloodshed alarms many Israelis and Palestinians and baffles most of the rest of the world.

“I think it’s a bit of a nonsense in international law,” said Kevin Chamberlain, a British barrister who specializes in the subject. “A state is a state or it isn’t.”

Only when US President George W. Bush finally spills his proposals on Middle East peace will the world know if they include the elusive concept of a half-way house to independence, but US officials have said he is considering this option.

Provisional statehood is an idea without apparent precedent, diplomats say, though Israel itself is an example of a state enjoying world recognition despite lacking definitive borders.

In practice, reactions to whatever Bush proposes may not dwell on the niceties of international law. Palestinians and Israelis will be more interested in whether he lays out a path to full statehood linked to defined goals and a timetable.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, while not ruling out a Palestinian state in some remote future, is dead set against any such notion now, arguing that it would simply reward terrorism.

He accuses Palestinian President Yasser Arafat of being behind militants attacking Israel and will not deal with him.

“It’s interesting to speculate what kind of Palestinian state they want...What are they talking about?” Sharon said at the scene of a suicide bombing that killed 19 people last week.

Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, spiritual leader of Hamas, which claimed that attack, was equally scathing on Monday about any statehood proposal that might come out of Washington.

“(America) waves to us with hopes of a state, a state on paper, while in reality Israel is pursuing its occupation of our land and its assaults on our people,” he said at his Gaza home, where Arafat has ordered him to be confined.

DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE: The PLO declared a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1988, long before it controlled any territory there. The 1993 Oslo accords set up the Palestinian Authority, along with its quasi-state institutions that now lie in ruin.

The Palestinians debated another unilateral proclamation of statehood in the late 1990s as the Oslo deals failed to end Israeli occupation, but eventually heeded world appeals not to pre-empt peace talks for the sake of a largely symbolic gesture.

Now Arafat’s officials voice misgivings about any offer of a future state that fails to set out a timetable or to specify that its borders should be based on those that delineated the West Bank and Gaza Strip before the 1967 Middle East war.

They were not reassured when US Secretary of State Colin Powell said recently that Bush knew that to achieve his vision of a Palestinian state living alongside Israel, “it might be necessary to set up a temporary state, as a transitional step”.

At first blush, this might not seem too far from Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s proposal that a Palestinian state be declared ahead of negotiations on its final borders.

Former Palestinian negotiator Ahmed Khalidi said an offer of a “partial state on partial land” pending negotiations on the tough issues of borders, Jerusalem and refugees would be a disastrous return to the failed Oslo formula of interim deals.

However, he said Palestinians could support the phased implementation of an agreement with defined objectives.

Israeli political scientist Joel Peters said virtually any plan would be better than the current peacemaking vacuum, as long as it went beyond a vague, Oslo-type interim process.—Reuters