February 10, 2003	Monday	Zul Hijjah 8,1423

WASHINGTON: With the looming prospect of war with Iraq, a split within the Western alliance of nations about what to do about Baghdad and the new threats of a nuclear crisis with North Korea, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has retreated from the spotlight. But the stubborn struggle — and its bloodshed — is still there, still smouldering.

In the January Israeli elections, Likud Party candidate Prime Minister Ariel Sharon came away with an unexpected large plurality — but not enough to make up a majority in the 120-seat Knesset, so he is having to make deals to rule.

Most of Israel’s minor parties support the tough line that he has carried out or are even more extreme, calling for such measures as expelling all Arabs.

But the second ranking party, Labour, has said it will not join in another coalition government with Sharon. It felt ill-used in the last coalition government and felt its policies were ignored by the strong-minded Sharon.

So that leaves Sharon with the limited possibility of forming a coalition government with a disparate collection of fringe religious and ethnic parties. Most of them are to the right of him. All are with their own agenda and their own demands, and some of them want tougher action by the Israeli government.

The Arabs who live in Israel and are citizens were so torn by their diminishing lack of choices that they played little or no part in the past election, even though they represent 19 per cent of the registered voters. They couldn’t vote for Sharon, but they had few other choices, so they essentially abstained.

The Jewish Israeli voters, galvanized by suicide bombings, cast their ballots for safety. They accepted the belief that the Palestinian leadership had rejected the last, best chance for peace presented by former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak of the Labour party at Camp David in the United States in July 2000. But as more evidence comes out, including a book by Moshe Amirav, one of Barak’s assistants at the Camp David summit the Israeli belief does not appear to be accurate.

In the newly published view, the Camp David offer by Barak was so conditional that Palestinian President Yassir Arafat, now hanging on by a thread, would have committed the equivalent of political suicide. If Arafat had accepted it, there was no guarantee that Barak could carry through with his offer.

The myth that the Palestinians rejected the offer of 95 per cent of their territory back (that’s only if you count what the Israelis have occupied since 1967 and doesn’t say what would happen to the pervasive Israeli settlements and road system that would slice the Palestinian remnant into tiny, economically insupportable “Bantustans”) has now been embedded into the Israeli body politic. By extension, it is part of the American strategy.

The belief has been perpetuated by US President George W. Bush, now otherwise occupied with the question of how to deal with Iraq. He has supported Sharon — as “a man of peace” — while ignoring the use of American weapons by the Israelis in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which has become a major theme in the radical campaign against the United States.

This American failure to connect cause and effect might be part of the reason for the lack of enthusiasm that the US administration is finding in the international community about a war in Iraq.—dpa