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JERUSALEM: A divided US administration still sees Yasser Arafat, not Ariel Sharon, as the man who must change his ways if Middle East peace is to come any closer.
The hawks in Congress and the Defence Department are receptive to the Israeli prime minister’s view that the Palestinian leader is a dyed-in-the-wool ‘terrorist’ who must go.
The doves, led by Secretary of State Colin Powell, argue that Arafat, whatever his defects, is the elected leader of the Palestinians and a policy of “regime change” is not apt.
Especially, they might add, if Washington wants European and Arab support for any bid to topple Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.
Israeli and Palestinian analysts say US policy lacks coherence due to such conflicting positions, with President George W. Bush seemingly unable to decide between them.
Bush, who declares he has no respect for Arafat, nonetheless lays out a “vision” of a future Palestinian state that Arabs, and many Israelis, reckon is anathema to Sharon.
“It’s undeniable that Bush is agonizing, almost in public, whether to go with his instinct or the political advice he gets from the State Department,” said Israeli analyst Mark Heller.
Against this background, few expect a US envoy heading back to the region this week to bring any stern messages for Sharon, whose domestic popularity has soared since he unleashed the military in the West Bank after a slew of suicide attacks.
The State Department’s William Burns is expected on Thursday. Bush said on May 7 he was also sending CIA director George Tenet to the Middle East to work on reforms of the Palestinian security forces, but Tenet has yet to arrive.
CIA MISSION: Israel sees the Palestinian security forces as tainted by links with militants who have killed scores of Israelis.
Many Palestinians are thirsty for reform, but see it as an internal matter, not one for Israel and its US ally to use to delay the Palestinian goal of replacing Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip with an independent state.
“The whole idea of reform cannot be separated from the political process it is designed to serve,” said Palestinian analyst Ghassan al-Khatib.
“This Israeli government is not only hostile to the US and UN Security Council vision of two states, it’s even hostile to the arrangements of Oslo,” he said, citing the 1993 interim peace accords under which Palestinian cities won self-rule.
Israel’s West Bank offensive, and its new policy of sending tanks and troops in and out of Palestinian-ruled towns at will, has effectively ended a key component of the Oslo accords.
“The original inspiration for Oslo was let the Palestinians take care of counter-terrorism,” Heller said.
Now, he argued, Israel believes the problem lies as much in the political direction that Arafat is giving the security services as in their organisation or technical capacities.
NO ISRAELI CONSENSUS: Some in Israel’s government, such as Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, want Arafat to have a chance to regain his credibility by unifying and reforming his disparate security organs.
Others, like Sharon, blame Arafat for inciting attacks on Israel and say the priority must be to dislodge him. Israeli hawks may blanch at the idea of rebuilding Palestinian security forces with Arafat still in place.
But David Kimche, a former senior official in Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency, said it would be hard for the government to resist US-led efforts to revamp them.
“They can’t object to efforts to enable the security services to fight terror more effectively,” he said.
Arafat, under pressure from moderate Arab leaders as well as the international community, now denounces suicide attacks as terrorism that damages the Palestinian quest for statehood.
But the former guerrilla chief cannot afford to be derided by his own people as Israel’s policeman after the losses Palestinians have suffered in the 20 months of an uprising.
Palestinians see Sharon’s talk of reform as an ill-disguised effort to replace Arafat with a pliant leadership.
For now, Sharon is riding high in the polls and seems able to ignore his Labour Party coalition allies who argue that only a negotiated peace, not military might alone, can rid Israel’s streets of suicide bombers and bring permanent security.
And few expect the United States to twist his arm, especially with Congressional elections due in November.
“Bush’s predominant interest is in domestic politics,” Kimche argued. “Pushing Sharon around is unlikely to be popular with right-wing Republicans, Jews or religious conservatives.”
GOLAN HEIGHTS: The fate of the Golan Heights is seen by Syria as a litmus test of Israel’s real intentions regarding peace. Damascus has refused to discuss other aspects of peace — such as normalizing political, economic, diplomatic, and cultural relations — until it gets a guarantee that Israel will fully withdraw from the Golan.
“The Israelis say that the disputed area is not so big,” says Adnan Omran, the Syrian minister of information, referring to the strip of territory along the northeast shore of the Sea of Galilee. “But everybody knows it’s not their land. They just want us to go down on our knees and surrender. Just the feeling that part of Syria remains occupied would make a peace treaty a joke.”
But away from the politics, the occupation of the Golan Heights represents a very human tragedy. Some 110,000 people fled their homes in 1967, according to estimates by historians and observers. Today, that number has swelled to around 500,000. —Reuters / CSM News Services
