- Israel Prime Minister Ariel Sharon used the January 5
congress of his Likud Party to reiterate his threat to permanently annex
land on the West Bank and thereby unilaterally determine the shape of a
truncated Palestinian entity.
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- First made on December 18 of last year, his threat to
abandon the timetable set out in the so-called "Road Map" for
peace has received scarcely a word of criticism from Washington-despite
the US being the main sponsor of the proposals. In effect, he has instead
been given a green light for his expansionist aims and the escalating brutality
that such plans will necessitate.
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- The Road Map provides for the establishment of a Palestinian
state with provisional borders, as a step towards the creation of a definitive
state by 2005.
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- In last December's policy speech to a security conference
in Herzliya, near Tel Aviv, however, Sharon laid down an ultimatum to the
Palestinian Authority (PA): that if they failed to suppress all opposition
to the Israeli occupation by outlawing militant groups and carrying out
mass arrests, he would unilaterally separate Israel from the Palestinian
territories within a matter of months.
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- He refused to specify the line of separation, but threatened
that the Palestinians would be granted even less territory than they would
under a negotiated settlement. The lines of demarcation Sharon intends
to impose are hardly a mystery, as they would follow the line of the illegal
security fence Israel is erecting. This cuts well into territories beyond
the "Green Line," the pre-1967 Six Day War border between Israel
and the West Bank. This would make permanent the "facts on the ground"
of 140,000-plus Zionist settlers having seized control of around 15 percent
of the West Bank, representing its prime agricultural land. It would also
permanently deny access to any part of East Jerusalem, which the Palestinians
want to be their capital and which constitutes a vast proportion of the
West Bank proper.
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- He pledged to speed up the construction of the security
barrier, warning the PA, "We are not going to wait forever."
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- Despite the provocative character of Sharon's threat,
Washington quickly gave its tacit assent. Initially, White House press
secretary Scott McClellan made critical remarks warning Sharon, "We
would oppose any unilateral steps that block the road toward negotiations
under the road map." But by the next day, McClellan had changed his
tune. "We were very pleased with the overall speech," he said,
adding that Sharon had made some important pledges to ease the conditions
facing Palestinians and had undertook to confiscate no more land for settlement
expansion and to dismantle unauthorised settler outposts.
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- The settlement issue is being focused on by Tel Aviv
and Washington-as if Sharon had suddenly become the enemy of the very people
on whom he has relied for support-in order to divert attention from the
expansionist substance of his announcement. In this, Sharon can rely on
the entirely predictable outrage of the settler population, of Likud's
most extremist wing and of its far-right coalition partners to any proposal
to remove a single settlement from the supposedly "biblical"
home of the Jews.
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- The Road Map calls for a freeze on settlements, as well
as on what is called "natural growth" in order to create a Palestinian
state. But Sharon has only stated that some settlements may have to be
"redeployed"-"reducing as much as possible the number of
Israelis located in the heart of the Palestinian population" and so
drawing " the most efficient security line possible."
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- Sharon has not specified precisely which settlements
are supposed to be shut down, but his record suggests that he is envisaging
isolated settlements in the east of the West Bank and the handful in the
Gaza Strip. There is no talk of reducing the overall number of settlers.
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- Deputy Prime Minister Ehud Olmert subsequently warned
of the anguish of possibly tens of thousands of settlers being forced to
relocate. He spoke of the measure in terms of preserving Israel's Jewish
majority, warning that Arabs would soon outnumber Israel's 5.5 million
Jews in the territory it controls. "Do we want [the Palestinians]
to be equal citizens in the state of Israel and ultimately dictate the
nature of the state?" Olmert asked.
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- If Sharon's proposals were carried through fully, this
figure of tens of thousands is possibly true, but only because Sharon's
government has presided over a doubling of the settler population on the
West Bank to 220,000. Israel spends about $500 million on settlements annually-excluding
the massive security bill. Of the settlements established, 130 have been
authorised and 100 are unauthorised. Of the latter, 60 have been built
during Sharon's term in office.
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- Most of the settlements Sharon has so far targeted for
dismantling are tiny and often uninhabited. Of two announced to be dismantled
on January 3, for example, only one was inhabited and consisted of two
families living in an old bus and a trailer. This month, Sharon identified
28 outposts for removal housing just 400 settlers. There are 40 or 50 much
bigger outposts that should have been dismantled under the Road Map, and
many of those that have been dismantled are quickly rebuilt.
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- To place the plight of these illegal Israeli settlers
in its proper perspective, it should be noted that the borders being drawn
by Sharon would displace more than 200,000 Palestinians from their homes.
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- There is ample evidence that Sharon intends to continue
his de facto encouragement of settlements. Only this month it was revealed
that $1 million had been allocated to building a road to an illegal West
Bank outpost, after a seminary dedicated to the teachings of the former
leader of the extremist Kach party, Rabbi Meir Kahane, was built there.
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- In a related development, his government was forced to
publicly deny plans to expand Jewish settlements by building 900 homes
in the Golan Heights-a strategic plateau captured after Israel defeated
Syria, Egypt and Jordan in the 1967 War. The Bush administration had called
for freezing Israeli settlement expansion there, after Agriculture Minister
Yisrael Katz publicly announced a plan to double the number of settlers
from 17,000 to 34,000 over the next three years at a cost of $56 million.
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- Katz is one of Sharon's main rightist opponents within
Likud. The proposal was meant as a deliberate snub to Syria, announced
as it was just weeks after its leader Bashar al-Assad had called for an
unconditional resumption of peace talks with Israel. "The idea is
that Assad will see from his own window the Israeli Golan Heights thriving
and flowering," said Katz.
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- At the congress of the party's 3,000-member central committee,
a stronghold of Sharon's main rival, Finance Minister Binyamin Netanyahu,
Katz was one of a dozen or so MPs up in arms at proposals to remove some
settlements. Sharon was met with a chorus of boos when he spoke of abandoning
settlements and when he spoke of the possibility of a Palestinian state.
But he dismissed demands that he put the issue before the party leadership
for ratification. He insisted that, as prime minister, he had the final
responsibility. And despite the booing, the threatened vote of no-confidence
and withdrawal from the coalition by the settler-based National Religious
Party (NRP) and National Union have not materialised.
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- Transportation Minister Avigdor Lieberman, leader of
the National Union, said he had heard nothing that should make his party
leave the government, while NRP leader Effi Eitam was advised by leading
settler representative Rabbi Shlomo Aviner to remain in the government
at all costs.
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- Sharon cannot afford to be quite as provocative as his
rightist allies, who are addressing a largely domestic audience while playing
to the most extreme elements within the Zionist milieu in the US and internationally.
He must be politic in pursuing his goal of a Greater Israel while not unduly
embarrassing his backers in Washington.
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- The Bush administration is intent on establishing its
undisputed hegemony over the entire Middle East. As was demonstrated with
Iraq, this drive ultimately rests on a combination of economic pressure
and the deployment of US military muscle. The fate of Saddam Hussein's
regime, together with the threats made against "axis of evil"
states such as Iran and Syria, is meant to intimidate all the Arab regimes
and ensure their obeisance before Washington.
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- But the Arab rulers have pleaded with Washington to give
them a fig leaf with which to hide their refusal to oppose US aggression
in the region-by forcing Israel to accept some limited form of Palestinian
statehood. To this end, the US joined with the European Union, Russia and
the United Nations to draw up the Road Map, which promises the creation
of a rump entity on some of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in return for
the Palestinian Authority bringing the intifada to an end.
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- Sharon has been forced to accept for now this "two-states"
solution-which would leave the Palestinians in a ghetto entity, ringed
and intersected by Israeli military outposts, policed by the PA and the
Western powers, and entirely subservient to Israel. But he has constantly
pushed the US to ditch the Road Map by mounting constant provocations against
the Palestinians designed to elicit suicide bombings by militant groups.
This enables Sharon to denounce the PA for its failure to honour its commitment
to end hostilities against Israel, and is now being used to legitimise
his threat to impose his own even more iniquitous version of a "two-states"
solution on the Palestinians.
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- Sharon could not contemplate irritating President George
W. Bush's without the knowledge that he has at the very least substantial
backing for his actions amongst many of Washington's key players and a
calculation that the criticisms he occasionally faces are only for the
record. Indeed, one of the more embarrassing aspects of Sharon's latest
outpourings for the Bush administration was his promise to coordinate Israel's
supposedly unilateral moves. In December, he pledged that any Israeli actions
would be "fully coordinated" with Washington in order not to
harm "our strategic coordinations with the United States." To
the Likud convention, he declared, "If it transpires in a few months
that we have no partner...we will have to act alone, with maximum coordination
with our allies, first and foremost the US."
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- Sharon is a pragmatist whose ambitions are restrained
by both the mounting economic, political and military difficulties facing
his government and his need to maintain US backing. But ultimately he has
not abandoned his aim of driving the Palestinians out of the West Bank
and Gaza Strip altogether-nor of extending Israeli control over the Golan
Heights and substantial parts of what are now Syria and Lebanon. Even as
he made his threat to unilaterally separate from the Palestinians, therefore,
he reassured his hard-line critics, "This security line will not constitute
the permanent border of the State of Israel."
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- He clearly calculates that his long-held goals may be
realisable if he pushes the Palestinians into a corner and forces the US
to take sides in an ever-escalating military conflict he has engineered.
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- Counter threats by Prime Minister Ahmad Qureia indicate
the anger Sharon has provoked and the desperate situation facing the PA
in seeking to tie the Palestinian masses to the "two-states"
solution envisaged under the Road Map. Qureia said of Sharon's plans, "This
is an apartheid solution to put the Palestinians in cantons. Who can accept
this? We will go for a one-state solution."
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- Pointing to maps of the fence, he said it was an attempt
to "put Palestinians like chickens in cages. The wall is to unilaterally
mark the borders, this is the intention behind the wall... It will kill
the road map and kill the two-state vision."
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- http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/jan2004/isra-j10.shtml
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