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May 27, 2003
Well. Well. Well.
I never thought Sharon would accept the road map nor get its acceptance through his cabinet. I thought he was a prisoner of the far right ethnic and religious nationalists. It now appears not. I thought that Sharon's Likud Party would resist it to the bitter end. And he got it through cabinet without consulting the Likud parliamentary party.
Consider this description of the road map by The Washington Post:
"The road map, drafted by the United States, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations, calls for an immediate cease-fire, followed by a series of simultaneous confidence-building steps by the two sides, including the disarming and dismantling of Palestinian militant groups, the withdrawal of Israeli troops from the West Bank and Gaza Strip, a freeze on Jewish settlement expansion and the immediate dismantling of small settlement outposts established in the past two years. The plan calls for the creation of a "provisional" Palestinian state by the end of this year and a fully independent and sovereign state by 2005."
The Israel Cabinet must have choked on that content.
But then what they have accepted is the steps not the content of the road map. Looks like a way to buy time to me.
And I'm still having trouble coming to terms with this. Sharon saying that Israel is an occupying force and that keeping "3.5 million Palestinians under occupation is bad for Israel and the Palestinians." Is that Sharon saying that? Sharon is the first Israeli prime minister to use the term “occupation” in reference to Israel’s presence on lands captured in the 1967 all-out war launched by its Arab neighbors.
This paper spells out the international (UK) pressure on George Bush to push ahead with the road map, and the internal (Jewish) constraint on him not to pressure Israel to make any concessions.
Is Sharon carving out a place in history as the determining voice in where Israel goes next and a key role in Washington’s design for a new Middle East? Is he going to the Middle East power broker?
Addition
And The Sydney Morning Herald is equally puzzled. Its editorial says:
"Could the man who has so vehemently pursued a military solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have had such a change of heart? Or could Mr Sharon, a veteran of decades of failed peace efforts, simply be maneuvering within the new confines of the post-Iraq international environment."
And the answer the SMH gives?
"Whether of not the Israeli hawk is sincere in his conversion to the long, arduous process of a negotiated peace will only now be revealed as those negotiations progress."
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Israel has accepted these plans before.
Deliberately or not the record is: 1. make impossible demands of the Palestinian which add to the agreed plan; 2. announce you have no duty to implement your own commitments until the Palestinians meet your new demands; 3. continue supporting and/or creating settlements; 4. wait for the international media to announce that the plan is dead.
This is roughly what they did to Oslo and indeed to the original recognition agreement with Sadat. There is nothing so far to indicate that this plan is any different or that Bush has any understanding of the failure of previous plans.