IF AND WHEN the intifada ends, Palestinians and Israelis will need to begin talking not just from the point where the negotiations stopped. They must also cover a series of serious developments which have followed the uprising.
There have now been two forays — the occupation army has not amusingly dubbed them Operation Enjoyable Song — into Palestinian-controlled territories, in Khan Younis last week and on Saturday, in Rafah. In both instances Israeli tanks and bulldozers rumbled in, razing or heavily damaging homes, leaving hundreds of people homeless, and triggering an exchange of gunfire, leaving a number of Palestinians dead and scores injured.
Israel says it has no intention of reoccupying Palestinian territory. Granted, no Israeli prime minister can turn the clock back and reoccupy Gaza or the West Bank cities. That would be catastrophic and Ariel Sharon knows it. But two excursions, as opposed to just a singular venture, could be the start of a dangerous trend. An indefinite stay by Israeli troops, that could lead to a more or less permanent stopover in Palestinian land, is not entirely above the current prime minister.
Another chilling precursor is evidenced in a recent Sharon interview in which he said he favored a long-term interim deal with the Palestinians that would give them a far smaller and weaker state than they demand. He told the Maariv newspaper that a Palestinian state would have to be demilitarized and its police forces armed only to maintain order, while Israel for years would oversee the external borders and be free to fly over the territory.
As worrying as the kind of state Sharon envisions is the size he presumes it will be. With another Israeli withdrawal in the West Bank, such as the one promised in a 1998 interim peace accord, he said it’s possible to reach 42 percent, plus or minus. He rejected the readiness of Ehud Barak, the former prime minister, to cede up to 97 percent of the West Bank for a Palestinian state.
The 42 percent is only a little bit more than the West Bank land in which Palestinians already have full or partial control under interim peace deals going back seven years. Palestinians have already ruled out establishing a state on anything less than all of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip — lands that Israel occupied in 1967. Even if a Palestinian state were to be the size equal to Barak’s estimate, the Palestinian areas will be for the most part non-contiguous and allow no free passage between them. The new system of roads on the West Bank will connect all the settlements to each other, thus making it impossible for Palestinians to rule their own territory continuously. The West Bank will, therefore, be divided into a series of cantons, sometimes referred to as reservations or Bantustans, separated by Israeli roads and settlements. And Israel will retain control of all territory on the West Bank which it has designated as military or state or public lands. This amounts to 60-65 percent of the whole. In effect then, the Palestinians would have ironically fulfilled the Zionist dream of giving Palestinians rule over themselves but not the land. Sharon’s last settlement drive is well on its way to achieving an objective pursued by a succession of Israeli leaders during the last three decades — to obstruct the creation of an independent, truly sovereign Palestinian state. The core idea is that if Jews have all the rights to the land of Israel, then any non-Jewish people there are entitled to no rights at all. As before, Sharon conditioned any peace talks on an end to the seven-month-old uprising. But politically and economically, this patchwork agreement would be disastrous — disastrous for Palestinians in the short-term but catastrophic for the whole region including Israel in the long run.
