Ariel Sharon does not seem ready for a negotiated Middle East settlement. Rather, he is making sure he will never have to negotiate. He insists on seven days of a total cease-fire, plus six weeks of cooling off — nearly two months of complete calm — before any goodwill gestures from Israel can be expected.
Thus, Sharon has set the bar high, in fact too high. The strict sequencing that he insists on between the cease-fire, the cooling-off period and any gestures favorable to the Palestinians should be rejected. This is against the spirit of the Mitchell report which recognizes that an end to violence cannot be sustained without meaningful political negotiations and material and tangible progress on the ground as soon as possible. Political accomplishments, like a settlement freeze, will help encourage Palestinians to respect the cease-fire. But by giving Yasser Arafat nothing to show in return for calling a halt to the uprising, Sharon’s demand for weeks of full calm before making reciprocal moves is unrealistic.
Violence has dropped significantly after the cease-fire took effect on June 13 but one violent act can easily be used by Israel as an excuse to delay or completely avoid meeting its obligations. If every few days there is a cease-fire violation, that would allow the truce to be disrupted repeatedly.
Still unclear is when the clock will start ticking on the seven days of complete quiet, a period which would appear short enough to maintain a truce.
But a cease-fire will only hold if Israel is ready to freeze the construction of the 150 or so Jewish settlements, lift blockades on Palestinian areas and withdraws its troops from positions held before the violence began.
But Sharon is deeply opposed to halting settlements, which are central to his conviction that they are facts on the ground and has spent much of his political career promoting their construction. Evidence of this is that just hours before his meeting with George W. Bush last week, and despite a massive publicity drive to persuade the international community that it has accepted the Mitchell report, which calls for a full settlement freeze, Israel’s Land’s Authority published tenders for 38 plots in Maaleh Adumim, the largest of Israel’s settlements in the West Bank. It was hardly a move conducive to the quiet Sharon professes he wants to see. The freezing of settlements would infuriate the nationalists in Sharon’s coalition and would lend ammunition to right-wingers in his own Likud bloc who would like to remove him from power.
Sharon thus has no incentive to cooperate. What he wants is not a final-status agreement, but a non-belligerency pact.
On the other hand, Arafat has pledged to honor the Mitchell report and is hoping that the parties who exerted pressure on him to declare the cease-fire will exert the same amount of pressure on Sharon to remove the causes of the violence or at least respect the report in practice. But Sharon wants 100 percent effort from Arafat, 100 percent results and wants Palestine to be the first country in the world with zero violence and no criminals. He is thus setting unattainable standards of a complete halt in violence and is trying to forestall a return to meaningful negotiations. It is a dangerous game.
