Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s resounding election victory has reshaped Israel’s political map and has handed the Israeli premier a strong mandate to continue his hard-edged approach to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The poll was also where the last efforts of the champions of the Oslo peace accords were annihilated.
With his smashing victory over the left-of-center Labour Party, Sharon is now in a position to do precisely what his rightist Likud Party officially demands: To prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
Sharon would now easily have majority support in the Knesset to expel Yasser Arafat — a step he has said he wants to take — and to accelerate the already rapid growth of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. He is free to tighten the already harsh restrictions on the more than three million Palestinians who live there.
Apparently, Sharon’s election victory has propelled him much closer to the state of affairs he envisions for Israelis and Palestinians alike. He has said he will accept an eventual Palestinian state that would occupy less than half of the West Bank — and none of Jerusalem — and be demilitarized. Israel would control its airspace. He envisions the borders of this state as being made final in perhaps 10 years.
Under Sharon’s plan, Israel would retain areas of the West Bank that he regards as essential to security — areas where, not incidentally, most of the settlements have been built. He supports what he calls a long-term interim arrangement with the Palestinians. That is effectively what he has now, with no talks toward a final settlement of the dispute under way.
There is also Sharon’s famous mantra in which he has repeatedly said he would make “painful concessions” for peace but he has not spelled out what the concessions would be.
Tempering Sharon’s machinations should be the Mideast road map to peace which envisions a three-stage process that would create new Palestinian institutions, establish provisional borders for a state by the end of this year and reach a final agreement with defined borders in 2005.
The US delayed publication of the plan until after the Israeli elections. Now it wants to delay some more to give Sharon time to form a coalition government which will take about five more weeks. And then there is the specter of war with Iraq. Even five weeks may be too little as the administration looks likely to press to delay the plan until after the confrontation with Iraq is resolved. Sharon says he accepts the road map but that he also wants numerous changes made. In recent statements and speeches, he has suggested he will craft his own road map plan, arguing it will be truer to President Bush’s vision than the outline negotiated by diplomats since August.
In fact, the administration has toughened up some of the language in the document in response to Sharon’s requests but Israeli officials believe the administration will be receptive to additional changes.
Sharon’s repeated answer to the administration’s road map proposals has been a quick “yes” followed more quietly by modifications. British Prime Minister Tony Blair and other European leaders have made the case that progress on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — symbolized by publication of the road map — must be made in order to assuage public opinion in the Arab world if a war is launched. However, this piece of advice has been ignored for the most part by Sharon and Bush who devoted only one line to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in his State of the Union address which instead focused on Iraq.
Israel’s general election demonstrated one thing above all others about the state: The demise of the Oslo peace process and all those associated with it. Given the way it was implemented or interpreted even by those, like the Labour party, who subscribed to it, nobody need to shed any tears for the Oslo process. But the total rejection by an overwhelming majority of Israelis of the very idea of peace which the Oslo underlined should worry all.
