Now that the Israeli elections are over, the road map to a Palestinian state by 2005 was supposed to reappear on the agenda. But the Palestinian Authority has been informed that the Middle East quartet has decided to postpone the introduction of its road map until a new Israeli government is formed and the situation in Iraq is resolved. The first endeavor has a time limit; the second anything but.
The government will take six weeks to be formed. The clock starts ticking after President Moshe Katsav formally invites Ariel Sharon to start working. Sharon now controls one-third of the Knesset after his landslide victory but will still find it hard work to build a governing coalition. He has said he would prefer a national unity government with the center-left Labor Party, although the task of bringing the divergent parties together is daunting. But dovish Labor leader Amram Mitzna has said his party will not serve under hawkish Sharon. One contentious point is the two parties’ substantially different views on Israeli settlements in the Palestinian territories. Labor sees many of them as unnecessarily exacerbating the conflict.
Labor’s partnership remains dear to Sharon. One theory is that Sharon is seeking the political camouflage that Labor’s participation would give his rightist policies. Mitzna believes that Labor played that role for Sharon in his last coalition government and paid the price for its compromised identity in the votinThe other theory is that Sharon wants to confound the hawks by reaching a historic peace agreement with the Palestinians. According to that theory, Sharon wants to vault into the ranks of Israeli peacemakers like Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Rabin and to erase the blots on his own record. Supporting evidence lies in Sharon’s recent rapprochement, his meeting with Ahmed Qorei, chairman of the Palestinian Legislative Council, a day after the elections, to discuss the possibility of resuming a cease-fire between Palestinians and Israelis. The meeting was Sharon’s first with the senior Palestinian official in about a year. He also met Yasser Arafat’s deputy, Mahmoud Abbas, before the election. Apparently, direct talks with the Palestinians started long before the elections and are set to continue next week.
There is, of course, another possibility: that Sharon is trying to survive in office and retain the backing of the United States while advancing in a general direction rather than toward a specific goal. He is not really negotiating; he is not really moving. He opposed the Oslo peace agreement from the start of his tenure as premier and earlier. Branding it a threat to Israeli security, and as Palestinian violence has continued, he has taken back almost all of the autonomy that was granted to the Palestinian Authority under the accords.
The makeup of the next Israeli government could prove critical in determining the future. But to have to wait until after the Israeli government takes shape before the road map can take center stage is a political vacuum which is in no one’s interests except Sharon’s. The bigger question is how long will it take for the Iraqi issue to be resolved before movement in the Arab-Israeli conflict is made. The Iraqi file is only now opening.
