A year of opportunity for Sharon and Abbas

Dec 31st 2004
From The Economist Global Agenda

Ariel Sharon and Mahmoud Abbas, the Israeli and Palestinian leaders, should start 2005 with new governments and a new opportunity for peace. Will they grasp it?

BOTH the Israeli and Palestinian leaders are beefing up their power in the face of momentous challenges expected in 2005. The new chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), Mahmoud Abbas, also known as Abu Mazen, has launched his campaign to win the presidency of the Palestinian Authority (PA) in an election on January 9th which he is now thought sure to win, due partly to a dearth of serious challengers (the strongest potential contender, Marwan Barghouti, finally dropped out after changing his mind several times). On Thursday December 30th, in a show of support for Mr Abbas, militants carried him on their shoulders through a refugee camp in the West Bank town of Jenin.

But once in office, Mr Abbas will be weighed down by the burden of the late Yasser Arafat’s legacy, assailed by strong opponents among the Palestinians, and hobbled by a near-derelict state apparatus. And he faces fierce pressure from abroad to revamp the Palestinians’ entire political, security and economic set-up.

Israel’s prime minister, Ariel Sharon, who has dubbed 2005 “the year of opportunity”, has equally daunting tasks ahead. His main one is to “disengage” Israel’s forces from the Gaza strip and to uproot all Jewish settlements there, along with a handful in the north of the West Bank, the main part of a heralded Palestinian state. Somehow, Mr Sharon must quell the settlers’ vehement opposition to the evacuation. And once he has withdrawn from Gaza, he will face pressure from abroad to negotiate a withdrawal from most of the West Bank too.

Mr Sharon has seen his right-wing coalition crumble due to the fierce opposition of some members (including in his own Likud party) to the Gaza pull-out. To press ahead with the plan, he has been talking for months with Shimon Peres, leader of the main opposition Labour party, about creating a national-unity government. Labour strongly favours quitting Gaza and its parliamentary votes are crucial to achieving Mr Sharon's plan. On Thursday, the main obstacle to the new coalition was cleared, with a compromise under which Mr Peres becomes deputy prime minister with powers second only to Mr Sharon's, while his current deputy, Ehud Olmert, a stalwart Likud ally, also keeps his job. The day before the deal was announced, Mr Olmert caused a kerfuffle by telling the Jerusalem Post that the Gaza pull-out would have to be followed by a wider withdrawal from the West Bank. Mr Sharon's office hastily insisted it had no plans for a second “disengagement”.

Mr Abbas has so far reiterated the PLO’s usual demands on Israel: that it withdraw from all of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza; that East Jerusalem be acknowledged as the capital of a future Palestinian state; and that the millions of Palestinian refugees outside Israel and the occupied territories be allowed to return. But Mr Abbas has also sought to divest himself of the legacy of Arafat, who endorsed the violence of the Palestinians’ current intifada (uprising): Mr Abbas has condemned it and urged the resumption of peaceful negotiations for an independent Palestine.

The difficulty of Mr Abbas’s job was underlined on December 23rd by a strong showing, in Palestinian municipal elections, by the Islamist movement, Hamas, which opposes a ceasefire and refuses to accept the existence of a Jewish state. Never having taken part in such elections before, Hamas apparently won nine of the 26 local councils outright, while Fatah, the main secular party (founded by Arafat) under the PLO’s umbrella, won 16. With Hamas boycotting the presidential election, opinion polls suggest that Mr Abbas may win a comfortable majority of the vote—enough to give him legitimacy, even without Hamas's official endorsement. But whether Mr Abbas would then be able to stop Hamas from continuing its bombing campaign is not clear. The continuing violence in Gaza will not help: on Thursday and Friday Israeli forces killed around 12 Palestinians during operations to stop militants firing on Jewish settlements.

The Israeli government has agreed to withdraw its forces from Palestinian towns before the presidential vote and to let Palestinians living in Arab East Jerusalem, which the Israelis consider their sovereign territory, vote too. Mr Sharon said he would meet the PA leader, once elected, to discuss a “co-ordinated withdrawal” from Gaza. He again demanded a “full cessation of terrorism in deeds rather than declarations” as a precondition for further negotiation.
Now that the more negotiation-prone Labour is set to enter government, Mr Sharon has a solid parliamentary majority for disengagement. Moreover, he won a bargain deal, with Mr Peres abandoning his dream of becoming foreign minister and his Labour colleagues getting only minor portfolios.

So Mr Sharon’s government looks more stable—at a cost of inflaming the right. The settler leaders look politically isolated. Mr Sharon has thwarted their efforts to prompt an early general election or a referendum. But they are still calling on their followers to resist an evacuation physically. Many settlers in Gaza put on orange Star-of-David patches, a reminder of the yellow ones Nazis forced Jews in the Reich to sew on. The use of such Holocaust symbols has not endeared the settlers to more mainstream Israelis. In any event, the issue is still ferociously debated. The withdrawal is not expected until July, settlers may turn violent, and some religious soldiers may refuse to force them to evacuate.

So far, outside powers have not become deeply involved, though many foreign leaders have visited Israel and the Palestinian territories to test the water and urge negotiation. Britain’s Tony Blair, who visited just before Christmas, lauded Israel’s intention to withdraw from Gaza and advised Palestinians to embark on reform. But Mr Blair’s plan for a London peace conference, now due in March, took a knock when Mr Sharon refused to attend. So Britain’s prime minister had to make do with a “reform conference” whose main purpose, apparently, will be to bolster a newly-elected leader of the PA in his efforts to clean up his own Palestinian house before trying to persuade the Israelis to negotiate with a view to making the territorial concessions that might lead to a viable Palestinian state.

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