A fragile Palestinian truce takes shape

Jan 26th 2005
From The Economist Global Agenda

The Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, has sent his police to calm the Gaza strip and is close to persuading militant groups to declare a ceasefire. As a result, preparations are being made for the first summit between Palestinian and Israeli leaders in almost two years

A RESUMPTION of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process now seems possible, after moves by Mahmoud Abbas, the newly-elected president of the Palestinian Authority (PA), to persuade militant groups based in the Gaza strip to halt their attacks on Israeli targets. On Wednesday January 26th, five days after Mr Abbas sent his security forces to police the northern end of the strip, the launchpad for many recent attacks, one of his senior officials, Saeb Erekat, held talks in Jerusalem with Dov Weisglass, a senior adviser to Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister. The focus of the meeting was to begin making arrangements for the Israeli leader's first summit with his Palestinian counterpart since Mr Abbas's election.

The meeting between Mr Erekat and Mr Weisglass was itself the most high-level contact between the two sides since the breakdown of a ceasefire in 2003, since when there had seemed little prospect of reviving the internationally-backed “road map” peace plan. The talks followed an announcement by Mr Abbas's officials on Monday that militant groups in Gaza had agreed to hold their fire for several days to see if Israel responded by pulling troops out of Palestinian cities and stopping other military operations. If so, a formal truce would then be called.

As the Jerusalem talks were being held, more of Mr Abbas's policemen began patrolling to the southern end of Gaza. Around 2,000 Palestinian police are to be deployed there, around the same number as have been patrolling the northern end since last Friday. Their deployment is the first such operation by the PA since the militants launched their intifada (uprising) against the Israeli occupation more than four years ago.

Since the death last November of Mr Abbas’s predecessor, Yasser Arafat, the West Bank—the larger part of the territories occupied by Israel since the 1967 war—has been largely quiet, whereas until last week Gaza had been the scene of constant rounds of attack and counter-attack between the militants and the Israelis. Mr Abbas's talks with the militants' leaders and his mobilising of the PA's forces have led to a sharp drop in the level of violence in Gaza.
However, on Wednesday a bullet fired by Israeli troops, reportedly in response to missiles fired by militants, was said to have accidentally killed a three-year-old Palestinian girl in Gaza.

One of Mr Sharon’s spokesmen said Israel would not publicly declare any truce in response to a ceasefire by Palestinian militants but that, “If there is quiet, we will respond with quiet.” In turn, officials of Hamas, the largest militant group in Gaza, made it clear that they were very close to declaring a truce but that this would depend on concrete actions by Israel in the coming days. Mr Abbas has spent much time in Gaza holding rounds of talks with the militants’ leaders, trying to persuade them to suspend their armed struggle and enter the political mainstream.

If an all-round ceasefire takes hold, it could pave the way for Mr Sharon and Mr Abbas to revive formal negotiations towards a lasting settlement, under the terms of the road map. However, the last such tentative truce, in June 2003, was blown apart in less than two months, with Palestinian militants resuming their suicide-attacks and the Israeli forces resuming their assassinations of the militant groups’ leaders. Shortly after the collapse of that truce, Mr Abbas, then Arafat’s prime minister, resigned, in part over his boss’s failure to merge and reform the PA’s rivalrous and disorganised security forces. Unlike Arafat, Mr Abbas appears genuinely to believe that violence is not helping the Palestinian national cause.

Israel has recently shown some small signs of being willing to make Mr Abbas’s job easier. In late December, in the run-up to the Palestinian election, it let out 159 of the 7,000 or so Palestinian prisoners it holds. And last Friday it partially reopened the Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt, which had been closed since an attack in early December. The militants have made it clear they expect more from Israel—including the release of many more prisoners—in return for a lasting truce. However, on Monday it was reported that Israel had resumed construction of one of the most controversial stretches of its barrier fence in the West Bank—a move that Palestinian leaders said undermined their efforts to arrange a ceasefire.

There have also been mixed signals from Mr Sharon’s shaky coalition government in the past few days. Shimon Peres, the doveish deputy prime minister and Labour party leader, has called for troop withdrawals from the West Bank and the easing of restrictions on Palestinians’ movements. Binyamin Netanyahu, the hawkish finance minister and coveter of Mr Sharon’s job, said he saw no reason for any Israeli concessions.

Though a summit between Mr Sharon and Mr Abbas now seems likely within weeks, the Israeli leader may be unwilling to start substantial negotiations until he has carried out his planned withdrawal of all Israeli troops and settlers from Gaza and part of the West Bank, which is due to take place in the middle of this year. A majority of Israelis support the withdrawal, and Labour, which joined the government earlier this month, is strongly in favour of the plan. But Mr Sharon still faces fierce opposition from the well-organised and vociferous settler movement and its political backers, including many in his own Likud party.

Though hopes for a revived Middle East peace process are higher than they have been for some time, and George Bush has been talking about achieving an independent Palestinian state by the end of his second term as American president, Mr Sharon’s officials are being careful to play down expectations of any breakthrough. Speaking to Reuters news agency on Sunday, Zalman Shoval, one of the Israeli prime minister’s advisers, doubted that Mr Abbas would have any more room to compromise than Arafat had. For this reason, Mr Shoval predicted, there would be no final peace accord “in our generation”. Still, after four years of bloody conflict, in which around 3,000-4,000 Palestinians and 1,000 Israelis have died, any agreement to stop fighting and resume the peace process, however long it takes, would be an achievement.

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