Disasters avoided, for now

Sep 30th 2005
From The Economist Global Agenda

The collapses of both Israel’s ruling Likud party and the Palestinian militants’ ceasefire have been averted in the past few days. But intransigence on both sides of the conflict is endangering the chances of peace following the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza

TWO doomsdays have, for now, been postponed. The threat of a return to all-out intifada by Palestinian militant factions, after the heaviest fighting seen this year between them and the Israeli army, was averted when both Hamas and Islamic Jihad announced on Tuesday September 27th that they would return to a ceasefire that had been brokered earlier this year. The day before, the threat of a fatal split in Israel’s Likud party was deferred after the party’s central committee voted narrowly not to bring forward the leadership primaries, which will pit Ariel Sharon, the current prime minister, against his main rival, Binyamin Netanyahu.

Both events demonstrated a triumph of reason over instinct. The trigger for the upsurge in violence was an explosion at a Hamas rally in the Gaza strip last week which killed 21 people. A mishandled Hamas rocket, said both Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA), which obliquely called it a “work accident”. An Israeli missile attack, insisted Hamas, which then proceeded to launch over 40 Qassam rockets into Israel. “That was an attempt to divert attention from their own blunder, because they feared a negative public reaction,” says Khalil Shikaki, an opinion pollster in Ramallah.

But Israel, as it had promised to do if attacked after its recent withdrawal of settlers and troops from Gaza, hit back with renewed force, launching more than a dozen air strikes on Gaza. That had its intended shock-and-awe effect: the militants backed down and announced their return to ceasefire, fearing an even worse public reaction if the Israeli bombings continued. Despite this move, Israeli aircraft launched further missiles at militant targets in Gaza City early on Wednesday and, on Thursday and Friday, Israeli troops killed a number of Palestinian militants in a continuing security sweep in the West Bank.

The militants miscalculated, says Mr Shikaki, because they had not taken into account the upcoming Likud vote. Mr Sharon had no choice but to respond to Hamas’s volley of rockets with an iron fist. He had been heavily criticised in his party for evacuating Gaza, and the success of its aftermath—violence or calm—will decide his chances of fending off Mr Netanyahu, who is courting the disengagement's many critics.

Could Hamas’s blunder have done Mr Sharon a favour, letting him display his toughness, so swinging the vote his way? Maybe. Or maybe the Likud hierarchs simply took a deep breath and realised that a possible split, with Mr Sharon walking out and forming a new party, and an almost certain early election, were heavy prices to pay for the chance of getting revenge at the prime minister. Either way, opinion polls published on Wednesday showed Mr Sharon’s popularity surging among Likud members in the wake of his victory in the party vote. One poll, in Haaretz, a daily, showed Mr Sharon almost 14 percentage points ahead of Mr Netanyahu, having been six points behind him three weeks earlier.

Even if the violence now subsides, the political battles are just beginning. The Likud primaries now will take place some time between June and November next year. Despite his improved poll ratings, Mr Sharon’s victory in those is far from assured: a lot can happen before then, and loyalties will switch many times.

More worrying, though, was Israel’s other, less violent response to the Hamas rockets: the arrests of hundreds of Hamas and Islamic Jihad activists in the West Bank. Many of the Hamas targets were likely candidates in a round of Palestinian local elections due in December (some West Bank municipalities have already voted; some voted this week); in some places virtually the entire Hamas electoral list has been nabbed.

That seems in line with Mr Sharon’s promise earlier this month that Israel will do all it can to prevent another round of Palestinian elections—for their national assembly, due in January—if Hamas takes part. Hamas is expected to do well in these: Mr Shikaki’s surveys give it 30-35% of the seats, and 45% to the PA’s ruling Fatah party. But rather than weaken the Islamists, Israel’s arrests could strengthen them by building sympathy among Palestinians. “Now people who might have voted for some Hamas candidates will vote for the entire Hamas list in prison,” says a senior Palestinian official.

Preventing Hamas from taking part in the election early next year would make it harder to achieve what Israel has been pushing for all along: the disarmament of Hamas and other militants by the PA’s security forces. Mahmoud Abbas (alias Abu Mazen), the Palestinian president, last week announced a small but perhaps significant first step towards that: an agreement that militant groups would no longer parade with their weapons on the streets. The unfortunate Hamas procession that ended in carnage was meant to be a last shout before that agreement came into effect. At a peace rally attended by Mr Abbas in Ramallah the next evening, there was not a single masked gunman or factional flag in sight. But the narrower Fatah’s margin over Hamas in the January elections, the harder it will be for Mr Abbas to continue the process.

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