4 of 13 DOCUMENTS



Financial Times (London, England)


January 4, 2005 Tuesday
London Edition 1


In spite of the violence of the past four years, there is extraordinary consensus As Palestinians prepare to elect a successor to Yassir Arafat, many observers see a rare opportunity to restart progress towards a peace deal, writes Harvey Morris


BYLINE: By HARVEY MORRIS


SECTION: COMMENT & ANALYSIS; Pg. 13


LENGTH: 2461 words


Expectations are running high that 2005 might be the year in which Israelis and Palestinians finally discern the beginning of the end of their seemingly intractable conflict. Since the death of Yassir Arafat in November, would-be peacemakers have been lining up to exploit what one Israeli official, in a burst of hyperbole that aptly summed up the current mood, called "a ray of hope streaming through a window of opportunity".

The apparent transformation is likely to be underlined by the election on Sunday of Mahmoud Abbas as new president of the Palestinian Authority and - despite last-minute hitches - the formation of a new centrist Likud-Labour coalition in Israel that would implement the first stage of the plan to withdraw Jewish settlers from Gaza.

The expressions of hope are not evenly spread. On the Israeli side, they tend to be highest within an Israeli political establishment that saw the late Palestinian leader as the single biggest obstacle to progress. They are lowest among a marginalised, leftwing camp that remains sceptical about the commitment of Ariel Sharon, prime minister, to an equitable settlement.

Mr Sharon, setting the tone in a speech in mid-December, said: "In 2005, we have the opportunity for a historic breakthrough in the relations between us and the Palestinians, a breakthrough for which we have waited many years . . . This is the hour, this is the time. This is the national test."

Optimism is also evident among Palestinians, relieved that dire warnings of internal chaos following Arafat's death on November 11 have so far failed to materialise. And diplomats, while continuing to temper their hopes with professional caution, broadly endorse the view that the conflict has reached a turning point.

Reflecting a perception that both Israelis and Palestinians have lost substantially in more than four years of violence, James Wolfensohn, visiting World Bank president, said that "both sides are tired of the killing".

In the current atmosphere, there is an understandable optimism among those who have been struggling to revive the peace process. "In spite of the violence of the past four years, there is an absolutely extraordinary broad depth of consensus, not only between the two parties but among the international community," said Terje Roed Larsen, outgoing United Nations representative in the region.

"If we look at the courage that is required for Sharon to say what he is saying and the equally courageous statements of Mahmoud Abbas, we have leaders ready to work for broadly the same goals."

As always, however, the desire of the two communities to see a return to normality has to be set against the realities of the situation on the ground. Previous windows of opportunity have opened only to be brutally slammed shut by either party or both and the history of the region is littered with unfulfilled peace plans.

The most recent casualty was the international "road map", launched with great fanfare in June 2003 when President George W. Bush told the leaders of Israel, the PA and Jordan: "All here today now share a goal: the Holy Land must be shared between the state of Palestine and the state of Israel, living at peace with each other and with every nation of the Middle East."

Few argued with the president's vision. The dilemma remains how to reconcile vastly different interpretations of what has to be fulfilled to achieve it.

Within a month, the ill-fated peace plan, drafted by a quartet of the US, European Union, United Nations and Russia, went into deep freeze, only to be kept alive by being grafted on to Mr Sharon's unilateral proposal to evacuate Jewish settlements in Gaza and part of the West Bank.

Mindful of earlier false starts, Mr Larsen tempered his optimism with the same warning he gave before the "road map" launch. "The international community should not raise expectations so high that we yet again have to dash the hopes of the Palestinians," he said.

There are already indications that Israel's honeymoon with Mr Abbas might be short-lived. Although he has reiterated his long-standing opposition to the militarisation of the Palestinian uprising, he also restated Arafat's minimum demands for a final resolution of the conflict - including full Israeli withdrawal from territories occupied in 1967, of which east Jerusalem is one.

Silvan Shalom, Israeli foreign minister, responded by saying: "At a time when there is perhaps a great atmosphere of hope here in the region and in the world as a whole, harsh statements such as this are not encouraging."

Some sceptical Palestinian officials believe Israel has been building up Mr Abbas, the better to knock him down once he is voted into office. "Within six months, they'll be saying the same thing about Abu Mazen (Abbas) as they said about Arafat," commented a leading reformist.

Mr Abbas's tough stance might be put down to pre-election rhetoric aimed at an electorate that is unwilling to accept any crossing of the "red lines" established by Arafat. But, despite the radically contrasting personalities of the two men, there is no hint that the softly spoken and self-effacing Abbas is ready to compromise on the fundamental demands of his old comrade.

There are, however, enough plus factors in the balance sheet to justify at least some of the present euphoria. Mr Sharon is, after all, the first Israeli prime minister to endorse the concept of a Palestinian state, a notion that was absent from the Oslo peace accords that created the PA.

In his public statements, he has turned his back on irredentists in the settler movement who still cleave to the dream of Jewish sovereignty throughout the Biblical Land of Israel and has apparently moved back towards his old Labour Zionist roots by forging an alliance with the Labour party of Shimon Peres.

Since Arafat's death, he has also softened the "unilateral" aspect of his Gaza withdrawal plan, opening up the prospect of co-ordination with the new Palestinian leadership on implementation of the proposed pullout.

On the Palestinian side, there is growing enthusiasm that a series of elections planned for next year will enhance the prospects for genuine reform within the PA.

There are also encouraging signs on the international and regional fronts. Mr Bush has said the quest for Middle East peace will be a priority of his second term, assuring doubters at a pre-Christmas press conference: "I know the world is wondering whether or not this is just empty rhetoric, or do I really believe that now is the time to move the process forward. And the answer is: now is the time to move the process forward."

Tony Blair, UK prime minister, has already seized the initiative by visiting the region and announcing a London conference on Palestinian reform.

International aid donors are holding out the carrot of an additional Dollars 500m a year in funding to the PA as long as violence ends and Israel lifts restrictions on movement and trade in the Palestinian territories.

Egypt, meanwhile, has taken the first steps towards a thaw in its "cold peace" with Israel by working closely with the Sharon government on co- ordinating the Gaza withdrawal, signing a new trade deal and indicating it would soon be ready to send its ambassador back to Tel Aviv. here is still ample material, however, for sceptics who fear that the latest hopes for peace may prove to be yet another false dawn.

Violence continues, principally in the Gaza Strip, as the Israeli army stages almost daily incursions, destroying Palestinian homes in the process, to counter rocket fire against Jewish settlements. Despite his aversion to armed struggle, there is little indication that Mr Abbas, even once elected, will abandon his policy of consensus-building in order to confront the militants.

In the early days of his two-week election campaign, Mr Abbas was pictured with cheering Fatah gunmen, some of them on Israel's wanted list, as he pledged them his protection.

In Israel itself, the alliance between Likud and Labour has failed to paper over the cracks in the unity of either party. Likud's intransigent wing is still opposed to relinquishing any Jewish settlements, while some on the Labour left fear Mr Sharon is trying to use the party as a fig leaf for an imposed interim solution to the conflict.

At the other end of the political spectrum, the Yesha Council, the principal mouthpiece of the Jewish settler movement, has announced a campaign of civil disobedience to try to ensure that the Gaza withdrawal plan never takes place. Palestinian officials and Israeli leftwingers note that, although Mr Sharon's withdrawal plan has galvanised political debate for more than a year, not a single settler has so far been relocated, while existing settlements continue to expand.

Even the apparent readiness of the US and its allies to become actively re-engaged has not been universally welcomed. Palestinians, one of the few communities in the Arab world to have experienced free elections, are irked by the demands of Mr Bush and Mr Blair that they embrace democracy. Some, including Ahmed Qurei, prime minister, criticise the planned London conference as an attempt to micromanage a reform process they regard as a purely internal affair.

"We are not waiting for the US and Europe to give us a green light for democracy," said Sheikh Hassan Yousef, a West Bank Hamas leader recently freed from two years' detention in Israel. "Consultation is a major pillar of Islam."

Such sour notes might be viewed as inconsequential amid the overall mood of optimism, were it not that seemingly unbridgeable gaps still divide the two sides.

Although Mr Sharon has skilfully managed to seize the political high ground with his Gaza withdrawal proposal, not even his supporters appear entirely clear about his longer term plans. Sceptics on both sides are concerned that the "Gaza first" proposal might turn out to be "Gaza only".

Labour supporters of the party's alliance with Mr Sharon believe that the withdrawal of settlements in Gaza, the first such evacuation of Jewish communities in the occupied territories, will create an unstoppable impetus for similar pullouts from much of the West Bank. Mr Sharon, in his December speech, nevertheless ruled out any concessions on the main blocs of Jewish settlement in the West Bank and on the status of Jerusalem.

Palestinian suspicions that Mr Sharon intends to entrench Israeli control over much of the Palestinian heartland have been fuelled by the re-emergence of ideas for complex land swaps that would consolidate existing settlement blocs (see accompanying story).

In an open letter to Sunday's voters, 559 leading Palestinians, including reformists, academics and Fatah moderates, rejected any interim settlement of the conflict that was aimed at "slamming the door in the face of a comprehensive peace settlement".

They also demanded that whoever is elected on Sunday must not accept the existence of Jewish settlements on territory occupied by Israel since 1967. According to the UN's Terje Roed Larsen: "There are profound changes that mark the dawning of a new era." He cautioned, however, that if process faltered, a new explosion of violence could not be ruled out. "The lesson in the Middle East is always to expect the unexpected."

A final resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict could include a complex land swap that would redraw the boundaries between Israel and its neighbours, according to a paper delivered in December at the prestigious Herzliya Conference.

Gideon Biger, a Tel Aviv University geographer, told senior Israeli politicians and academics at the annual forum that the Middle East's present borders were not sacred. "They are the results of battles and wars and not agreements, and therefore are not holy lines. There is a possibility to change these lines according to the facts on the ground."

Professor Biger set out a comprehensive territorial swap in which Egypt would cede land in the Sinai Peninsula to allow for the creation of an enlarged Gaza Strip as part of a future Palestinian state. Egypt would be compensated by receiving a bite-shaped area in Israel's southern Negev desert.

The new Palestinian state would meanwhile give up claims to areas of the West Bank that are home to the majority of the 240,000 Jewish settlers in the occupied territory. Israel would also hold on to the northern part of the Jordan valley.

In the north, Israel would withdraw from around four-fifths of the Israeli-annexed Syrian Golan Heights and Syria would be compensated for the remainder with Jordanian land along the present border of the two Arab states. Jordan would receive in turn a slice of Israeli territory south of the Dead Sea.

Land swaps are nothing new in the history of Middle East peace plans. A Palestinian-Israeli swap was an integral part of ideas put forward by President Bill Clinton in the course of the failed Camp David talks in 2000. Last May, Giora Eiland, national security adviser to Ariel Sharon, Israel's prime minister, submitted a plan that called for Egypt to give up 600 sq km in Sinai to the Palestinians to triple the size of the Gaza Strip, a proposal swiftly rebuffed by Cairo.

The attraction to Israel of the swap proposals, which have moved from the Israeli right into the mainstream, is that they would maximise the number of Jews within the state's final borders and minimise the number of Arabs. They would also ensure Israeli possession of the major settlements in the West Bank, something already effectively conceded by President Bush last spring.

Some politicians on the Israeli right would go further and cede to the Palestinians some areas in Israel with a predominantly Israeli-Arab population. This suggestion was put forward at Herzliya by Avigdor Lieberman, a former right-wing minister sacked by Mr Sharon for opposing his Gaza withdrawal plan.

The Soviet-born Mr Lieberman told the conference: "I would like Israel to be a homogenous nation, which can be compared to the processes in Poland and Hungary, countries that are practically cleansed of other minorities." Although Mr Lieberman represents a far-right view, his ideas reflect wider concerns about the so-called demographic timebomb that, in little more than a decade, would see Arabs outnumber Jews between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River.

The Herzliya proposals do not for now represent the views of the Sharon government. But some have the backing of influential figures such as Uzi Arad, a government adviser, former senior official in the Mossad intelligence service and director of the Herzliya Conference.

Analysts noted that ideas floated at the annual forum, where Mr Sharon first laid out his Gaza plan and where in December he spoke of 2005 as a year of opportunity, frequently reflect or influence future government policy.


LOAD-DATE: January 3, 2005


LANGUAGE: ENGLISH


DOCUMENT-TYPE: Features


PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper



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