Palestine leader Yasser Arafat's unscathed re-emergence from the rubble of his Ramallah compound has presented the Israeli leadership with an excuse to back off from talks with the Palestinians.
The Israeli authorities pointed out that they wished to capture 50 of the 200 people who were lodged with Arafat in the building. The 50 persons it wanted were alleged to have had a hand in a spate of extremist violence that has rocked Israel in recent months. Arafat himself was on the Israeli negative list. Tel Aviv had on several occasions held him personally responsible for sanctioning terrorism on its soil. Despite a growing international outcry, the destruction of the P.A. complex continued unabated until only one building, in which Arafat and his followers were trapped, remained. But on September 29 Israel had to back off without arresting the 50, leaving Arafat and his supporters triumphant.
In fact, there were reports that some of the men whom Israel wished to arrest had escaped, prompting an angry Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who was on a visit to Moscow, to seek an explanation over telephone from his Defence Minister Binyamin Ben Eleizer.
Intense international pressure, especially from the United States, was behind the Israeli decision to pull out from Ramallah. The crunch came for Israel when U.S. National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice met Sharon's representative Dov Weisglas in Washington and insisted that Israel had no option but to pull out from Arafat's compound. The meeting took place amid a flurry of telephone calls from the State Department and the White House to Israeli officials.
The pressure from Washington, however, intensified only after a crucial development had taken place on the ground. As the siege continued, hundreds of Palestinians poured on to the streets in support of Arafat. Television channels beamed these demonstrations across the Arab world. Conscious that it had to ensure quickly that the anti-Israel sentiments the images were generating did not transform into a wave of anti-American protestations, Washington had no choice but to arm-twist Israel into calling off the siege.
More than the feelings demonstrated on the Palestinian streets, U.S. planners were worried about the negative impact the developments in Palestinian areas would have on the Arab people in general. Keeping the Arab Street quiet was vital, especially at a time when Washington was focussing almost all its diplomatic energy on minimising resistance to its military plans in Iraq. Rice, in fact, told her Israeli interlocutor that Israel's destruction of Arafat's compound was "interfering" with U.S. efforts to build support against Iraq. Earlier, the U.S. did not veto a Security Council resolution that asked Israel to lift the siege, while the White House spokesperson declared that the Israeli encirclement of Arafat's compound was not helpful in countering terrorism.
The impact of the siege of Arafat's premises goes far beyond heralding a victory for the aging Palestinian leader. More than anything else, this incident graphically illustrated the mindset of the Sharon government. Most commentators in the region and some in Israel agree that the siege symbolised a formal repudiation of the Sharon government to strike a negotiated peace deal with the Palestinians that would result in the creation of the state of Palestine at peace with the state of Israel. The purpose of the siege, instead, according to diplomatic sources, was to launch a fresh initiative to fragment the Palestinian movement by sending Arafat into exile. In fact, many people in Israeli right-wing ruling circles acknowledged during the period of the siege that they would be happy to hand Arafat a "a one-way ticket" out of the country to end the stand-off.
The siege, though it was a provocative act, did not come as a total surprise as the Sharon government had repeatedly signalled recently that it would prefer to hammer the Palestinians out of political contention rather than negotiate a peace deal with them.
This hawkish refrain in Israeli decision-making circles against holding talks gathered further momentum when Lt. General Moshe Yaalon was recently appointed the Chief of Staff of the country's Army. Gen. Yaalon had already explained at some length why Palestinians seeking statehood should be subjected to unrelenting military pressure. In his view, the Palestinians posed a "cancerous" existential threat to Israel. In other words, the political purpose of the Palestinians was not to confine themselves to the creation of an independent state in the territories, but, rather, to obliterate the state of Israel. Israel, his reasoning went, has no room for political manoeuvre or compromise, but instead has to defeat the Palestinians completely.
Sharon's views are on similar lines. "Oslo doesn't exist, Camp David doesn't exist, neither does Taba," he said in September, thereby denouncing the very framework for peace negotiations based on a land-for-peace deal.
The right-wing opposition to a rapprochement with the Palestinians had also been evident earlier. A one-tonne bomb dropped by an F-16 jet in July killed 14 Palestinians, mostly children, when extremist groups such as the Hamas were signalling their readiness to call off suicide bombings in Israel. The bombing resulted in a fresh spate of retaliatory Palestinian violence, snuffing out the chances of a meaningful dialogue.
The recent initiative by Ben-Eleizer, who belongs to the left-of-centre Labour Party, which is part of Sharon's coalition government, is also suffering a similar fate. In an attempt to break the cycle of violence, Ben-Eleizer had proposed his "Bethlehem, Gaza first" plan. The plan promised a withdrawal of Israeli forces from these areas first and a relaxation of restrictions on Palestinian people, in return for a decrease in violence. In case this worked in the two areas, the scheme could be extended to other areas as well. Both Sharon and Gen. Yaalon have been openly dismissive of this initiative. In yet another indication of his hard line approach, Sharon has appointed Effie Eltam, who advocates expelling Palestinians from the West Bank, as the head of Israel's settlement programme.
Arafat's unscathed re-emergence from the rubble of his Ramallah compound has presented the Israeli leadership an excuse to back off from talks with the Palestinians. Israel, under collective pressure from the U.S.-led "quartet" that also includes Russia, the United Nations and the European Union, was being asked to negotiate with the Palestinians under the assumption that the Palestinians would begin re-orienting themselves by undertaking meaningful security and political reforms. One of the proposals under consideration was the recasting of the Palestinian leadership array by elevating Arafat to the figurehead status of President and appointing a Prime Minister with real powers.
The entire process of Palestinian reforms that had the backing of Arafat's Fatah faction and the reform-minded Parliament, has now been stalled. Arafat, who held a meeting with the central committee of the Fatah faction on October 2 the first such meeting after his return from the standoff decided that the appointment of a Prime Minister should be kept on hold. Instead, the focus of the P.A. will now be on holding elections on January 20. Arafat, who had sacked his 21-member Cabinet, under pressure from the Fatah that accused it of corruption, has also been given three weeks' time to appoint an interim Cabinet pending elections.
Analysts point out that Israeli intransigence may have contributed significantly to the Palestinian inclination to delay reforms. The Palestinians, they say, may, for the moment, prefer to withdraw into their shell and wait for the Israeli elections to happen, before planning a fresh, and possibly a more productive, course of action.
The end of the siege of Arafat appears to have helped the U.S. and Britain in their campaign to build a coalition against Iraq. By pressuring Israel into lifting the siege, Washington has earned valuable brownie points that could discourage the rise of anti-U.S. sentiment on the Arab Street in case of an attack against Iraq.
The U.S.' tactical move, targeting Israel for the moment, has now been supplemented by Britain's attempt to appease the Arabs. Addressing the Labour Party conference in early October, British Prime Minister Tony Blair said that U.N. Security Council resolutions needed to be respected not only by Iraq but by Israel as well. Blair expressed support for the creation of a Palestinian state "based on the boundaries of 1967". Palestinian Cabinet Minister Saeb Erekat welcomed Blair's call, but said that his declaration needed to be supplemented by specific details. "I think it's good for Prime Minister Blair to say that even Israel needs to implement Security Council resolutions," Erekat said. "What we need to see from Mr. Blair is to specify the mechanism and timeline [for an Israeli withdrawal]."
Despite the recent Anglo-American efforts, Washington and London may have to do much more to retrieve some favour among Arabs on Iraq. The most recent challenge to the Bush administration comes from the Israeli lobby's move in the U.S. Congress to formally seek recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital. But, with the status of Jerusalem an emotive pan-Arab issue, a swift backtracking will become necessary, if anger and frustration targeting the U.S. across the Arab world has to be contained.
The return of Arafat to political centrestage has helped promote Anglo-American goals in Iraq in more ways than one. With further reform among Palestinians unlikely and chances of the revival of a meaningful dialogue with Israel remote, Washington can now pay much greater attention to developments in Iraq. In other words, the Israel-Palestine issue, now nearly frozen, and which is likely to fester in the background, despite sporadic bouts of violence that are expected, gives the U.S. much greater room to build its case against Iraq on a global scale, without significant diversion of its diplomatic energy.
The run-up to the release of Arafat may have had a lasting impact on shaping the mode of the Palestinian struggle in the future as well. The lifting of the siege on Arafat's compound can be ultimately attributed to the massive outpouring of Palestinians on September 20 on the streets of Ramallah. This move was followed by a night-long candlelight vigil by Arafat's supporters.
Observers of the Israel-Palestine scene see in this the emergence of a non-violent form of protest, which is novel, and far different from the violence-prone first and second waves of the intifada. Sick of the confinement imposed by Israel, unarmed Palestinians have also begun to break curfew at regular intervals in a peaceful manner. With mass-level curfew violations paying off, Marwan Barghouti, widely perceived to be a successor to Arafat, but who is now incarcerated in an Israeli jail on charges of fomenting terrorism, urged Palestinians to defy curfew orders during his trial recently. While the Sharon government will do its best to provoke Palestinian violence, a third wave of the intifada, but this time with a non-violent face, may be just beginning to surface.
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