Free Crawling from the Wreckage by Gwynne Dyer Page B

Arafat died in November 2004, and Mahmoud Abbas replaced him as head of the PLO and president of the Palestinian National Authority. Like any change of personnel or circumstances in the claustrophobic Israeli-Palestinian relationship, this led to an outburst of optimism about the “peace process.” It didn’t last long
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July 17, 2005

ISRAEL AND PALESTINE: THE END OF THE “CALM”
    Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas called for a “period of calm” when he took over the late Yasser Arafat’s job in January, and for a while some people allowed themselves to believe that peace was within reach. But that delusion depended on the belief that Arafat had been the main obstacle to a permanent peace agreement, and it is now melting in the summer sun.
    “This calm is dissolving,” said General Dan Halutz, the Israeli military’s chief of staff, last Friday. Mushir al-Masri, a spokesman of theradical Hamas movement that rejects a permanent peace deal with Israel, sort of agreed: “The calm is blowing away in the wind, and the Zionist enemy is responsible for that.” But the truth is that neither Halutz’s political superiors nor al-Masri’s expected the calm to last.
    Israel would prefer the Palestinians to remain quiet, of course, but Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s strategy does not include serious negotiations with them. He is instead going for an imposed peace that leaves all the main Jewish settlement blocks in the West Bank under Israeli control, and last August, he got official U.S. support for that policy.
    Sharon is building a “security fence” along the border between Israel and the West Bank—but cutting deep into the Palestinian territories in a number of places to include the major Jewish settlement areas—that translates that policy into a de facto new border for Israel. He is expanding Jewish settlements around predominantly Arab East Jerusalem to cut it off from the West Bank and to eliminate the possibility that it could ever serve as the capital of a Palestinian state. And Washington has promised to put no pressure on him for concessions to the Palestinians until he completes the “disengagement,” the unilateral withdrawal of some 8,500 Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip that is due to begin next month.
    In reality, as Sharon’s chief of staff, Dov Weisglass, explained last October, the disengagement process is intended to supply “the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians … When you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda … all with a presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress.”
    Sharon spoke bluntly about his strategy to the Knesset in April: “I am doing everything I can to preserve as much [of the West Bank settlements] as I can.” He is succeeding: by the time the Gaza withdrawal is complete, so should be the wall that cuts through the West Bank and defines the new de facto border between Israel and the occupied territories. But since Palestinians understand all this, they have concluded that Mahmoud Abbas’s gamble that a “period of calm” would lead to genuine peace negotiations with Israel has failed.
    Palestinians are turning more and more to Islamist movements that reject the whole notion of a permanent division of the land between Israel and a Palestinian state. Hamas’s popular support has risen so fast that Abbas postponed the parliamentary elections scheduled for this summer, since a vote now might give Hamas and its allies a majority of seats. The Bush administration has given Sharon a green light, and he is going to move as fast as he can.
    Later in 2005, Sharon’s leadership of the Likud Party was challenged by Binyamin Netanyahu,