Road to peace: a meaningless charade - World

After reassuring his colleagues on the Israeli right that he has no intention of abandoning any of the major settlements which he helped to create to guarantee that Israel would retain control over most of the West Bank, Ariel Sharon publicly "accepted" the Road Map to Peace proposed by President Bush. While retaining control over most of the West Bank, Sharon will now be willing to talk about a Palestinian state in what amounts to less than 12 per cent of pre-1948 Palestine.

To show his "good faith," Sharon will dismantle some of the many settlements that have been set up by handfuls of Israeli nationalists in the past two years, while Israel retains control over most of the settlements in which some 240,000 Jews have created a de facto occupation on the West Bank. To protect those more serious settlements which he boasted in the 1980s would create "facts on the ground" that would forever guarantee Israeli control over much of the West Bank, Sharon is now portraying himself as a "realist" and is willing to allow Palestinians control over what will be a country that is smaller and less economically viable than Long Island.

For the sake of achieving these essentially meaningless concessions, the Palestinians will have to prove that they can control Hamas and suppress all those who might engage in acts of violence against Israeli civilians. Otherwise, Israel will no longer be required to follow through with this road map and actually grant Palestinians the sham state Ariel Sharon envisions.

Palestinian Prime Minister Abbas may grab at any straw being offered to him by President Bush, but he and other Palestinian moderates are unlikely to be able to convince the extremists that they have achieved some significant victory or that the prospect of continued Israeli occupation over the majority of the West Bank seems like an outcome worthy of abandoning their armed struggle. The best the moderates can say to the extremists is, "If you end violence now, then we can travel down this path at the end of which will lie ... a negotiation about what a Palestinian state will be." Well, for those who understand that such a negotiation between a powerful Israel and a powerless Palestinian people is not likely to produce much more than the outcome Ariel Sharon describes to his right-wing audiences.

What would work? President Bush could reverse the order of his Road Map, insisting that the negotiations about the final settlement take place now ... A final settlement that provided Palestinians with a state that roughly approximated the size and integrity of the pre-1967 West Bank and Gaza would be a serious accomplishment sufficient to build a majority Palestinian support for peace. Once that had been agreed upon, Palestinian moderates could win the war for the minds of their own people, Hamas and related violent groups would become increasingly isolated as the Palestinian majority sought to implement the rest of the Road Map.

Instead, the current plan rewards the terrorists and violence-prone on both sides. It communicates a clear message: "We know that you oppose a peaceful resolution of this conflict. To get your way, all you have to do is engage in acts of violence, provoke the other side, and then we will give you just what you want--a halt to any progress down this road to peace."

So the charade is win/win for Ariel Sharon and President Bush. Sharon can appear to be making dramatic concessions while in fact giving little besides dismantling of a few trailer homes on remote hills that he has labeled "illegal settlements" (as if there were any other kind). Bush portrays himself as having delivered on his promise to make serious progress toward Israel/Palestinian peace without actually demanding an end to the Occupation, and his Road Map conveniently postpones the moment of reckoning till after the 2004 elections. Yet for those of us who are aware of the painful suffering that the Occupation has brought to the Palestinian people and that acts of terror have brought to the Israeli people, this latest round of false promises and road maps leading nowhere will generate yet a new level of sadness at an opportunity that is still being missed.

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