Middle East: Divided we stand

As the world watches the Middle East teetering on the edge of war ABRAHAM RABINOVICH and PHIL REEVES explain how the latest crisis erupted.

The announcement this week by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of a unilateral Israeli ceasefire shone a glimmer of light on the 8-month-old Palestinian intifada, not a light at the end of the tunnel but an illumination of the tunnel itself, with its labyrinthine turnings, its overheated pipes and its rusty escape ladders.

Sharon's offer, and its swift rejection by the Palestinians, echoed in tone the give-and-take that can be overheard in any schoolyard when the protagonists try to take a bit more than they have to give.

Sharon welcomed the Mitchell Committee Report proposing ways to shift the conflict back to the negotiating table. But the Israeli leader embraced in full only its call for an unconditional halt in violence, not its call for a freeze on construction in West Bank and Gaza settlements.

The Palestinians, for their part, welcomed the Mitchell Report even more warmly but said they saw no reason to halt violence if they weren't getting a settlement freeze.

Beneath the bickering over momentary advantage, however, lie the deep, life-and-death issues that do not readily lend themselves to diplomatic finesse.

Israel has engaged in five major wars and many skirmishes with its neighbours since it was established 53 years ago, all of them stemming from the Palestinian issue. Now it is at war with the Palestinians themselves and for both sides it is an existential moment.

The Palestinians perceive the struggle as their war of independence. The Israelis, military powerhouse though they be, perceive it ultimately as a war for survival.

The Oslo accords of 1993 have given the Palestinians about 40 per cent of the territory that Israel captured in the Six Day War of 1967, as well as the institutional framework of a state-in-the-making. In negotiations held intermittently in the past seven years, the Palestinians have demanded all the territory and the dismantlement of settlements.

To everyone's amazement, Israel's then prime minister, Ehud Barak, last year came close to accepting their demands. At negotiations at Camp David outside Washington, he reportedly offered about 95 per cent of the territory, including Arab-inhabited areas of Jerusalem, which Israel had hitherto claimed as its exclusive and undivided capital.

To everyone's further amazement, Yasser Arafat rejected the proposal out of hand. The Palestinian leader insisted that Israel accept the right of four million Palestinian refugees to return to Israel. He also rejected Barak's demand that any agreement meant Palestinians accepted that they had no further claims on Israel and that the long conflict was over. Three months after the failure of the Camp David talks, the intifada broke out.

As the Palestinians see it, it was not they who started the violence. The long Israeli occupation, they say, is itself an act of violence and those rising up against it are exercising the legitimate rights of any conquered people to seek their freedom. The Israeli settlements, they say, are built on Palestinian land belonging to the Palestinian people and are not only a political affront but a physical barrier to the construction of a contiguous, viable Palestinian state.

Most Israelis agree that the Palestinians have a point - up to a point. They note that it was the Palestinians who rejected the UN decision in 1947 to partition the land between Arabs and Jews. Israel won the subsequent war, launched by the Palestinians and seven Arab armies with the intention of eliminating the newborn Jewish state, creating the Palestinian refugee problem.

Nevertheless, polls have long shown that the overwhelming majority of Israelis accept the idea of a Palestinian state alongside their own. Although it never came to a vote, most may have supported Barak's unprecedented offer at Camp David.

This large peace camp, which chose Barak two years ago over his hawkish opponent Benjamin Netanyahu, has virtually evaporated since Camp David. The primary reason is the Palestinian's insistence on the right of refugees to return.

The mass return of Palestinian refugees, with their high birth rate, is seen by Israelis as the demographic death knell of the Jewish state. With 20 per cent of Israel's six million population already consisting of Palestinian Arabs, the return of millions more would mean that within a few generations at most there will be an Arab majority.

To Israelis, the Palestinian insistence on the right of return means that they have not truly accepted the existence of the Jewish state and seek to eliminate it, one way or another.

This concern has been exacerbated by the behaviour of Israel's own Arabs, particularly since the beginning of the intifada. In the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Israeli Arabs refrained from public expressions of support for the Arab countries waging war against Israel and hundreds even volunteered to harvest crops on kibbutzim whose men had been mobilised into the army.

Today Arab Knesset members vie with each other in flaunting their support of the intifada.

Israeli Arabs identify with their Palestinian brethren and have been further alienated by the killing of 13 of their number by Israeli police last October during demonstrations of support for the intifada that that turned into riots.

As Israelis see it, the fact that the Palestinians opted for an armed uprising to achieve their goals after rejecting a generous offer means that they may do so again any time their demands are not met. The Israelis also fear that the Palestinians will continue to nurture grievances rather than reconcile themselves to the existence of a Jewish state.

The Palestinians see the Israeli occupation of the territories, which has continued for more than three decades, as evidence that Israel uses military might to achieve its own goals. Sharon believes that Israel's willingness to use this military might must now be made even clearer.

Israel's unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon a year ago was widely seen by many as an unseemly retreat under fire. There were warnings that this victory of the Hizbollah guerrillas would inspire the Palestinians to engage in a war of attrition against Israel. Sharon's use of tanks and more recently of fighter-bombers against Palestinian targets is his way of re-establishing Israel's deterrent power.

The settlement issue is particularly contentious. Huge advertising placards jostling to catch the buyer's eye at the entrance of Har Homa show a world of suburban order; honey-coloured luxury apartments with roof terraces and double garages rising out of a gentle western (and therefore green) landscape under an azure sky.

No mention is made that this is territory annexed by Israel in 1967, and that the new town is not, as Israel insists, part of south Jerusalem but a Jewish settlement being created as part of a matrix of suburbs intended to establish overall control over the divided holy city.

The builders were this week working at a feverish pace and so were the estate agents - this, despite the presence just on the other side of the hills of Israeli tanks, which regularly blast away at nearby Arab villages on the West Bank in an effort to winkle out Palestinian gunmen.

That violence has swept away more than 500 lives in seven months. One component in the cocktail of explosives that detonated it was fury over Israel's use of the land on which the Palestinians hoped to build their state.

When Har Homa was started, it was to have comprised 6000 homes. The Jerusalem city authorities announced recently that they intend to build another 2800 units, even though few of the apartments have been sold.

The emerging outline does not look much like the utopia on the billboards, let alone what it once was - a tranquil pine forest fanning over a hill whose true, Arabic name is Jabal Abu Ghneim.

This is a fortress - a tight cluster of modern blocks, some nine storeys high - which dominates the land between the ancient cities of Bethlehem and Jerusalem like an enormous malevolent battleship.

Sharon says there will be no new settlements, but he insists on the right to continue the expansion of existing settlements to accommodate "natural growth," even though there are thousands of empty settler homes on the West Bank. The Palestinians have heard about "natural growth" from Israel before, only to see more and more bites taken out of their land.

As the Oslo peace negotiations dragged on, Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza grew by more than 50 per cent, nurtured by hefty amounts of Israeli government money.

And so it continues, despite growing evidence that Israelis are not much interested in life on the frontline. Sales of houses in settlement-suburbs in Jerusalem's occupied half have shrunk to a trickle. Israelis who moved to the occupied territories for cheaper and better apartments, rather than ideological reasons, are now thinking twice before living in a conflict zone.

In the sales offices of Har Homa, the executives are putting a brave face on matters. Victor Messiga works for a development company that has built 54 houses, primarily for Orthodox Jews. Fourteen have been sold, he says, so sales are "going well."

He denies that worries about living on the front line are a problem. After all, isn't security an issue for Israelis everywhere? And isn't Har Homa just another part of Israel?

The truth, though, is that the settlements and settlers are now in the sights of Palestinian guerrillas, who see them as legitimate targets for mortar attacks and drive-by shootings. The death toll is rising steadily. Added to it this week was 30-year-old Assaf Hershkowitz, a settler from Ofra, who was shot dead in a roadside ambush a few miles from the spot where his father was killed three months earlier.

What makes the situation particularly tragic is that the two sides had appeared to be within a hair's breadth of achieving a historic compromise. The current confrontation has sent them reeling back to the dark, early days of the Arab-Israel conflict.

As individuals, Israelis and Palestinians often get along well. As political-economic entities they complement each other. Israel had absorbed some 150,000 Palestinian workers each day and the Palestinians were heavily dependent on the Israeli economy.

But humans are ultimately political animals and there can be no reconciliation unless political needs are met.

The Palestinians want a restoration of national honour. Israel fears that for many Palestinians this can only be fulfilled by Israel's destruction.

The hope is that once the Palestinians have won a state of their own, mutual needs and the fear of losing what had been gained would permit them and Israel to develop a fruitful relationship.

Feature: Middle East

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UN: Information on the Question of Palestine

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