World dispatch

The enemy within

The blinkered Israeli prime minister lacks the benefit of forethought and ignores the lessons of hindsight, writes Brian Whitaker
Over the last half-century many people have tried to destroy Israel and all have failed. What nobody seriously considered until now is that Israel might be destroyed without even trying, by its own prime minister.

While eyes have been turned towards Afghanistan, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has come to a critical watershed. In the words of one Israeli newspaper, it has reached "a moment before the embrace of death". Two peoples are locked together in combat and, unless there is a change of course, they will eventually tumble over the precipice together.

It is not just that the daily cycle of violence - shootings, incursions, suicide bombings and rocket assassinations - is accelerating dangerously, but that the dynamics of the conflict have changed.

Last April, when Israeli tanks made their first incursion into Palestinian-controlled territory - a small patch of land in Gaza - there was uproar. The United States condemned it as "excessive and disproportionate" and Britain called it "unjustifiable".

Within 20 hours the tanks were gone, but they had made their point.

Since then, by taking bold strides forward and small steps back, the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, has inured the world to these actions and, in a relatively short time, has extended the boundaries of what is internationally acceptable.

Last Monday, the tanks entered Tulkarm in the West Bank. It was the first time since the intifada began that Israeli forces had taken over an entire "Palestinian-controlled" town, but there was scarcely a murmur of criticism. By the end of the week, Mr Sharon had received an invitation to Washington and White House advisers talked of imposing sanctions on Mr Arafat. The United States is making less effort than ever to appear even-handed, and in the absence of Osama bin Laden (permanent or temporary), Mr Arafat has risen to the top in American media demonology - a view encouraged at the weekend by "peace" envoy Anthony Zinni, who likened Mr Arafat to a New York mafia boss, Carlo Gambino.

Mr Zinni will not be returning to the region until "the proper time" - which may be a very long time indeed if remarks by the US ambassador to Israel, Dan Kurtzer, are anything to judge by.

Speaking at a meeting of Arab students and leftwing Jews last week, he said: "I have to tell you honestly - we are not going to solve the Arab-Israeli conflict. The United States is not going to do it. If the people, the Israelis and Palestinians, don't put pressure on their governments to solve it, it doesn't matter who you get as a third party. The EU is not going to solve it, the UN is not going to solve it, Russia is not going to solve it, the United States is not going to solve it.

"It's going to require a deep, enduring commitment of the Israeli and Palestinian people to want to solve it, and then we can come in and help do so."

In the meantime, the US will wash its hands of the problem and Sharon will have a green light to do more or less as he pleases. The Palestinians, naturally, have protested at this, but it is only one among their many woes.

More interesting is the alarm from some on the Israeli side who fear that Sharon, left to his own devices, will drag them into a worse military quagmire than the 20-year war in Lebanon.

The undermining of Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Authority is just one example of Sharon's cure being worse than the original disease.

Mr Arafat is under virtual house arrest in Ramallah, with Israeli tanks surrounding his office, and the PA, for almost all practical purposes, has ceased to function. Both may survive on life-support for a while but, once they have gone, we can expect a period of internal strife among the Palestinians until the Islamists take over.

Those who object to this policy point out that no matter how tiresome or flawed Mr Arafat may be, he is not a religious fanatic and the PA is the only Palestinian interlocutor the Israelis have got. Get rid of them and there will be no one to talk to.

To which Mr Sharon may well whisper to himself: "Exactly!"

Removing Mr Arafat and the PA, and replacing them with Hamas, will mean there is no need to resume peace talks - ever.

If that is what Mr Sharon really thinks, it would at least be a strategy. But some Israelis who are in a position to know say there is no strategy at all: Mr Sharon is flailing in all directions simply to appease the most fanatical elements in Israeli politics.

"The defence establishment has no strategy. It has no goal. They are not thinking ahead," a senior army commander (who was not identified) said on Israel radio last week.

"We are speaking of rolling, one-time operations, and it is not beyond the realm of possibility that this is, among other things, an attempt to placate Israeli public opinion in the wake of continuing, grievous terrorist attacks."

Last autumn, on a whirlwind Middle Eastern tour to drum up support for the Afghan campaign, the British prime minister, Tony Blair, asserted that there are two "fixed points" for solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. One, he said, is the security of Israel; the other is the creation of a Palestinian state.

Today, both those goals look more remote than they did last autumn.

Mr Sharon was elected by Israelis on a promise to restore order - something he has utterly failed to deliver. Meanwhile, increasingly vociferous cries from the Israeli right say there must never be a Palestinian state.

Saying there must never be a Palestinian state translates into saying there must never be a political solution - which in turn translates into a commitment to permanent conflict and insecurity.

In the eyes of almost all independent observers, the creation of a stable, democratic and secular Palestinian state alongside Israel, with the land divided on the basis of Israel's 1967 boundaries, would provide the best long-term security for Israel.

Nobody claims it would be perfect but, coupled with appropriate security guarantees, it's the most practical option.

A less practical alternative is a single "bi-national" state in which Israelis and Palestinians live side by side with equal rights. In some respects that might be better for the Palestinians, but many Jews find it unacceptable since it would make them a minority and Israel would cease to be primarily a Jewish state.

By rolling back a decade of peace process, by unpicking the Oslo accords and by attempting to re-assert control over Palestinian territories, Mr Sharon is shifting away from a two-state solution towards a bi-national state.

But if Mr Sharon has his way, it will presumably not be a bi-national state in which the Palestinians have equal rights, but one in which they are permanently deprived of them by force.

Ultimately, though, it cannot be sustainable. Mr Sharon is an old man fighting an old-style colonial war but too blinkered to read the lessons of history. It may take decades, but in the end either there will be a Palestinian state or the Palestinians will become citizens in a bi-national state, with the same rights as Jews - in which case the Israeli government will meet the same fate as the apartheid regime did in South Africa.

Mr Sharon's big mistake is to imagine that such a conflict can end with a winner (the Israelis) and a loser (the Palestinians). Most observers outside Israel - and, thankfully, some inside Israel - disagree. The fates of the Israelis and the Palestinians are so entwined that there cannot be a winner and a loser.

There will either be two winners or two losers.

Mr Sharon has at least been warned. "Arafat is not alone in this siege. All of Israel is with him," Yoel Marcus wrote in Ha'aretz, the liberal Israeli daily, last week.

"No tourists are coming, the economy has taken a mighty blow and people go out less for fear of terrorist attacks. The public is tired, worried and pessimistic, and many of us are preoccupied with a subject no one likes to talk about: looking for ways to get the hell out of here."

In the same newspaper, the veteran Israeli peace negotiator, Yossi Beilin, wrote: "It is still in our power, but not for much longer, to prevent the Israeli-Palestinian death hug; before we return the Palestine Liberation Organisation to the terrorism of the 1970s; before the Palestinians return us to the retaliatory operations of the 1950s; before the entire world gives up on the attempt to help us understand what they have already understood in Ireland, in Cyprus and even in Kashmir; before our children leave us here to our insanity and move to other regions; before we lose any chance of attracting Jewish immigration, even from distressed countries."

At present, such voices are heard only from the sidelines, but there is still a possibility that somewhere along this perilous route people will step back and decide that the talks held in Taba last January, which expired for lack of time in the last days of Ehud Barak's government, were not a million miles from producing a workable solution.

Then they will stare at the wreckage left by Ariel Sharon and ask: what was the point?

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