Collapse Of The Road Map
By Mike Whitney
Does Arafat gain anything by spending the rest of his days rotting in a dilapidated hovel, seeing the aspirations of the Palestinian people turned to rubble?
Does the United States gain anything by having the fighting in the West Bank and Gaza transmitted on Arab TV to millions of angry Muslims?
Do the people of Israel gain anything (56% of whom still want a negotiated settlement with the Palestinians) by never knowing whether they can go out for a cup of coffee, or ride a bus, or send their kids to the store without being blown up by a suicide bomber?
No.
The only people who benefit are Ariel Sharon and those who share his view of how to achieve their territorial goals. Everyone else loses.
This is a departure from the conventional wisdom that Yasir Arafat is the puppet master who initiates terror attacks on Israelis from his slag heap in Ramallah.
The reality is that Sharon was not only steadfast in his opposition to the Oslo Peace negotiations and the two state solution, ( with a Palestinian state comprised of the area that was seized during the 1967 war) but did every thing within his power to expropriate more Palestinian land and increase the number of settlements in the West Bank during that same eight year period. His aggressive way of pursuing his agenda earned him the nickname "the Bulldozer," the very symbol of the devastation that has been levied against the Palestinian people.
The Road Map never changed "the Bulldozer's" determination to control the territories and expand the Israeli presence there. Sharon has always maintained that he would never remove the settlements from Palestinian areas, and he has been true to his word. Even as late as May of this year, Israeli newspapers were reporting that Sharon would proceed with 12,000 additional "Jewish only" housing units in the West Bank, a direct violation of the Road Map and a clear indication that the Israeli leadership had no intention of maintaining its end of the bargain.
This is why Sharon had to make sure that the Road Map failed, so that the requirements of dismantling settlements and withdrawing Israeli settlers would never occur. He accomplished this by applying the same method he has used routinely whenever the danger of peace breaks out; targeted assassinations.
First a minor figure in Hamas was killed in the West Bank but, his death did not produce the expected retaliatory strike. Then on August 14, just a few days later, Muhammed Seeder, head of Hebron's military wing of Hamas was killed by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) outside of his home. It was a deliberate provocation intended to put the Road map in the ditch, and it succeeded.
Five days later, a Hamas suicide bomber detonated a bomb on a bus in Jerusalem killing 20 Israelis, mostly women and children.
Two days after the bombing, Isma'il Abu-Shanab, one of Hamas highest ranking members of the political wing ( and a contributor to the original Road Map) was killed in a rocket attack in Gaza.
Since then, the assassinations, the attacks on civilian areas and the suicide bombings have continued unabated, degenerating to the point where the Israeli leadership has given serious consideration to killing the elected representative of the Palestinian people, Yasir Arafat.. (The US has tacitly endorsed this proposed murder by furnishing the lone dissenting vote in the UN Security Council that would have condemned the action)
In the wake of the recent violence, Arafat has been exhumed from his lair and pilloried by President Bush as the one who is responsible for stifling efforts for peace. Arafat, it seems, will be forever cast as the whipping boy whenever things fall apart, or whenever there is a response to Israeli provocation. In reality, as the facts clearly demonstrate, it was Sharon who torpedoed the process, and it is Sharon who bears the responsibility for the failure of the Road Map.
Mike Whitney
fergiewhitney@msn.com
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