The Hindu : Opinion / News Analysis : Peace no closer in West Asia

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Thursday, Jun 30, 2005

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Peace no closer in West Asia

Jonathan Freedland

THEY ARE calling it the war of the colours. On one side, the Jewish settlers facing eviction from Gaza urging their fellow citizens to wear or wave orange to protest the withdrawal. On the other, the settlers' opponents who have failed to agree on a colour scheme and so flutter their approval in shades of blue, blue-and-white and green.

In the coming weeks, Israelis will witness scenes that stir some of the deepest emotions in their national culture. They have had a foretaste already. On Tuesday, Corporal Avi Bieber was jailed for 56 days for his refusal to participate in the demolition on Sunday of deserted homes in the Gush Katif area of Gaza. Come August 15, there could be hundreds of Corporal Biebers, refusing to raise their hands to their fellow Israelis, and endless television pictures showing former settlements blown to rubble. If settlers turn on Israeli soldiers who have come to evict them, it will not look like a culture war — but a civil war.

What makes this conflict so strange is the make-up of the two sides. For who has become the chief hate figure of the Israeli right? None other than the man despised by much of the global left: Ariel Sharon. His decision to leave Gaza threw Israeli progressives into initial confusion. Surely if he was for it, they had to be against it. More substantially, they suspected a trick, the first step in a neat game of quid pro quo — giving up Gaza in return for American, and therefore global, permission to keep the best chunks of the West Bank. That view remains credible and yet, as August 15 draws near, it becomes harder to remain unmoved by what is about to unfold. For one thing, the pullback from Gaza is clearly a good thing in itself.

There is the prospect for long-term progress too. The sunniest optimists see Gaza as a crucial precedent. Once Mr. Sharon has countenanced a withdrawal, the taboo will be broken.

The momentum, say these hopeful types, will be unstoppable. The coalition Mr. Sharon has cobbled together for disengagement will break up, leading to new elections. If he fights those and wins, he could withdraw from the Jordan Valley and a few more isolated settlements in the northern West Bank.

Of course, it is easy to puncture such hopeful talk. The trauma felt by the Israeli right may well serve as a reverse precedent, leaving many Israelis convinced that withdrawal was an experience too painful to be repeated. That argument would be boosted by an upsurge in attacks on Israeli civilians: if the suicide bombers were to return in numbers, motivated by the belief that it was violence which pushed Israel out of Gaza, there would be little Israeli eagerness to hand over yet more land.

But those who fantasise that the Gaza move could set in train a revival of the traditional Middle East peace process may be guilty of a larger mistake. For such a view misses what is really going on here — and how revolutionary a figure Ariel Sharon has turned out to be.

He has made what the experts call a "paradigm shift," breaking the old peace-making model, in which the two sides negotiated and made compromises, in favour of going it alone — with or without the enemy.

Until now, most advocates of peace have regretted this shift, arguing that it seeks to impose a solution favouring Israel and making the Palestinians passive observers of their own fate.

Those criticisms have bite, but a powerful case for unilateralism exists all the same. I heard it in a recent conversation with Haim Ramon, a Labour Minister in Mr. Sharon's Government.

Everyone knows the outlines of a final two-state solution, he says. The trouble is, the two sides cannot get there. Even if Israel could bring itself to give back most of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, the Palestinians under Abu Mazen could not agree to waive the right of return of Palestinian refugees.

The withdrawal is not very appealing, promising only interim management of the conflict rather than a full resolution of it. Compared to a just, fair accord between the two sides — a handshake, smiles and sunshine — it is unalluring. But compared to what we have now, and the prospect of 38 more years of occupation, it looks like the lesser evil. An end to occupation is best. But a unilateral, partial end to occupation is surely better than nothing. —

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