Whose
Security?
By Jonathan
Cook
Al Ahram
18 June , 2003
It took only two days from last week's handshakes at the Aqaba summit
between US President George W Bush and the Israeli and Palestinian prime
ministers, Ariel Sharon and Mahmoud Abbas, setting the seal on the latest
peace initiative for the Middle East, for the folds of the so-called
"roadmap" to start falling apart.
The plan, building on President
Bush's speech of last summer, is designed to create a "viable"
Palestinian state living alongside a "secure" Israel by 2005.
But the moment the summit closed, Israel and the three most active armed
Palestinian groups succeeded in erecting a series of roadblocks that
make the route ahead look impassable.
First, months of talks between
Abbas and Hamas to reach a temporary cease-fire collapsed ignominiously,
with Hamas leaders accusing the prime minister of selling out to Israel
in his summit speech. Referring to Abbas's call for abandonment of the
armed uprising, spokesman Abdel-Aziz Rantisi said: "Abu Mazen,
through giving up the right of resistance and calling it terrorism,
gave the green light to Sharon and his army."
Abbas was forced to cancel
a meeting with Hamas leaders in Gaza on Sunday to try to talk them round
after it was rumoured that officials decided his safety could not be
ensured. Although Hamas, the most powerful of the militant groups, was
expected to return at some point to the negotiating table, it was at
best an inauspicious start.
Then, it was revealed that
Palestinian Security Affairs Minister Mohamed Dahlan had been trying,
with US and European money, to buy weapons from the Al-Aqsa Martyrs
Brigades, the armed wing of Abbas's Fatah movement, and to recruit its
members to the reformed police forces he is building with CIA help and
Israeli cooperation.
Although Dahlan denied the
reports, several Palestinian sources confirmed that he had received
$50 million and was offering as much as $6,000 for each rifle and a
similar amount to join the new forces.
The Al-Aqsa Brigades' allegiance
to Fatah, it might have been assumed, would leave them less opposed
to supporting the leadership, but most members were reported to have
refused the offer, with the group's West Bank leader Abu Mujahed saying:
"We will not negotiate with Dahlan."
The Brigades were apparently
as outraged by Abbas's Aqaba speech as Hamas, particularly over his
failure to mention either the release of political prisoners, including
the most high profile, Marwan Barghouti, or the humiliating confinement
of the Palestinian president, Yasser Arafat. Having been completely
sidelined by the international community, Arafat himself has little
incentive to help the Palestinian prime minister out of the current
impasse.
Finally, concluding a disastrous
weekend for Abbas, three gunmen -- symbolically, one each from Hamas,
Islamic Jihad and Al-Aqsa Brigades -- attacked an Israel army post in
the northern Gaza Strip, killing four soldiers and leaving another four
seriously wounded.
In a statement, the three
groups said: "This joint operation was committed to confirm our
people's united choice of Jihad and resistance until the end of occupation
of our land and holy places."
The Israeli government response
was predictable: a barrage of criticism of Abbas and Dahlan for failing
to uphold their roadmap commitments to ensure Israel's security. "If
terrorism will continue, it will destroy the roadmap, it will destroy
the peace process," government Spokesman Avi Pazner said.
US Secretary of State Colin
Powell took up the same refrain, saying the "tragic, terrible incident"
must not be allowed to wreck the roadmap. "We all have to work
together to get this terrorism under control."
Powell and Israeli officials,
however, failed to point out that the first violation of the new atmosphere
of trust supposedly engendered by the roadmap had been committed by
Israel, not the Palestinians, the day after the Aqaba summit.
Near Tulkarm in the northern
West Bank two Hamas leaders were shot dead by the army in a house in
the village of Atil and a third was seriously wounded. Nabil Abu Rudeinah,
an aide to Arafat, said the shootings were proof that Israel was continuing
its policy of assassinations and that it was not interested in implementing
the roadmap.
If there was any doubt about
Israel's true intentions, they were confirmed on Tuesday morning when
an army gunship fired a missile at a jeep in Gaza carrying Hamas Spokesman
Abdul- Aziz Rantisi. He survived but it was hard to read the military
strike as anything other than an unconcealed declaration of war on Hamas.
In fact, the events that
unfurled in the wake of the Aqaba Summit starkly illuminated the central
flaw in the roadmap, one that threatens to transform it from a blueprint
for peace into a minor signpost on the path to yet more bloodshed.
The core failing of the document
is encapsulated in its emphasis on one concept -- security -- to the
exclusion of almost everything else.
The word, it was made clear
in the Aqaba speeches, is shorthand for Israeli security, or more accurately
Israel's own interpretation of what constitutes its security, rather
than the balanced idea of jointly binding security guarantees to prevent
violence directed at either Israelis or Palestinians.
The repeated demand that
the new Palestinian leadership guarantee Israel's security by ending
all violence from the outset of the peace process ignores the current
heated debate among the armed Palestinian groups, and within the wider
Palestinian society, about what is legitimate resistance to 36 years
of illegal and brutal occupation.
Rather than providing for
a strategy to break the tit-for-tat violence between Palestinian militants
and the Israeli army, the roadmap simplistically promotes "security"
as the answer to "terrorism", another well- worn concept in
which Israel cloaks all forms of Palestinian resistance.
The insistence on "security"
measures to be taken by the Palestinian leadership against "terrorism"
in the roadmap's first phase -- before an "interim" Palestinian
state is created -- has left the whole plan hostage to what Israel accepts
as the implementation of this clause.
Does it mean an end to attacks
on civilians within Israel's 1948 borders? Or does it mean this plus
an end to attacks on settlers, many effectively members of armed militias
in the West Bank and Gaza? Or does it mean an end to attacks on all
Israeli targets, including military ones?
The roadmap steamrollers
over these important legal and moral distinctions, requiring that Dahlan's
police forces crack down on groups conducting or planning "violent
attacks on Israelis anywhere". All such attacks are unequivocally
defined as "terror", which explains why Powell so quickly,
and unthinkingly, labelled Sunday's armed attack on the soldiers in
Gaza as "terrorism".
Similarly, the roadmap bans
all Palestinian incitement against Israel. But what constitutes "incitement":
sheikhs criticising the occupation in mosques; small boys throwing stones
at tanks; women shouting at soldiers manning the checkpoints; textbooks
including maps of historic Palestine?
Scepticism about the chances
of the roadmap offering even the most limited realisation of Palestinian
statehood hinges on this initial weakness: the central concern -- security
-- has been weighted in Israel's favour, with Israel largely left to
judge when the Palestinians have fulfilled their obligations. (The Palestinians,
by contrast, will have no reciprocal right to determine what constitutes
a "settlement" or its expansion).
It is clear that Sharon will
exploit this defect in the roadmap to make impossible demands of the
Palestinians. Realistically, how can Palestinian security forces that
have been surgically castrated by the long months of Israeli army incursions
hope to take on the more motivated and resourceful resistance of Palestinian
militants? And how does Israel expect these police forces, however well
rehabilitated, to stamp their authority on the West Bank and Gaza when
the Israeli army -- one of the most powerful in the world -- has signally
failed to do so in the year since it reinvaded every last inch of the
West Bank and much of Gaza?
What Abbas and Dahlan need,
to stand even the slimmest chance of curbing violence from their own
side, is a very large carrot to offer Palestinian militants, and the
general population, after 32 months of a savage beating with the Israeli
military stick. Why should Palestinians abandon resistance to the illegal
occupation of their land when there is scant evidence that the occupation
is about to end, or that the roadmap offers a route to resolving two
of the most fraught issues, namely the future status of Jerusalem and
the right of return for millions of Palestinian refugees.
In fact, the definition of
"security" implicitly weights the last problem, the return
of the refugees, in Israel's favour too. Security, according to some
of Israel's 14 submitted reservations to the roadmap, also means protection
from any measure that might threaten the Jewishness of the Israeli state.
Sharon's claim that the refugees would be a demographic wrecking ball
for the Jewish state is the accepted wisdom in Washington.
So the big test for the Palestinian
leadership is to what extent it can persuade the White House to place
Israel's "security" concerns in more limited and realistic
parameters and whether it can insist on reciprocal "security"
for the Palestinian civilian population.
That will require an immediate
halt to the collective punishment of the closures and the lifting of
curfews. It will mean an end to the house demolitions, deportations,
extra-judicial assassinations, the blocking of humanitarian aid and
the refusal to issue building permits. It will also require the dismantlement
of the "security fence" being built around the West Bank and
the cessation of all other forms of military behaviour designed to terrorise
the general population.
So how does the roadmap fare
on these key Palestinian security concerns during the make- or-break
first phase?
To be sure, the plan does
include a prohibition on some of these activities: Israel must take
"no actions undermining trust, including deportations, attack on
civilians; confiscation and/or demolition of Palestinian homes and property,
as a punitive measure or to facilitate Israeli construction; destruction
of Palestinian institutions and infrastructure; and other measures specified
in the Tenet Work Plan."
But these injunctions are
made teethless in three ways. One is in the wording itself. Although
these actions are banned, who is to decide, for example, what constitutes
an "attack on civilians"? Will it include the "collateral
damage" of bystanders killed in a "targeted assassination"
-- as happened during Tuesday's assassination attempt on Rantisi --
or by the "return fire" of a tank after a mortar attack? Will
it include schoolchildren killed for throwing stones or holding a slingshot?
Will it include pregnant women shot for breaking a curfew or students
killed for evading a closed roadblock? At the moment Israel classifies
such attacks as legitimate retaliation against the "terrorist infrastructure".
A monitoring team -- at Israel's
insistence composed entirely of Americans -- is supposed to oversee
the implementation of the roadmap. But how will 13 monitors, even if
they are free of American domestic political pressures to side with
Israel, be able to stand at every checkpoint or follow every tank? And
if they are not witness to events, whose word will they trust: that
of the army commander or of ordinary Palestinians?
Even the land confiscations
and house demolitions prohibition is subject to the get-out clause that
these measures are prohibited only if they are "punitive"
or designed to assist settlement expansion. Note that they are not prohibited
if Israel deems them necessary to ensure its "security", as
it has claimed when demolishing hundreds of homes, levelling thousands
of acres of crops and uprooting tens of thousands of olive trees.
Second, the frailty of the
injunctions against Israel is highlighted by another section of the
roadmap that requires Israel to "normalise" Palestinian life
by withdrawing from areas "occupied from 28 September 2000"
-- the day of Sharon's visit to the Haram Al-Sharif and the effective
eruption of the Intifada, followed by Israel's incursions into Areas
A and B, the self- rule areas set by Oslo.
The problem here is the assumption
that returning to the status quo pre-Intifada is "normalisation".
The Intifada occurred precisely because life for the Palestinians was
not normal during the Oslo years.
In fact, some 60 per cent
of the West Bank and 20 per cent of Gaza were still under the control
of the Israeli army. Even in areas nominally under Palestinian authority,
life was severely circumscribed by roadblocks and checkpoints making
movement difficult.
Furthermore, through the
Oslo period the occupation was enforced at arm's length by Israel's
exclusive control of Palestinian borders, airspace, trade and key resources
such as water. None of this is expected to change in the foreseeable
future.
For example, the roadmap
will do nothing to end the policy of "general closures" which
took off during the Oslo years, effectively the regular sealing off
of the West Bank and Gaza from Israel. For a Palestinian labour force
largely dependent on the Israeli economy for work, the consequences
have been catastrophic. This kind of normalisation is hardly likely
to weaken Palestinian support for armed resistance or make Abbas's job
of ensuring Israeli security any easier.
And third, how is one to
believe that Israelis and Palestinians can move from the first phase
to the second phase -- the creation of the "interim" Palestinian
state -- when Israel has been required only to "freeze" settlement
activity in the first phase? What chances are there that Israel will
allow this fledgling Palestinian state, and its fledgling police forces,
to take responsibility for the security of more than 400,000 Israeli
settlers? And how will Abbas sell the idea of ending -- let alone actually
halt -- armed resistance to occupation when his temporary state is cut
to pieces by the existing settlements?
The one certainty in the
coming weeks and months is that goodwill from Sharon will not be forthcoming.
In fact, the Israeli prime
minister has conceded almost nothing so far: a few thousand Palestinians
may be allowed out of their cages to work in high- security Israeli
industrial parks; 100 security prisoners, most of them never charged
and many nearing the end of their administrative detentions, have been
released from a jailed population of 8,000; a trickle of money is to
reach the Palestinian Authority from the huge stash of tax monies Israel
has been withholding for the long months of the Intifada; and a dozen
or more "unauthorised outposts", mostly uninhabited caravan
sites, are to be dismantled to meet the roadmap's stipulation against
settlement expansion since Sharon took office (and be sure Sharon will
happily show the settlers' violent response to even this minimal crackdown
to milk world sympathy).
As for the main problem facing
the Palestinian population, the rigid imposition of roadblocks and checkpoints
that have effectively choked off all economic life, as well as stripping
Palestinians of the last vestiges of their dignity, there is no progress
at all. Israel reimposed a complete closure on the West Bank shortly
after the Aqaba summit and before Sunday's Gaza attack. Even if the
closure is lifted again, any Palestinian attacks will almost certainly
bring the stranglehold back.
Despite the miserliness of
Sharon's offers, the price he is demanding of Abbas is exorbitant. What
will satisfy Sharon is not an end, temporary or permanent, to attacks
on civilians, nor will he be happy with a halt to attacks on military
targets.
What Sharon requires of Abbas
is the complete disarmament of all Palestinian militant groups, by force
if needs be. Israel's security, according to Sharon, can only be ensured
by the abandonment of even the potential for armed struggle against
the occupation -- and the demilitarisation must take place before he
takes any concrete action to end the occupation.
If Abbas was not aware of
the reaction of his own militant groups to this requirement, it was
clarified for him in the aftermath of the Aqaba summit. As he observed
of Sharon's demands on Sunday: "We will not allow anybody to drag
us into a civil war."
The fear of unleashing a
civil war -- one Abbas might well lose against the combined forces of
Hamas, Jihad and the Brigades -- is the main reason for his and Dahlan's
repeated refusal, despite Sharon's almost gleeful offers, to take security
responsibility at this early stage for parts of Gaza and the West Bank.
A report by the respected
analyst Akiva Eldar in Ha'aretz newspaper revealed that at one such
meeting between the two sides, it was demanded of Dahlan that he prove
his seriousness by staging a gun battle between Hamas and the new police
forces in which several Hamas members would be killed. Dahlan refused.
Optimistically, Abbas hopes
to make better progress through continuing negotiations with Hamas,
his biggest obstacle to securing a cease- fire. But have the other roadmap
participants -- primarily, of course, the Americans, as well as the
Europeans and the Arab states -- appreciated the faulty logic at the
heart of the roadmap?
Apparently not. Everyone
is falling over themselves to be seen helping to engineer a cease-fire
and resurrect the Palestinian police forces.
The leading player from the
Arab states is Egypt, whose Intelligence Minister Omar Suleiman has
been hosting intermittent talks for many months between representatives
of Hamas and the Palestinian Authority to agree on a temporary cease-fire.
Egypt believes the Gazan
leadership of Hamas can be brought to heel by increasing the pressure
for a cease-fire on the group's exiled leadership, under Khaled Meshal,
in Damascus. The overseas Hamas has traditionally been more hard-line
than the Gazans but it is supposedly being "softened up".
Syria, being menaced by Washington
for its alleged role in sponsoring terror, has closed the offices of
Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups in the capital. Egyptians
delegates were expected to return to Syria and Lebanon this week to
put further pressure on Hamas.
In preparation for confrontations
between Dahlan's forces and the militants, the Europeans and Americans
have been sending shipments of police equipment to the territories to
bolster the new police forces, including jeeps, riot shields and helmets,
and light pistols. And in the West Bank town of Jericho the US Central
Intelligence Agency has been helping to train what remains of the Palestinian
security forces.
In line with Sharon's thinking,
all the outside actors seem determined to invest the fate of the roadmap
solely in the successful resurrection of the Palestinian police forces,
as the guarantors of Israel's security. Any voice raised in opposition
will be choked into silence.
The fallacy from Oslo is
being repeated: that a solution to the conflict can be found in the
Palestinians realising Israel's national ambitions rather than their
own, far more limited, ones. Palestinians must once again be made to
enforce the occupation on Israel's behalf.