Rage and despair
Liberal Israelis and Palestinians say President Bush's embrace of Ariel Sharon's proposal may have killed the last chance for peace.
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By Michelle Goldberg
April 17, 2004 | JERUSALEM -- Fareed Taamallah, a liberal Palestinian activist who frequently works with Israeli peace groups, has given up on a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. He's eating a falafel in a windowless restaurant in Bedia, a Palestinian village just a short walk from the new Israeli security wall that slices through the West Bank, surrounding Israeli settlements that look like suburban Florida neighborhoods magically transferred to the Levant. It's the day after George W. Bush stood beside Ariel Sharon and, in the eyes of many here, gave him the green light to annex this region in exchange for pulling out of squalid Gaza. Watching it, liberal Israelis and Palestinians alike saw the death of the peace process. The event, they fear, will herald an even more violent and anguished phase of the intractable war between two small populations whose hatreds reverberate all over the world.
"Sharon wants to destroy the peace process and the Palestinian people as a political entity," Taamallah says. "There is no limit to what Sharon can do because he got the green light from the States."
In much of Israel and Palestine, Wednesday's meeting between Bush and Sharon, scheduled to broadcast during prime time here, is seen as a huge, possibly career-saving victory for Sharon and a debilitating blow to liberals on both sides of the Green Line, the border that separated Israel and Palestine before the 1967 war. Despite what Bush said, few here see Sharon's proposal to pull out of Gaza while solidifying control of much of the West Bank as being consistent with the "road map," the peace plan supported by the United States and the other three members of the so-called Quartet (Russia, the European Union and the U.N.), which requires that Israel stop settlement building and the Palestinians stop terror attacks as part of a process leading to the creation of an independent Palestinian state by 2005. Instead, it's seen as the death notice of Bush's stillborn proposal and the beginning of a new stage in Israeli politics in which Israel, rather than negotiating a settlement with the Palestinians, negotiates one with America.
By overturning the decades-old official U.S. position that the dispute over borders and refugees had to be resolved by direct negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians, Bush in effect conceded huge areas to the Israelis in advance of those negotiations. It's true that in any peace deal, some large Israeli settlements were likely to be folded into Israel proper -- with the Palestinians being given compensatory land -- and true as well that no wholesale right of return was likely to be acceptable to the Jewish state. But by prejudging these issues, Bush fundamentally shifted the entire dynamic of the process -- and, many here believe, killed it .......
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/04/17/palestine/index.html
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