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The
Guaranteed Failure of the Road Map
by
Tanya Reinhart
May
15, 2003
Every
few months, a "peace plan" is pulled out of the drawers of the White House
and keeps the public discourse busy for a few weeks. Although this ritual has a
fixed pattern and predetermined end, it is curious that many in Israel are
still tempted to believe that this time it is different.
The Road Map
announces that this time "the destination is a final and comprehensive
settlement of the Israel-Palestinian conflict by 2005". To check if it
offers anything concrete in this direction, it is necessary to first get clear
regarding what the conflict is about. From Israeli discourse one might get the
impression that it is about the right of return: the Palestinians are trying to
undermine the mere existence of the state of Israel with the demand to allow their
refugees to return, and they are trying to achieve that with terror. It seems
that it was forgotten that in practice this is a simple and classical conflict
over land and resources (water). The
Road Map document as well manifests complete absence of any territorial
dimension.
The
demands from the Palestinians are clear: to establish a government that will be
defined by the U. S. as democratic, to form three security forces which will be
defined by Israel as reliable, and to crush terror. Once these demands are
fulfilled, the third phase is to begin, at which the occupation will
miraculously end. But the document doesn't put any demands on Israel at this
third phase. Most Israelis understand that there is no way to end the
occupation and the conflict without the Israeli army leaving the territories
and the dismantlement of settlements. But these basic concepts are not even
hinted at in the document, which only mentions freezing the settlements and
dismantling new outposts, already the first stage.
The
first stage is more substantial, because it repeats the Tenet plan. In this
stage Israel is expected also to "withdraw from Palestinian areas occupied
from Sept 28 2000... [and to restore] the status quo that existed then".
There is no doubt that fulfillment of this demand can contribute greatly to
establishing some calm, even if a temporary one. Had I believed that the
European representatives in the quartet could bring this plan to
implementation, I would have welcomed it. But there is no basis for such a belief.
The Tenet plan has come into the spotlight many times before. The last round
was what appeared to be an American cease-fire initiative in March 2002, for
which Anthony Zinni and Dick Cheney were sent to the region. Already then Ariel
Sharon clarified that he does not agree to this demand, and he only agrees to
easing the conditions for the population in areas in which quiet will be
preserved (Ha'aretz, Aluf Ben, March 19, 2002). This did not prevent the U.S.
from pointing at the Palestinians as the side that refused the cease-fire. With
the end of this initiative, Israel embarked on the "Defensive Shield"
spree of destruction, with the blessing of the U.S.
Israel
responded also to the Road Map with the same old objections. It further
emphasized that a negotiated halt to terror is not sufficient and what is
required is a visible clash between the new security forces and the opposition
organizations (namely, a civil war). Israel even demands that a Palestinian
declaration of end of conflict and renunciation of the right of return must be
given as a precondition at the beginning of any process, and not at the end.
Again, none of this undermines the U.S. position that Israel is the side that
is seeking peace, the side "whose security is the key to the security of
the world", as Condoleezza Rice put it. The U.S. is ruled today by hawks
whose vision is an unending war. Israel, whose leaders are always eager to go
on another war, is an asset in this vision. There is therefore no basis for the
belief that the U.S. will allow anyone to force Israel to make any concessions.
In
March 13, 2002, at the eve of Zinni's peace visit in the previous round, the
Israeli army welcomed him with an attack on the Jabalya refugee camp in Gaza,
in which 24 Palestinians were killed in one night. Now it has welcomed Powell
with a wave of arrests and deportation of international peace activists. In the
Pax Americana, there is no room for peace activists. Peace will be brought by the tanks.
Tanya Reinhart is Professor of Linguistics
at Tel Aviv University. She is the author of Israel/Palestine:
How to End the War of 1948 (Seven Stories Press, 2002), one of the
most important books on the Israel-Palestinian conflict to date. Visit her
website: http://www.tau.ac.il/~reinhart.