JERUSALEM — Pledges by the United States to increase Washington’s involvement in ending Israeli-Palestinian violence may be welcome in some quarters but not in the Sharon government.
A new U.S. initiative has the potential to create new friction between Jerusalem and Washington, analysts here say. It also could trigger the breakup of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s fragile national unity coalition.
Should the Bush administration push its proposals too hard, the right wing of Sharon’s government could quit if Sharon bows to U.S. pressure. Conversely, the left wing of the unity government also might resign if Sharon refuses to accept the U.S. plan.
Analysts believe that if the government falls, former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will return to power with an even more right-wing government.
Word of the Bush administration’s new initiative came over the weekend in New York, where world leaders convened for the annual meeting of the U.N. General Assembly. Sharon, citing security concerns, was not in attendance, but sources say he will meet with Bush in the United States early next month.
U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell is expected to outline the plan for ending the region’s violence in a speech Monday at the University of Louisville in Kentucky. Details of the address are still being hashed out, but American Jewish leaders say it is aimed at reinvigorating proposals already on the table, instead of formulating a new Middle East policy.
President Bush laid the framework for Powell’s speech at the assembly meeting Saturday.
“We are working toward the day when two states — Israel and Palestine — live peacefully together within secure and recognized borders,” Bush said.
U.S. officials have frequently made reference to a future Palestinian state but have not called it “Palestine.” Bush is the first American president to ever use the word.
For decades, the use of the term “Palestine” would have been seen in Israel as a deliberately hostile gesture. “Palestine,” after all, is the word used invariably by the Palestinians to describe their national goal.
Some Israelis contend it deliberately hints at the pre-1948 situation, when all of the country under the British Mandate was called Palestine — and that the current use of the term implies a vision by some Palestinians of a new homeland minus the state of Israel.
Bush clearly was speaking of two states — Israel and Palestine. On Sunday, Powell said the president used the name of Palestine intentionally.
“If one is moving forward with a vision of two states living side by side,” Powell said, “it’s appropriate then, as we start to reach more aggressively toward that vision, to call those two states what they will be: Israel, Palestine.”
Ra’anan Gissin, a spokesman for Sharon, said he is comfortable with Bush’s use of the name “Palestine.” Obviously, Gissin pointed out, Bush did not mean Palestine in place of Israel.
But it seemed equally obvious from the president’s remarks that Bush also did not mean the kind of unconnected islands of Palestinian self-rule, surrounded by swaths of Israeli control, that Sharon has put forward in the past as his vision of an eventual Palestinian state.
Even if Israel agrees to the idea of Palestinian statehood, as significant as the step may be, it will not be enough to paper over the very real and very deep differences that divide Sharon from the Bush administration — and divide Sharon from Foreign Minister Shimon Peres.
That explains the growing speculation in Jerusalem that a newly energized U.S. peacemaking effort could easily result in tension with Washington and in the collapse of the national unity government.
It was with the goal of preventing those two scenarios that Peres has been trying over the past several days — so far without success — to draw up with Sharon a mutually agreed list of Israel’s peace principles.
Their discussions reportedly hit a snag over the suggestion Israel would have to dismantle some settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip — or at least say it is ready to dismantle them — in order for its peace plan to carry credibility.
Sharon, constantly criticized from the right by Netanyahu, is opposed to any such concession at this time.
He knows it would cost him support from the Likud’s more hawkish coalition partners — and perhaps from some members of the Likud itself.
By the same token, Peres and the Labor Party leadership would find themselves under mounting pressure to end their coalition alliance with Sharon if the Americans step up their peace efforts and the prime minister of Israel fails to respond in a positive and forthcoming way.
It is unclear whether Powell will adopt the peace proposals being floating in Israel by Peres and others.
Although some in the American Jewish community had been wary of a new U.S. initiative, recent comments from the Bush administration have helped calm their fears.
In the first weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States, the White House was seen to be courting Arab states, and American Jewish leaders feared any new initiative would favor the Palestinians.
But in the past two weeks, the administration has placed additional sanctions on Palestinian terrorist groups, and the White House has publicly held the feet of Palestinian leader to the fire.
Jewish officials were heartened by comments such as those made last week by National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.
“You cannot help us with Al Qaida and hug Hezbollah,” she said of Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat on Nov. 8. “That’s not acceptable. Or Hamas.”
And despite Bush’s use of the name “Palestine” to describe an eventual state during his address to the United Nations on Saturday, Jewish leaders were impressed by his tough comments on Palestinian violence.
“No national aspiration, no remembered wrong can ever justify the deliberate murder of the innocent,” Bush said to the assembly.
“Any government that rejects this principle, trying to pick and choose its terrorist friends, will know the consequences. We must speak the truth about terror.”
Some American Jewish officials privately say they would have preferred a new push on the Middle East to come from the president, because the White House has generally demonstrated more understanding than the State Department.
The State Department will not confirm Israeli media reports that Powell will travel to the region in a few days following his speech.
Powell’s speech is expected to be a road map toward an ultimate two-state solution, piecing together plans and initiatives that have been outlined in the past year.
Key among those principles is the Tenet plan, hammered out by former CIA Director George Tenet in June after a suicide bombing in a Tel Aviv disco. The plan seeks immediate resumption in security cooperation between Israelis and Palestinians, calls for the end to violence in the region and a restoration of the situation on the ground to what it was before the uprising began in September of last year.
Its goal is to get the two parties to implement the another plan, named after former U.S. Sen. George Mitchell, which outlines a three-pronged approach to rebuilding relations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority — ending violence, rebuilding confidence and resuming peace negotiations.
The Mitchell plan recommends a “cooling-off period” and urges both sides to condemn incitement. It also seeks “100 percent effort” from the Palestinian Authority in curbing violence and demands that Israel freeze settlement activity in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Meanwhile, events on the ground make the task of peacemaking even more formidable.
The United Nations this week got a taste of how difficult it will be to get Israel and the Palestinians to back off from their nearly 14 months of violence. On Monday, the five permanent members of the Security Council — the United States, China, Russia, France and England — issued a statement calling on Israel to withdraw from two Palestinian-controlled cities in the West Bank and urging the Palestinian Authority “to take all possible steps to put an end to violence.”
On Tuesday, both Israel and the Palestinian Authority rejected the statement.
Israeli officials said they would withdraw from Jenin and Tulkarm after the Palestinians halt attacks against Israel that were being launched from both cities. But Palestinian Cabinet minister Hassan Asfour condemned that statement, saying it justified “Israel’s terrorist acts against the Palestinian people.”
Israeli troops had entered six Palestinian-controlled cities in the West Bank following the Oct. 17 assassination of Tourism Minister Rehavam Ze’evi by Palestinian gunmen. Israel has since withdrawn from four of the areas.