Making it official

I think we all already knew this, but confirmation is always refreshing.

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said in an interview published Wednesday that Israel has no intention of sticking to the U.S.-backed "road map" peace plan it endorsed last year.

Sharon also said that there may be no further troop pullbacks after Israel carries out its so-called unilateral "disengagement" from the Palestinians - a withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and four small West Bank settlements in 2005.

"It is very possible that after the evacuation (disengagement), there will be a long period when nothing else happens," Sharon told the Yediot Ahronot newspaper, commenting for the time in detail on Israel's plans after a Gaza withdrawal.

Asked whether he was talking about decades of standstill, he said: "It's impossible to say."

Palestinian Cabinet minister Saeb Erekat charged that this only proved their contention that the disengagement plan is merely a ploy to solidify Israeli control over most of the West Bank. He said that those who relied on the road map should realize that

"their good intentions are one thing, and that Sharon's good intentions are another."

That may well be true. I admit that after initially having been sufficiently hopeful about Sharon's proposal for withdrawal to have suggested he might have had a genuine change of heart and preferred to go down in history as a peacemaker, I have come to share that belief about his intentions.

But there is another possibility; I consider it unlikely but it is there: There is considerable bitterness, anger, even a rising tide of threat against him because of the withdrawal from Gaza.

Israeli police said this week that they were investigating possible death threats made against Sharon because of his settlement withdrawal plan. A radical rabbi declared on Channel 2 television Tuesday night that was he prepared to carry out a ceremony placing a death curse on Sharon.

There have been large-scale demonstrations against the proposal and members of Likud have twice this year voted against initiatives to advance the plan.

The BBC's James Reynolds in Jerusalem says some people find the current political climate is disturbingly similar to that of late 1995 - when right-wing activists led an angry campaign against Yitzhak Rabin, the then prime minister, and his efforts to follow peace accords.

This culminated in Rabin's assassination by a right-wing extremist.

So the question is: Is Sharon, by insisting on this withdrawal but foreswearing anything more, actually doing less than he would but as much as he thinks he dares? Again, I don't think that's likely - but I do admit it's possible.

But that raises one other issue.

Israeli military forces killed 10 Palestinians on Wednesday in the West Bank, the highest single-day death toll there in 18 months, and Israeli officials warned that troops will continue attacks against Palestinians while Prime Minister Ariel Sharon moves ahead with proposals to remove Jewish settlements from the Gaza Strip and parts of the West Bank.

"We have to intensify our activities. That's the instruction that the prime minister gave to the defense minister," said Raanan Gissin, a spokesman for Sharon. "There has to be a heavy hand against terrorist infrastructure and leadership so when we disengage they will be on the run and we will walk out."

The idea has been advanced that the real reason for the stepped-up attacks is to make sure that the plan unfolds as the Israelis willingly withdrawing rather than being forced out by the Palestinians. That is, it must be presented as a victory rather than as what it really is: a result of the impossibility of perpetual occupation in the face of a hostile populace. The same lesson the Soviets learned in Afghanistan, that we learned (temporarily) in Indochina and are learning again in Iraq, the same lesson numerous imperial forces have learned down through history.

The reality is that Israel can't withdraw as a winner, no matter the spin. But in attempting to do so, very likely to assuage his right-wing critics and shore up his own position, Sharon is ratcheting up the destruction and the death toll in Gaza, seemingly under the notion that Palestinian lives are instruments for his political plans. That is not only an evil notion, it is a foolish and dangerous one that will not secure Israel's future but only subject it to greater threat. Blood stains deep and memories are long - and the terrorism of the IDF is the best recruiting poster for the terrorism of Hamas.

Footnote: I've been wanting to write something on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for a while but I haven't been able to get my mind quite all the way around what I want to say. It seems to me the ground is shifting, there's something brewing, something that will change the nature but not the fact of the conflict, at least not immediately. But perhaps in that shift new possibilities will emerge. I'll have to work on this. Maybe in a few days I can come up with something a little clearer.