December 20, 2003
Sharon's New Offer: A Compromise, a Threat or Both?
ERUSALEM, Dec. 19 � The cottage industry that is Ariel
Sharon-watching in Israel and elsewhere was very busy on Friday parsing
Mr. Sharon's instantly famous speech of Thursday night and trying to
answer the basic question: was Mr. Sharon's declaration an offer, a sort
of olive branch, or was it a threat?
The speech had two essential elements. One was a pledge to work hard to carry out the American-supported peace plan known as the road map, which if successful would lead to a Palestinian state by 2005.
That much was not new for Mr. Sharon, who has pledged himself to the peace plan, with reservations, in the past, but it was a reassuring affirmation at a time when peace negotiations had been stalled for several months.
What was new, and subject to different interpretations, was his second point. If there is no progress toward a negotiated peace in the next few months, Mr. Sharon said, Israel will move unilaterally to separate the Jewish and Arab populations in the West Bank and, as he put it, reduce "friction" between them.
The speech, which aroused intense interest in Israel, certainly seems to portend something new in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It came at a time of an almost palpable desire among Israelis for some new direction, and widespread criticism that the old formulas were not working.
So from that point of view, Mr. Sharon's speech did seem to promise that things would go one of two ways, both of them different from the recent past. One is that negotiations with the Palestinian Authority would resume and both sides would really try to get some business done. The other is that the path of negotiations would die and Israel would, in essence, impose the conditions of a peace on the Palestinians.
"This is significant as words," a European diplomat said of the speech. "The question is what deeds will follow."
In the official Israeli view, what Mr. Sharon said signified a sincere and constructive offer to the Palestinians, and it was backed up by some important, immediate gestures that the Israeli side would make, also without negotiations.
Israel, Mr. Sharon said, would reduce the curfews and roadblocks that make even everyday movements for Palestinians fraught with obstacles and inconvenience.
More significant, certainly from the Israeli perspective, he vowed to dismantle the illegal settlements that have sprung up on various hillsides and outcroppings on the West Bank in the last couple of years.
In a way, as some analysts of the scene were noting, the immediate steps amounted to an acceptance by Mr. Sharon of Phase One of the peace plan, which calls for both sides to take confidence-building measures that would create an atmosphere conducive to peace.
"He basically called on the Palestinians for negotiations and then offered an alternative," Avi Pazner, an Israeli government spokesman, said in an interview on Friday. "If they do not negotiate, he has his own ideas about what to do. It was not a threat. That was not the intention."
The proof of that, in the view of some people here, lies in Mr. Sharon's willingness to dismantle settlements, either as part of an overall peace agreement or � and this is what he announced Thursday � even without an agreement.
Indeed, for Mr. Sharon, who spent much of his career in government as the chief engineer of settlement building, that represents an important departure in his thinking.
"Last night, at the Herzliya Conference, he bade farewell to what was his real legacy, the settlements," Nahum Barnea, a commentator in the daily Yediot Ahronot, said. Others do not buy the view of a changed Mr. Sharon. They see a master strategist who has changed his tactics but not his main idea, which is to forestall as long as he can any genuine moves toward Palestinian independence.
Mr. Sharon is widely said in Israel to have already given up on the new Palestinian prime minister, Ahmed Qurei, who is viewed as weak and under the thumb of the Palestinian leader, Yasir Arafat, whom Mr. Sharon will not countenance as a negotiating partner.
The belief, according to some people close to Mr. Sharon, is that Mr. Qurei's government will fall in six months or so, that there will be no peace agreement and that Israel therefore needs a plan for unilateral action once that happens.
Hence Mr. Sharon's announcement of the basic outlines of those unilateral steps: withdrawing the army to a new security zone and dismantling some of the settlements. What is interesting in the offer is that it gives the Palestinians some important things that they want, namely a pullback of the Israeli presence from Palestinian territory.
A good offer, in other words? Not everybody feels that way. In this view, Mr. Sharon is threatening to impose a settlement consisting of a truncated Palestine existing behind the concrete and chain-link barrier that is now under construction.
In other words, Mr. Sharon, if he does go ahead with unilateral steps, will essentially draw the border between Israel and Palestinian territory in a way that favors Israel and does not lead to a Palestinian state.
An alternative interpretation of Mr. Sharon's speech is that it was a way for him to buy time, to lay out options but not commit himself to any of them.
"Sharon is not about to change the settlement map," Yossi Beilin, co-author of the Geneva Accords, the private peace plan announced in Switzerland a few weeks ago, wrote in the daily Maariv on Friday. "The conditions he poses for realizing his new vision are so many that there is no great risk in saying that they will not be met."