Palestinian expectations were low before the meeting between Ariel Sharon and Mahmoud Abbas -- they are now non-existent, writes Graham Usher in Jerusalem On 21 June Ariel Sharon and Mahmoud Abbas had their first head-to-head meeting in four months. Its tenor was described by the way it collapsed. "We are still taking casualties," Sharon scolded Abbas as the latter was putting on his coat. The Palestinian leader was then sped away. It was left to his prime minister, Ahmed Qurei, to give the sour judgement at a press conference in Ramallah. "Overall what was presented to us was not convincing or satisfying at all. It did not meet our expectations or the expectations of those Arab and international parties that helped organise the meeting," he said. But it met the expectations of Sharon. At the meeting he told Abbas that any movement on those issues of most pressing concern to the Palestinians -- the release of prisoners, settlement expansion, the further redeployment of Israeli troops from West Bank towns -- was predicated on the Palestinian Authority taking action against Hamas and Islamic Jihad, in other words, "a Palestinian civil war", as one PA source put it. Palestinians pressed Sharon for clear decisions about the Gaza disengagement plan -- over the control of the Gaza border crossings, the reopening of its airport and harbour or the re-establishment of a safe passage for people and goods between Gaza and the West Bank. Sharon's answer was a resounding "no" to all and for the same reason. "There was nothing, nothing," growled Mohamed Dahlan, the Palestinian minister responsible for coordinating Israel's disengagement from Gaza. There are some in the PA who question whether Sharon wants a coordinated Israeli withdrawal at all -- fearing the precedent it would set for a return to political negotiations. But few too would dispute that Sharon was strengthened in his negativity by events that preceded the encounter with Abbas. On 19 and 20 June Islamic Jihad fighters killed an Israeli soldier and settler in separate ambushes in Gaza and the northern West Bank -- retaliation, said Jihad, for Israel's arrest and assassinations of their cadre. Israel killed three Palestinians, including a 17-year-old boy trying to breach the Gaza border fence to seek work in Israel. "Less a suicide bomber, more a suicide worker," said one local. More ominous for Abbas was the attempted suicide bombing by Wafa Al-Biss, a 21-year-old woman from Jabalyia. Dispatched by his own Fatah's Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades (AMB) -- and holding an entry permit to Israel for medical reasons -- her mission was to self-detonate in a medical centre in the Israeli town of Beer Sheva, "a noisy, crowded place" as instructed by her AMB handlers. She was detected by Israeli soldiers at Gaza's Eretz crossing and stripped of her explosives. "My dream was to be a martyr. I believe in death," she said. Israel's response was predictable. It arrested 52 alleged Jihad men in raids across the West Bank, wrecking homes as they were taken. On 21 June -- even as Abbas was sitting down with Sharon -- Israel fired an air-to-surface missile into Gaza, presumably in pursuit of one or other Islamic Jihad man. It failed to reach its quarry, but it did expose Abbas's absolute powerlessness in the eyes of his people. Had Al-Biss realised her "dream", few Palestinians believe it would have meant anything less than an Israeli re-invasion of northern Gaza and perhaps the re-conquest of the Strip as a whole. Indeed the only "coordination" that survived the wreckage of the meeting was over the fate of the red-tiled houses that reside in the settlements in Gaza. Announced by Condoleezza Rice during her visit to Israel and the occupied territories on 18 and 19 June, it is, appropriately enough, a house demolition. Under it, Israel will raze the settler homes while the PA will clean up the aftermath. High-rise apartment blocks instead will house thousands of Palestinians made refugee in 1948, then again in 1967 and most recently through Israel's destruction of Gaza cities and camps during the Intifada. The thousands of Palestinians made jobless by Israel's closure regime will build the apartments. Contrary to international law, it will be the world (and not the occupier) that foots the bill, estimated at $50-60 million. Writ large, this seems to be the future for a post- disengaged Gaza. According to The New York Times, Rice will use the upcoming G8 summit to drum up $3 billion in aid for Gaza. The aim again appears to be a crash course job creation scheme to generate a menial, labour intensive economy in Gaza to replace the menial, labour intensive but better paid economy Palestinians once worked in Israel. It is all eerily reminiscent of the Oslo process. Then millions were poured into Gaza to shore up an economy ravaged by Israel's closure and separation policies, in the belief that quiet, "development" and handouts would somehow transmogrify into peace. The actual result was the decline by a third of Gaza's GDP, structural unemployment rates of between 25-30 per cent and the second Intifada. Without Palestinian control over their borders, a safe passage and a withdrawal of the occupation from the West Bank, it will be the same this time round, predicts Palestinian negotiator, Saeb Erekat: "The issue is not politics here -- it's economics. It's about the economic sustainability of Gaza -- 1.3 million people, most of them under 25, living in 360 square kilometres. How do you sustain that economy without transferring it from being a labour-oriented to a goods-oriented one, and how do you sustain a good-oriented economy without access to markets in the West Bank or to the outside world through Egypt? Gaza cannot survive one day without the West Bank."
