Abu Mazen faced down one test to his leadership this week but there are graver ones to come, writes Graham Usher in Jerusalem Flush from his success at the Sharm El-Sheikh summit Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is about to take another step in translating his separatist plans for the occupied territories into fact. On Sunday his cabinet is set to approve two of the "most important" decisions "since the founding of the state", in the opinion of Israel's Haaretz newspaper. The first is to authorise the evacuation of 21 settlements in Gaza and the northern West Bank under Sharon's so-called disengagement plan. The second is to approve the southern route of the West Bank wall, including the incorporation of the vast Gush Etzion settlement bloc 12 miles south of Jerusalem and deep within occupied Palestinian territory. The reason for the simultaneity is transparent, says Haaretz. "The two decisions are being brought at the same time in an effort to neutralise international criticism of the fence route by coupling it with the decision to evacuate settlements." If so, the cabinet decisions are going to provide the severest test for the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, and the diplomatic strategy on which his leadership rests. He has already been bloodied by one test. Two days after he declared a ceasefire on the part of the Palestinian factions, three of those factions -- Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Popular Resistance Committees -- fired over 40 mortars at Jewish settlements in the occupied Gaza Strip, causing some damage but no injury. The ostensible cause for the return to arms was the Israeli army's killing of a Hamas man in southern Gaza on 9 February. But the scale of the barrage could only be read as a rebuttal of Abbas's "unilateral" ceasefire declaration at Sharm El-Sheikh. It was combined with an assault on Gaza Central Prison by around 50- armed men that led to killing of two inmates and the abduction, torture and execution of a third in Gaza's Bureij refugee camp. The Israeli media was swift to claim both as Hamas inspired challenges to the new Palestinian leader. The truth is messier. The three slain Palestinians had been jailed for the murder of three Fatah activists in central Gaza, whose families demanded the death sentence. The Palestinian Authority tarried over judgement until, on 10 February, the families exacted their own. According to local sources Hamas men were involved in the jailbreak, but so were Fatah activists and officers in the police forces, underscoring the widespread Palestinian perception that the police are part of the problem of lawlessness in Gaza rather than the solution. In the aftermath three senior PA police officers were "resigned" and six fired by presidential decree. It is an open question whether this signalled a new get tough policy by Abbas, but the dismissals do clear the way for his aim of unifying the police forces under one central and loyal command. That command will almost certainly be former Gaza police chief Nasser Yusuf, slated to become PA interior minister, and former Gaza Preventive Security head, Mohamed Dahlan, rumoured to be "minister in charge of cabinet affairs". Hamas and the other factions' anger over Sharm El-Sheikh had two causes, say sources. The first was Abbas's failure to extract third party guarantees (either American or Egyptian) that Israel would end its policies of assassination, incursion and arrests in the occupied territories. The second was Condoleezza Rice's appointment of General William Ward as "security coordinator" between Israel and the PA, "a new attempt to push the Palestinian security forces towards a confrontation with the Palestinian resistance", said Hamas. At a meeting on 12 February, Abbas assured the factions that he had "firm promises" that Israel would refrain from all military operations as long as the militias did likewise and that, regardless of Ward's presence, no force would be used against any faction that abided by the truce. He also agreed to release Hamas bank accounts frozen by the PA in August 2003 and absorb Islamist militiamen into the police as a way of assuring their immunity from Israeli attack. The response of Hamas and Islamic Jihad was to reconfirm the de facto ceasefire both had announced on 22 January. The response of the army -- on 15 February -- was to shoot dead two men from Fatah's Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, allegedly on route to attack a settlement near Nablus, and a 15-year boy near Ramallah. The army denied all knowledge of the last death. The truce may survive these violations. But it is unlikely to survive the cabinet decision. If executed, the wall will not only integrate Gush Etzion into Israeli proper but also six villages with 19,000 Palestinians and large swathes of land belonging to Palestinians in Bethlehem. This is combined with policies that aim to "assert an Israeli hegemony over East Jerusalem in ways that no Israeli government has dared to do in the past", says Israeli lawyer Daniel Seiderman, who represents Palestinian landowners in Bethlehem and East Jerusalem. These include not only the ongoing construction of the wall at East Jerusalem's northern and southern entrances and of settlements to buttress them but also "unprecedented rates of house demolitions, restrictive zoning plans for Palestinian neighbourhoods and a new permit system" that will deny East Jerusalem Palestinians access to their kin, businesses and lands in Ramallah. The sum effect, says Seiderman, will be to "extricate Palestinian East Jerusalem from its West Bank hinterland". If this is the future, it is not going to work says the mayor of Qalqiliya, Marouf Zahran, who has seen 83 per cent of the municipality's land become lost or isolated by the wall. It would also sound the death knell for Abbas's leadership, which, as a Fatah member, he supports. "Abu Mazen's strategy is plain," he says. "In exchange for giving Israel security he expects the US, the European Union and Arab states like Egypt and Jordan to oblige Israel to stop building the wall and withdraw from our land. But it is up to them, and especially America, to deliver that trade. Anything less will be unacceptable to the Palestinians -- and I don't mean only Hamas".
