Inching toward Doomsday

Palestinian hopes that the arrival of a new US envoy would augur a more neutral American stance were swiftly disabused, writes Graham Usher from Ramallah
America's new envoy to the Middle East, William Burns, this week dipped his toe into the swirling rapids of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict only to be met with the contending interpretations each side has of the Mitchell report he has been mandated to implement and with a rising tide of violence.
Burns, who is due to meet with President Hosni Mubarak today, held his first meeting with the Palestinians on Sunday in Ramallah against the backdrop of two car bombs exploding in central West Jerusalem, one of them packed with mortars. He left on Tuesday when three Jewish settlers were killed in guerrilla ambushes on the West Bank and two Palestinians were shot dead by the army in Gaza and the West Bank. A third Palestinian died while trying to blow himself up beside an army checkpoint near Gaza's Khan Yunis refugee camp.
"The continuation of violence threatens to overtake [Burns'] efforts," ran a US Embassy wire in Tel Aviv, in characteristic understatement. But this is largely because Burns' skewed efforts so far can only produce violence.
For the Palestinians, endorsing the Mitchell report meant accepting it as an entire package, where each of its elements is guaranteed simultaneously even if the implementation is sequential. For example, once Ariel Sharon commits the Israeli government to a freeze on settlements Yasser Arafat can commit the Palestinians to a cessation of violence.
For Israel Mitchell is "a train with four stations," to borrow the metaphor of Foreign Minister Shimon Peres. The first stop is "an absolute end to violence and incitement". Then comes a "meaningful cooling off period," which Peres wants to last at least two months and longer if violence does not cease "immediately". Next comes "confidence building measures", where Mitchell's call for a settlement freeze will be addressed. The final destination is a renewal of political negotiations "based on UN resolutions 242 and 338".
According to Palestinian and Israeli sources, the US is not only on board this train but driving it. Colin Powell "agrees that the question of settlements need not be discussed now," said Peres. And even when it is discussed, Israel's position is known, courtesy of its government guidelines and "clarifications" given to CNN on Tuesday by Sharon. "We will not construct any new communities," he said, reading from a prepared text, "but we will provide for the current needs of the existing communities."
To meet these "needs", Housing Minister Nathan Sharansky on Tuesday approved bids for 710 new housing units in the West Bank settlements of Maale Adumim and Alfei Menashe, in addition to the 6,000 units already under construction in the occupied territories. "How can we negotiate a settlement freeze when we have no peace partner in the negotiations?" he asked Israeli Radio, plaintively, on Tuesday.
Faced with what one Palestinian source called a "rigid" united front between Israel and the US administration, Arafat reluctantly agreed to security meetings between the two sides but adamantly refused to make any cease-fire call before flying off on a tour of Russia and Europe.
The first gesture appeased the Americans, although the meeting on Tuesday night produced "no progress whatsoever", according Palestinian West Bank police chief, Haj Ismail Jaber. The second infuriated them. This is almost certainly the view from the Oval Office.
Arafat's problem is that he is unlikely to get much more succour on his diplomatic travels. In Moscow, Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov told him that Russia would send a special envoy to the region and supported the Palestinians' demand that a freeze on settlements forms a "central part" of the Mitchell package. But he was also urged by President Vladimir Putin to "end those murders, killings and assassinations". Prior to meeting the Palestinian leader, Putin had had a long telephone conversation with Sharon.
Arafat will almost certainly get the same message in Europe, even if it is more sympathetically expressed. Yes to a freeze on settlement construction but only if the PA acts first to douse the flames in the occupied territories. But Arafat cannot lower the temperature without at least some guarantee of tangible political achievements.
Faced with such a forbidding diplomatic environment, some Palestinians in the PA are starting to whisper that perhaps the only exit left is a doomsday scenario. This is where the Intifada continues on a rising arc of violence to the point where Sharon's patience snaps, the government and US "restraint" ends and his army "does something crazy, like Qana or Sabra and Shatilla", in the words of one PA source.
Such a terminus may well pull the US out of Sharon's embrace and the Labour Party out of his ruling coalition, two conditions that are indispensable if his tenure as prime minister is going to be shorter rather than longer. But a doomsday costs lives -- the vast majority of them Palestinian.
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