Sharon's rejection / After Likud's vote, a need to patch up the road map

Wednesday, May 05, 2004

American Middle East policy is spinning out of control.

The Iraq game plan, which involves turning authority over to so-far-unknown parties by June 30, American citizens being forced out of Saudi Arabia by growing hostility and danger and now a sequence of events in the Israeli-Palestinian issue that have turned out wrong add up to policy mismanagement at best and catastrophe at worst in a key region.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon devised a plan under which Israel was to withdraw its settlements from the Gaza Strip while retaining virtually all of them in the West Bank. This plan cut counter to the so-called road map to peace, devised carefully last year by the United States, the European Union, the United Nations and Russia. The Sharon plan also enraged the Arabs and the Palestinians, the necessary partners in negotiations leading to a sustainable agreement and peace.

Nonetheless, President George Bush endorsed Mr. Sharon's plan heartily during a visit by the Israeli prime minister to the White House. Then, things got worse. Mr. Sharon submitted his Gaza withdrawal plan to a referendum of members of his Likud party for approval. They rejected it emphatically, voting 60 percent against.

Mr. Sharon is thus left with two alternatives, aside from simply resigning. First, he can proceed with implementation of his plan anyway. At that point his coalition government probably fragments, forcing elections. Or he can shave the plan down, withdrawing only some of the 21 Gaza settlements, with a population of some 9,000 Israelis, in an attempt to placate his Likud opponents.

At that point the Palestinians would be left with only some of even the Gaza Strip, one of the more miserable pieces of real estate on Earth, and less of the West Bank.

That basically is to say goodbye to the road map, which envisaged a negotiated division of the disputed territory in the West Bank and Gaza into two secure, recognized states, Israel and Palestine.

Given that state of play, the members of the quartet are meeting in New York to try to see if anything that could be described as a credible peace process -- a taped-together road map, or something -- can be salvaged from the ruins of American and international policy toward this difficult, dangerous issue.

In the meantime, Palestinians kill Israelis, and Israelis kill Palestinians, with five Israelis and four Palestinians dead in Gaza alone Sunday, if anyone needed to be reminded why this matter is so pressing.