Trudy Rubin | Three failed strategies

Approaches of Sharon, Arafat and Bush hinder peace.
By Trudy Rubin

JERICHO, West Bank - Saeb Erekat is worried about his 14-year-old son Ali, because Ali's friends say his father is a traitor.

Erekat was long the chief Palestinian negotiator in peace talks with Israel. But the failure of peace talks, and the Israeli military strike into West Bank cities, have made anyone associated with the Oslo peace process suspect. "Ali used to be so proud of me," Erekat says morosely in his Jericho office, "but now he can't understand how I can invite Israelis and their wives to my home."

Such is the fate of those on both sides who were associated with Israeli-Palestinian negotiations: They are mocked because their promises of peace have turned to dust.

Indeed, the very idea of negotiations has become discredited. For 27 years there was painstaking progress in Arab-Israeli negotiations, from the 1974 Kissinger shuttles through the Taba talks in January 2000 that nearly produced an agreement on a formula for a Palestinian state.

But all that progress is rapidly unraveling.

The common wisdom - that Israelis and Palestinians will have to return to talks after enough blood is shed - is unconvincing. Both sides have diverged so sharply from that path that they may not be able to find their way back. Certainly they won't be able to do so without intense U.S. intervention.

If the negotiating track vanishes, there will be no security for Israel, no state for the Palestinians, no end to Mideast violence. Ten years from now people will ask how things could have gone so wrong. And the answer will lie with the strategies of three men: Yasir Arafat, Ariel Sharon and President Bush.

The mistakes of the Palestinian leader are well known. Arafat failed to take advantage of promising Israeli negotiating positions in 2000, and of Bill Clinton's eagerness to help. Instead, Arafat adopted a strategy of talk and fight, in hopes that the violence would provoke international intervention on the side of the Palestinians. Instead, the violence led to the election of the hawkish Sharon; a rash of Palestinian suicide bombings led inevitably to an Israeli invasion.

But Sharon's strategy endangers Israel's long-term security. His move into the West Bank was aimed not only at catching terrorists, but also at crushing all Palestinian national institutions. He's chosen a military strategy that offers Palestinians no political hope.

I have visited Nablus, Jenin and Ramallah and seen the staggering destruction of records, files, and premises of civilian ministries and even nongovernmental organizations. This was not simply a case of hard drives being taken for intelligence information: Computers were smashed, files strewn on the floor or burned, archives dumped, expensive aerial photographs for town planning burned, restored historic buildings damaged. The destruction was systematic.

Most telling was the room-by-room trashing of the headquarters of Jibril Rajoub, head of preventive security on the West Bank, following intensive shelling that left parts of the extensive compound gutted. The thuggish Rajoub was known for his close cooperation with Israeli intelligence and the CIA, and touted even by Israeli hawks as a potential post-Arafat leader.

If he was targeted, the message is clear: No national Palestinian leader, even those who cooperate with Israel, can be seen as a potential partner. Sharon's strategy appears to be to derail the Palestinian Authority and look for local urban leaders who might be more malleable.

Sources familiar with Sharon's thinking say he wants to convince "post-Arafat leaders" to accept a "long-term interim agreement" that would leave them with discontinuous chunks of West Bank land connected by bridges or tunnels.

Such a prospect, with no hope of future political negotiations, is a sure formula for continued terrorism. With Arafat or without Arafat, the lack of a political horizon will ensure a queue of future suicide bombers.

Given this prospect, the only hope for resurrecting the concept of Mideast negotiations lies with George W. Bush.

But the administration can't seem to come up with a coherent Mideast strategy. The President hasn't yet decided whether to put forward a "Bush Plan" that would spell out how to get to two states roughly along 1967 lines.

For such a plan to have the remotest chance, Bush would have to exert immense pressure on a resistant Sharon and an elusive Arafat.

All signs so far are that Bush has no stomach for the idea, which is indeed risky. But without strong U.S. intervention the concept of Mideast peace talks will soon be a memory. The choice is George W.'s: peace track or war track?