The only solution for Middle East peace

By H.D.S. Greenway, 6/21/2002

EVEN BEFORE President Bush could lay out his vision for Middle East peace, snipers from both the Palestinian and the Israeli camps were taking potshots at it. Palestinian critics feared that a provisional Palestinian state without defined borders would perpetuate the Israeli occupation under a different name, while the Israelis feared that any state on the West Bank and Gaza without a true understanding about ending violence would simply lead to more violence.

They are both right to worry, but the status quo is even more worrying.

The idea of declaring a Palestinian state before all the details on final boundaries, refugees, and control of holy places has been worked out is an idea that has been around for some time, broached by such divergent sources as Egypt's Hosni Mubarak and Israel's Dan Meridor, a moderate Likud Party minister in Ariel Sharon's Cabinet.

Sharon's version of a Palestinian state, however, would mean little pockets of Palestinian control isolated within the grid of Israeli settlements and settlement roads - ''Bantustans,'' as the Palestinians call them, remembering the impotent and bogus independent states of apartheid South Africa.

Sharon's latest maneuver to take back Palestinian land every time there is a terrorist incident would further foreclose on Palestinian statehood.

For more than a year now, Sharon and the Islamic militants have had a similar goal: to destroy the Palestinian Authority and the Oslo accords. Even when Yasser Arafat's Islamic enemies attack Israel, Sharon holds Arafat responsible and attacks the secular Palestinian Authority and reduces its ability to respond to terror.

It is as if the president of the United States announced that there was too much crime in Chicago and that he would bomb a police station every day until the situation improved.

Thus we have the ludicrous situation in which the West pays for a Palestinian infrastructure and Israel keeps knocking it down, and not just to arrest terrorists. The destruction of all the Palestinian Authorities ministries, computer bases, educational television channels, and the like demonstrate the Sharon's government's overarching goal to strangle Palestinian nationhood in its cradle.

As for Arafat, the Palestinian people themselves are tired of his corruption and undemocratic ways, and there is little doubt but that his hands are far from clean when it comes to terrorism. But Sharon's vendetta and excesses against him have ironically boosted his status among his own people.

And today Arafat has nothing left with which to halt Islamic terror even if he wanted to. Sadly, the suicide bomber has become an accepted and honored method of resistance to Israeli occupation among a rising number of Palestinians, secular and religious.

As Secretary of State Colin Powell has often said, it is no good just asking for a cessation of violence. There must be political movement, carrots as well as sticks, if the cycle of violence is to be broken. The trouble has been that President Bush has often been outmaneuvered by the more experienced Israeli prime minister, and when they were eyeball to eyeball last spring over halting Israeli action on the West Bank, it was Bush who blinked, giving Sharon what amounts to a green light to do what he wants to the Palestinians.

The Israelis may have crushed the Palestinian Authority, but they have not achieved peace. And listen to the rhetoric: ''Prepare your coffins, dig your graves, because your dead will be in the hundreds,'' says Hamas.

''For every Jew who is buried as a result of an attack, we must make sure 1,000 Palestinians are killed,'' says Michael Kleiner, an elected member of the Israeli Parliament.

This is a cycle that will not be easy to break.

Unorthodox as it may be, a provisional Palestinian state might just be the incentive Palestinians need to turn away from violence. But if it is to work, the Palestinians need to have contiguous territory, an end to most of the Israeli settlements, a clear improvement of their lives, economically and physically, and a clear road map to unprovisional statehood.

Palestinians must be allowed to choose their own leaders without pre-conditions from Israel or the United States.

Arafat may not be our choice, but he is one of the few elected Arab leaders, and it must be remembered that Israel and the United States encouraged him to take extralegal and undemocratic actions in the days when he was arresting terrorists.

But if Israel is to give up Ariel Sharon's dream of expanding settlements and de facto occupation under a different name, Israel's needs must be considered as well. The current situation Israelis endure is intolerable. Most Israelis are willing to give up land for peace, but the peace cannot be turned off and on whenever Palestinians get restless.

In the end, only a two-state solution has any chance of ending more than a century of Arab-Jewish violence in the Middle East, and Bush is right to try.

H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe.