Kim Bullimore
After being elected president of the Palestinian Authority (PA) with 62% of the popular vote on January 9, Mahmoud Abbas was due to be sworn in on January 15. However, on January 14, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon announced that his government would freeze all contact with Abbas as a result of an attack carried out by Palestinian militants at Karni Crossing in the northern Gaza Strip.
According to Israeli government spokesperson Assaf Shariv, Israel had informed the US, the European Union (EU) and Britain, as well as the Palestinians, that it would not make any contact with Abbas "until he makes a real effort to stop the terror". The fact that Abbas (who is also known as Abu Mazen) had not taken office and had only been the Palestinian president-elect for less then three days when the attack happened, made no difference to the Sharon government. It was only under pressure from its key ally, the US, that Israel agreed to lift the ban a week later.
Since being elected, Abbas has had to walk a tightrope — on the one hand, attempting to prove to the Palestinian electorate that he will not give away too much of his people's rights to Israel and its US backer, while at the same time attempting to capitalise on the pressure being placed by the US and EU on Israel to resume "peace" negotiations with the PA.
Abbas' strategy appears to be to try to exploit this pressure to implement his electoral platform of seeking "dialogue" with the Palestinian armed resistance to secure a ceasefire. Within two weeks of his inauguration, Abbas announced that he had succeeded in negotiating a hudna (ceasefire) from the Palestinian guerrilla organisations.
Hamas, the Al Asqa Brigades and Islamic Jihad agreed to the ceasefire on the condition that Abbas would allow them to play a stronger role in the administration of the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), that Israel would cease its targeted assassinations of leading members of these organisations and that Abbas would not retreat from the long-standing Palestinian demand for an independent state on the Palestinian territories seized by Israel in June 1967, with East Jerusalem as its capital, and Israeli acceptance of the right of return for Palestinian refugees driven out of Palestine by the Zionist state.
At the recent municipal elections in the Gaza Strip, Hamas won 77 out of the total of 118 seats on the municipal councils and control of seven out of 10 municipal councils. Hamas now more then ever poses a political challenge to the leadership that Abbas's Fatah organisation has held over the Palestinian movement.
While many Palestinian voters are cautiously willing to give Abbas a chance to resume negotiations with Israel, they are unwilling to tolerate any attempt by the PA to militarily crush the Palestinian armed resistance groups, as both Israel and the US have previously demanded. This is because the Palestinian people, having experienced Israel's past record of duplicity, recognise that it may be necessary to resume the armed resistance.
For Sharon, however, Abbas's recent success in getting the guerrilla organisations to agree to a ceasefire is the worst possible outcome. After years of playing the victim and trumpeting that they have "no Palestinian partner for peace", the Israeli rulers have been forced, just for a little while, to agree to resume negotiations with the "terrorist" Palestinian leadership.
Sharon's strategy has been to attempt to avoid this by placing impossible demands and pre-conditions for negotiation on the PA. However, with the death of Yasser Arafat, Sharon no longer has the excuse he previously relied on to pursue this strategy and has been forced to acquiesce to the pressure of a US government desperate to be seen to be "even handed" in its Middle Eastern policy.
In addition, Sharon has been forced to put on hold his government's usual tactic of demonising the Palestinian leadership. In the hope that Abbas will make a wrong move and provide Israel with a pretext to refuse negotiations, Sharon must make sure he is not seen to be actively undermining Abbas.
However, Sharon's foreign minister, Silvan Shalom, let the Israeli facade slip when speaking on Israeli Army radio on January 27. Shalom said that "a ceasefire as such was not a goal [of the Israeli government]", adding that "a ceasefire is a ticking bomb which will blow up in our faces" and "whoever thinks a halt [in the fighting] is the right thing is mistaken".
Despite this and Israel's past record of failure to respect and adhere to promises and conditions negotiated under previous cease-fires and peace negotiations (such as the 1993 Oslo Accords), the corporate media over the past fortnight has fallen over itself to promote the "goodwill" gestures of the Israeli government — most of which have yet to actually materialise.
While trumpeting every "proposal" and "in principle agreement" emanating from Sharon's press office, the corporate media has failed to point out that Israel continues to carry out aggressive military operations in both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
These operations have resulted in 22 Palestinians being killed, 47 being wounded and at least 200 being detained, as well as numerous Palestinian villages being put under "lock down" and curfews, further restricting the right of their inhabitants to freedom of movement. In addition, at least a dozen international peace activists have also been arrested. Some of them are now fighting deportation for taking part in non-violent protests.
During this same period, Israel has continued to build its illegal apartheid wall and to confiscate Palestinian land. According to the January 30 Haaretz daily, the Israeli cabinet would approve the following week — before any summit between Abbas and Sharon even took place — the re-routing of the apartheid wall resulting in the de facto annexation to Israel of land between the Palestinian cities of Bethlehem and Hebron, on which 10 illegal Israeli colonial settlements have been built. The new route would also annex to the Israeli side of the illegal wall four Palestinian villages with at least 18,000 residents, as well as many properties belonging to Palestinians from Bethlehem.
Very little has been reported by the US and other Western corporate media about the fact that the day after Abbas' election Israeli occupation forces revealed that they were planning to demolish an additional 3000 homes in the Rafah refugee camp; or that Israel was planning to demolish a Palestinian neighbourhood in Jerusalem leaving 74 families homeless in order to create a 500-metre barrier to "protect" the illegal apartheid wall.
While the corporate media has given extensive reporting about the deployment of Palestinian police on January 20 into the Gaza Strip to stop Palestinian attacks on illegal Israeli settlements, very little has been reported about the continuing attacks by the illegal settlers on the Palestinian police and civilians and the Israeli government's unwillingness to stop these attacks. On the same day, Israeli settlers from the illegal colony of Gush Katif attacked the Palestinian police and demanded that they be withdrawn.
[Kim Bullimore is a member of the Socialist Alliance. She has recently spent three months working with the international human rights organisation, the International Women's Peace Service, in the West Bank].
From Green Left Weekly, February 9, 2005.
Visit the Green Left Weekly home page.