Sharon the hawk turns peacemaker

It is now conventional wisdom that the death of Yasser Arafat and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq have transformed the prospects for peace in the Middle East. The new President of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, seems willing to enter into genuine negotiations with Israel, and is doing his somewhat inadequate best to clamp down on terrorist organisations. Any analysis not poisoned by the bile of John Pilger and Robert Fisk will show that the fall of Saddam and this year’s successful democratic elections in Iraq have strengthened the forces of democratic reform throughout the region.

But there is another player in the Middle East who seldom gets much credit for the role he is playing, and that is Ariel Sharon. The Israeli Prime Minister gets a consistently bad press outside Israel, where he is usually depicted by some western media as a lumbering “hawk,” as the champion of Israeli colonisation of the Palestinian territories, and as the author of the security fence separating Israel from the West Bank.

Sharon won a crushing victory in the 2003 Israeli elections on a policy of “no concessions” to the Palestinians. But his pragmatic streak now dominates the National Unity government, and he has become the champion of withdrawal from at least some of the territories and of a negotiated settlement leading to the creation of a viable Palestinian state taking in most of the West Bank and all of Gaza. In doing this the Israeli Prime Minister has divided his own government, split his own Likud party, and been forced to rely on the support of the opposition Labour Party to stay in office.

Sharon didn’t have to do these things. The Israeli public was firmly united behind his policy of refusing to negotiate with the Palestinians while the campaign of terrorist suicide bombings was going on, and he had the crucial support of the Bush Administration in Washington for this stand. International sympathy for the Palestinians had declined sharply since Arafat’s rejection of the generous Clinton-Barak offer at Camp David in 2000, which would have given the Palestinians a contiguous state in 97% of the disputed territories.

Sharon became convinced during the four years of Palestinian suicide bombings that only unilateral action, such as building the fence to protect Israel’s population and withdrawing from Gaza and most of the West Bank, thus creating a new de facto border, could bring Israel peace. These policies are intended to create new “facts on the ground” that will make a sustainable and politically acceptable peace possible. The new situation following Arafat’s death meant that this could be to some extent co-ordinated with a more realistic Palestinian leader in Mahmoud Abbas, but Sharon’s intention is to carry them through with or without the Palestinians.

Backed by the Bush Administration, Sharon has pursued a two-track strategy. One track has been the construction of the security fence, erected in the face of sustained criticism from Europe and the UN. The fence has led to an almost total cessation of successful suicide bombings against Israeli civilians, which were the greatest obstacle to the resumption of the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians.

The second track of Sharon’s policy is to get out of Gaza and from the less defensible (in a military sense) Israeli settlements in the Northern Samaria region of the West Bank. These withdrawals will be politically very painful for Sharon and for Israelis generally. A minority of settlers may resist relocation, requiring the use of force – a process which Israelis would find very traumatic, although it has been done before to remove settlers from the Sinai following its return to Egypt.

That is why the United States has, according to Martin Indyk, the Australian-born former US Ambassador to Israel, speaking on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Lateline, given assurances about settlements along the “green line” (the pre-1967 border) being incorporated into Israel in a final settlement. This, by the way, was proposed by President Clinton – and that particular idea was accepted by the Palestinian Authority.

The trade-off for these concessions will be permanent and defensible borders for Israel, recognition of Israel by all the Arab states, and the abandonment by the Palestinians of the “right of return” for all the descendents of the Palestinians who left what is now Israel in 1948. Those Palestinians will have to resettled, either in the new Palestinian state (where most of them live now anyway), or in ethnically similar and sympathetic states like Syria and Jordan.

The key question to be resolved is the location of those final borders. In 2000 Ehud Barak offered Arafat more than 95% of the West Bank. Arafat’s foolishness in rejecting that offer will become clear in any final peace settlement, because it will not be repeated by any Israeli government – certainly not by Sharon. The main block of Israeli settlements, extending about 10km north, south and east of Jerusalem, and some other small areas along the pre-1967 “green line,” will eventually be incorporated into Israel. More than 80% of the Israeli settlers in the West Bank live on less than 10% of its territory, and mostly in areas bordering the “green line,” so these areas can be incorporated into Israel without affecting the geographic or demographic viability of a Palestinian state.

As Ehud Barak said in The Guardian recently, the Palestinians have already agreed that these areas should be retained by Israel. “Approval of an old construction plan in Maale Adumim, adjacent to Jerusalem, should not be perceived as a danger to the peace process… because the Palestinians have already agreed this major bloc will stay under Israel’s authority – if not at Camp David, in many other exchanges of ideas.”

This will still leave more than three quarters of the West Bank, plus the whole of Gaza, to constitute a Palestinian state. It will be smaller than the state the Palestinians were offered in 2000, and much smaller than the one they were offered by the United Nations Partition Plan of 1947. This will be the legacy of nearly sixty years of Arab rejectionism and reliance on force to achieve a Palestinian state. That strategy comprehensively failed, and it robbed the Palestinians of much that they could have got long ago by peaceful means. The final irony is that they will have Ariel Sharon to thank for bringing a Palestinian state to its long delayed birth.

Michael Danby is the Federal Member for Melbourne Ports and Secretary of the Australia-Israel Parliamentary Friendship Group.