Sharon steals spotlight as Palestinian state shelved until further notice
Israeli prime minister continues to set political agenda

By Agence France Presse (AFP)

Thursday, December 29, 2005

Sharon steals spotlight as Palestinian state shelved until further notice

JERUSALEM: It was meant to be the year when the Palestinians realized their dream of statehood, but the spotlight was stolen in 2005 by an ex-general who cut his teeth fighting for Israel's independence.

Whether pulling Jewish settlers out of the Gaza Strip, forging a new coalition, quitting his Likud party or suffering a stroke, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon dominated the year's headlines from January to December.

In so doing, he won the enmity of his former right-wing allies, admiration from the international community and left the Palestinians largely bewildered.

The political whirlwind threw Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas into a spin over a year that saw him elected president in January but battling to prevent his own Fatah movement from imploding come December.

Two general elections early next year will determine how much control both men will be able to continue exercising over events.

Sharon signaled his intention to uproot the 8,000 Jews living in 21 settlements in Gaza as long ago as February 2004, giving his opponents ample time to mobilize resistance.

His arch domestic rival Benjamin Netanyahu, who would later succeed him as head of Likud, quit the Cabinet after the final decision was approved on August 7. Eleven days later, thousands of police([search]) and soldiers stormed the largest settlement of Neve Dekalim.

The opponents of the so-called disengagement plan had adopted "Jews don't expel Jews" as their mantra. They could not be more wrong.

Over the following five days - rather less than the scheduled three weeks - the security services won widespread admiration for keeping their cool while dragging settlers and supporters kicking and screaming out of the territory Israel began occupying in 1967.

The last settler was evicted from the settlement of Netzarim, a place Sharon declared in 2002 was as integral a part of Israel as Tel Aviv.

After troops finished demolishing settlers' homes and army bases, the Palestinian Authority assumed the poisoned chalice of responsibility for one of the world's most overcrowded and impoverished strips of land.

Under the internationally-backed "road map" peace plan, 2005 should have been the year when the Palestinians were awarded an independent state incorporating Gaza and the West Bank.

But Sharon decided to pull out unilaterally from Gaza after deciding that Palestinian patriarch Yasser Arafat could not be a partner for peace.

Sharon and Abbas, who was elected the late Arafat's successor as Palestinian president on January 9, initially tried to turn over a new leaf in relations.

A February summit, hosted by Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak, ended with both men drawing a line under five years of hostilities.

A month later, Cairo underlined its emerging role in the peace process by hosting talks where the Palestinian factions called an informal truce.

The cool-down largely held, but the coastal city of Netanya was twice the target of Islamic Jihad suicide bombers.

Mutual recriminations over continuing violence, albeit at a lower level than at any other stage of the conflict, ensured that a second summit in June was a failure. The two men have not met since.

But Abbas was a two-time guest at the White House, where he was told not to expect statehood before the end of George W. Bush([search])'s term in 2009.

He did, however, persuade the U.S. president not to back Israel's call for a ban on Islamist movement Hamas running in its first legislative polls, postponed until January 25.

Hamas's strong showing in local elections, spiraling lawlessness in the Palestinian territories and Fatah's failure to even agree on parliamentary candidates threatened the ruling party's hold on power like never before.

Sharon responded to rebellions in his party, largely sparked by anger over leaving Gaza, by ditching Likud and forming a faction called Kadima.

Seven Likud ministers jumped ship with him. The man who had been regarded as Israel's arch hawk also managed to attract former Nobel laureate Shimon Peres, who flounced out of the center-left Labor party after being dethroned by trade unionist Amir Peretz.

The "big bang" was completed as Netanyahu took over a right-wing Likud rump.

Sharon's minor stroke in December has so far failed to dent Kadima's ascendancy in opinion polls but underlined its dependency on the wellbeing of an overweight 77-year-old. - AFP

 http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=10&categ_id=2&article_id=21090

US warns Israel of escalation
Martin Chulov, Middle East correspondent
December 30, 2005

THE US has warned Israel it risks a serious escalation in a continuing artillery showdown with Palestinian militants by establishing a no-go zone in the northern Gaza Strip.

The buffer zone came into effect yesterday after a week of rocket barrages fired towards southern Israel from sections of Gaza that were handed back to the Palestinians after the Israeli military pullout in August.

Israeli tanks and artillery batteries fired at least 30 shells into Gaza yesterday in the biggest military operation it has mounted since the withdrawal.

Operation Blue Skies was targeting militant groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad, who routinely fire improvised rockets, known as Qassams.

Before the barrage, leaflets were dropped to Palestinian civilians warning them to leave the area and not to return until further notice.






"For your own safety, you are warned not to enter the areas designated on the attached map starting December 28, 6pm, until further notice," read the leaflet. "Whoever ignores this warning is putting his life in real danger."

The Israeli Defence Force claimed to have shelled six launching sites and a bridge yesterday, with no injuries reported.

Both militant groups have been working to improve the range and accuracy of their rockets, which are made in vehicle workshops and equipped with primitive guidance systems.

They claim to have recently improved the propulsion of the Qassams from 6km to 9km, which would bring Israeli border towns into range.

A third group, the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, once formally aligned with former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's Fatah political movement, claimed recently to have developed an improvised rocket with a 25km range. However, the claim has been dismissed by Israel.

Israel hopes the creation of the buffer zone will push launchsites back far enough to prevent them from being able to target Israeli towns, such as the light industrial area of Ashkelon, which has been hit by more than 10 rockets in the past three months.

The US has also condemned the Palestinian Authority for failing to rein in the militants or stopping them setting up missile launchsites inside Gaza.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas won a decisive electoral mandate when he took over in November last year after Arafat's death, but has been unable to transform it into assertive authority.

The US and Israel believe the PA is preoccupied with the lead-up to Palestinian elections scheduled for January 25, and doesn't want to risk cracking down on militant groups at a time when their electoral support may be needed.

However, the US and several of Israel's Arab neighbours fear the buffer zone amounts to a partial reoccupation of Gaza, because it denies Palestinian citizens freedom of movement through areas their Government now commands after 38 years of Israeli military occupation.

"Israel has left the Gaza Strip and has no right to come back," Mr Abbas said from Gaza yesterday. "They should not make any pretext."

In further violence, an Israeli soldier was killed last night when a Palestinian suicide bomber blew himself up near a West Bank checkpoint, Israeli medical and security sources said.

Two other Palestinians were also killed by the blast, which came after the bomber was stopped at a checkpoint near the northern town of Tulkarem.

 http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,17689094%5e2703,00.html

This is like Hitler telling Mussolini to go easy on the Jews. Israel surrounded Gaza with artillery under an operation called "First Rain". What was about to happen was obvious, and predicted long ago.

Sharon Is Terrorist Number 2

altGeorge W. Bush may claim that Ariel Sharon is a “man of peace,” but his track record suggests a different title. Over a 50-year military and political career, Sharon has been responsible for incalculable civilian trauma. Specific examples include the 1953 massacre in the West Bank village of Qibya and the 1982 slaughter in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, but he is also culpable of uprooting tens of thousands of Palestinians through settlement expansion carried out by his government.

American foreign policy has habitually displayed double standards towards the Middle East: one standard towards Israel and one towards the Arabs. To give just one example, the US effected regime change in Baghdad in three weeks but has failed to dismantle a single Jewish settlement in the occupied territories in 38 years.

Breakthrough Idea: Divestment

A growing number of world citizens are pushing for economic divestment from Israel to stem Palestinian suffering. The World Council of Churches has urged its members to give “serious consideration” to the idea, following the US Presbyterian Church’s moves in that direction. More than 40 university campuses across the US have active divestment campaigns, the first of which began at the University of California at Berkeley in 2000. Even some Israelis are promoting economic sanctions as a means of nonviolent protest. In January 2005, the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions became the first Israeli peace group to endorse such measures, telling its compatriots “You can’t have it both ways. You can’t complain about violence on the part of the Palestinians and yet reject effective non-violent measures against the Occupation that support their right to self-determination, such as economic sanctions.” Such tactics were essential to the success of the anti-Apartheid movement in South Africa. And they can be just as effective this time around.

The two main items on America’s current agenda for the region are democracy for the Arabs and a settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. America, however, insists on democracy only for its Arab opponents, not for its friends. As for the peace process, it is essentially a mechanism by which Israel and America try to impose a solution on the Palestinians. American hypocrisy is nothing new. But with Condoleezza Rice it has gone beyond chutzpah.

With Ariel Sharon, by contrast, what you see is what you get. He has always been in the destruction business, not the construction business. As minister of defense in 1982, Sharon preferred to destroy the settlement town of Yamit in Sinai rather than hand it to Egypt as a reward for signing a peace treaty with Israel. George Bush once described his friend Sharon as “a man of peace.” In truth, Sharon is a brutal thug and land-grabber.

Sharon is also the unilateralist par excellence. The road map issued by the quartet (US, UN, EU and Russia) in the aftermath of the Iraq([search]) war envisaged three stages leading to the establishment of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel by the end of 2005. Sharon wrecked the road map, notably by continuing to expand Jewish settlements on the West Bank and building an illegal wall that cuts deep into Palestinian territory.

He presented his plan for disengagement from Gaza as a contribution to the road map; in fact it is almost the exact opposite. The road map calls for negotiations between the two sides, leading to a two-state solution. Sharon refuses to negotiate and acts to redraw unilaterally the borders of Greater Israel. He told right-wing supporters: “My plan is difficult for the Palestinians, a fatal blow. There’s no Palestinian state in a unilateral move.” The real purpose of the move is to derail the road map and kill the comatose peace process. For Sharon, withdrawal from Gaza is the prelude not to a permanent settlement but to the annexation of substantial sections of the West Bank.

Sharon decided to cut his losses in Gaza when he realized that the cost of occupation is not sustainable. Gaza was home to 8,000 Israeli settlers and 1.3 million Palestinians. The settlers controlled 25 percent of the territory, 40 percent of the arable land and most of the water. It was a hopeless colonial enterprise, accompanied by one of the most prolonged and brutal military occupations of modern times.

Avi Shlaim is a professor at St. Anthony’s College, Oxford, and author of The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World. A longer version of this article first appeared in The Guardian.

 http://adbusters.org/the_magazine/63/Sharon_Is_Terrorist_Number_2.html