Sharon Playing With Ceasefire

Walid Choucair     Al-Hayat     2003/07/25

Between U.S. President George Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who is best at diverting the attention of the public and the international and regional forces?

There is no doubt that the officials in the U.S. administration, the Pentagon and the White House are cleverly exploiting the death of Udai and Qusai Hussein to turn the attention away from the mounting domestic scandal regarding the false accusations and exaggerations that Iraq was seeking a nuclear weapons capability, as well as the Democrats' attacks on Bush's policy in Iraq and the increasing calls for a serious cooperation with the UN. With the killing of Udai and Qusai, the U.S. can re-focus the attention on the atrocities the former Iraqi regime, thus absorbing the negative repercussions of the situation reached by the U.S. and the UK in Iraq.

But Sharon could be forced to be more cunning than Bush. Part of his maneuvers aim at benefiting from the American impasse in Iraq, so he can eschew the commitments he is supposed to fulfill towards his friend Bush. Sharon is also trying to divert the attention away from the internal scandal having to do with financial allegations about his electoral campaign for the leadership of Likud. He is also trying to cover for all his efforts to obstruct moving towards the political part of the Roadmap. To that end, he is resorting to all means available, and in this respect, he fares much better than Bush in the latter's attempt to divert attention away from his internal and foreign difficulties.

Sharon is sending contradictory messages; before the visit of Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas to Washington, he talks about painful concessions the Israelis have to make for the sake of peace, and then he encourages Jewish radicals to visit Al Aqsa Mosque, under the protection of the Israeli police. This provocation is reminiscent to the one Sharon made in 2000, which triggered the Intifada. Then the Israeli government accepts to release 300 Palestinian detainees, who do not include any Hamas or Islamic Jihad activists, and then admits to the existence of 5,000 prisoners, while the Palestinian Authority maintains that there are 8,000 detainees. Sharon is aware that the issue of detainees is a time bomb for the truce, because it concerns thousands of Palestinian families who will not accept that their children remain in prisons, while there are talks about confidence-building measures stipulated in the Roadmap. 

Sharon is playing with the cease-fire agreement, after he had the reputation of a man who likes to play with fire. He realizes that the threat of calm, through insisting on his objection to fulfill his commitments, is a problem for Bush, who doesn't need any additional problems as he tries to overcome his troubles in Iraq. The Israeli Prime Minister is also putting the Palestinians before the challenge of maintaining the cease-fire, despite the fact that they are not gaining anything in return at the political level - maybe to push them to violate the agreement thus allowing him to renew his military campaign against them, while the Americans are embroiled in Iraq.   

Sharon's cleverness drove one Israeli observer to write: things are quiet for now; we have a truce and no terrorism, so why should we speed up the negotiations?