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Election May Launch Dangerous Phase in Israeli-Palestinian Relations

Posted on: Sunday, 26 March 2006, 21:00 CST

LONDON _ Israeli-Palestinian relations could enter a dangerous new phase Tuesday as Israelis appear certain to elect a new leadership determined to close West Bank settlements but also grab land and redraw the country's borders behind a massive security barrier.

Election analysts say the expected victory of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's upstart party, Kadima, will give his successor a mandate to tell Palestinian leaders: Either negotiate peace now, or Israel will impose its own terms on the estimated 3.5 million Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Kadima's terms include the dismantling of small Jewish settlements in the West Bank similar to last summer's total Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. But its centrist leader and acting prime minister, Ehud Olmert, also plans to withdraw Israelis behind a long barrier running the length of the West Bank. All settlements and large chunks of Palestinian land behind the barrier would, by default, become part of Israel.

That prospect has outraged Palestinians whose newly elected government, run by the militant Islamist group Hamas, has rejected negotiations with Israel. Given the lack of a Palestinian negotiating partner, a land grab by Israel of Palestinian territory behind the barrier is a virtual certainty, Israeli political analysts said.

Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas leader and Palestinian prime minister-designate, has offered to negotiate if Israel agrees to withdraw to the borders that existed before the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. Israel has long refused any such proposal because it would entail dismantling several heavily populated settlements and withdrawing from Arab east Jerusalem, which Israel captured in the war and claims as part of its capital.

"Most Israelis believe that Israel has to give up on most of the territory in the West Bank," said Eytan Gilboa, a political scientist and specialist in public opinion polling at Bar Ilan University in Tel Aviv.

Polls suggest the public is signaling to Israel's next leader, "If you have a partner to negotiate peace with, that's OK. If you don't, then you take unilateral action of the kind that was taken in Gaza," Gilboa said.

The elections also are forecast to give Olmert a far clearer mandate to close settlements than Sharon had when he withdrew from Gaza over the loud protests of settlers and hundreds of thousands of their supporters.

"If Kadima wins and Olmert forms the next government, nobody will be able to say he doesn't have authority to act. Nobody will be able to demand a referendum before the big pullout and before moving tens of thousands of settlers from the hills to the settlement blocs and Israel," wrote Yossi Verder, a columnist for the Israeli daily Haaretz.

Palestinians contend, however, that Olmert's plan for the West Bank is vastly different from the Gaza pullout, where all troops and Israeli civilians withdrew, giving the Palestinians their own internationally monitored border with Egypt as well as a contiguous coastline.

The West Bank after such a pullout would more closely resemble a fenced enclave from which Palestinians could not leave without Israeli approval.

Olmert says he plans to retain Israeli control over West Bank border crossings with Jordan. The rest of the West Bank is now witnessing the construction of a massive barrier that alternates between a wire fence and a two-story, concrete wall.

Sharon ordered the barrier built long before the stroke in January that left him in a coma. Election analysts say his security plan, which Olmert vows to continue if elected, has dramatically reduced Israeli fears of attack by Palestinian guerrillas.

As a result, "security is not as critical as it used to be" in influencing voters' election choices, Gilboa said.

Israelis now are behaving more like the voters in Western countries, focusing more on the economy, employment and political corruption, said David Horovitz, editor of the English-language daily Jerusalem Post. Still, they are not euphoric about the future, no matter how secure the barrier makes them feel.

"A certain mood of gloom and despondency has settled on Israel," Horovitz said. "The fact that Hamas won its election may be one factor. There's also a certain degree of disillusionment with Israeli politicians because of an endless series of corruption allegations and scandals. . . . There's a very wide sense of `to hell with the lot of them.'"

Asher Arian, a University of Haifa political scientist, suggested that the impasse with the Palestinians is leaving Israelis disappointed but feeling that they must act in their own self-interest.

"It's true, if you talk to military experts, that Israel's military situation has never been better," he said. "But yet, there is a sense of endemic despair, overall, about something over the horizon that is not going to be good. It might be Iran. It might be Hamas."

Polls indicate that up to 20 percent of the electorate is still undecided. Voter turnout, normally as high as 80 percent in national elections, is expected to be as low as 60 percent on Tuesday. Election analysts said low turnout and a last-minute swing of undecided voters toward the right could drastically reduce Kadima's margin.

The analysts also warned that a Palestinian attack on the eve of the election could send voters scrambling to the conservative Likud bloc, whose leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, has promised to freeze any pullout plans and take a hard military line against Hamas.

Olmert's plan also has raised fears that back-to-back pullouts from Gaza and the West Bank could reinforce Hamas' claim that Israel is retreating under military attack. The militant Shiite Muslim militia, Hezbollah, made similar claims after Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon in 2000.

"There's a portion of the Israeli electorate that is mortified, horrified, despairing over the fact of Israel's departure from Gaza and believes that it's the beginning of the end of Israel," Horovitz said. "But much of the country nonetheless is not sorry that Israel left Gaza and does not regard the departure from Gaza as a mistake," he said, regardless of the message it might have sent to Hamas.

The overriding message from the election campaign, Horovitz said, is that "much of the country would be delighted if Israel were able to pull back behind the security barrier . . . and leave the Palestinians to stew in their Hamas juices."

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Source: The Dallas Morning News

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