Next Palestinian civil war?
By Martin Walker,
UPI Chief International Correspondent
WASHINGTON (UPI) The fifth suicide bombing attack against Israel in 48 hours, which killed at least three shoppers in the northern town of Afula Monday, seems to have been aimed at three separate targets.
The first was to continue the campaign to inflict pain and grief on Israeli civilians. The second appears to have been to destroy President Bush's battered "road map to peace." The third target appears to have been the new Palestinian government of Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas, in what is shaping up to be a Palestinian civil war.
The first of the latest phase of suicide
attacks on Israeli targets was timed to coincide with Mahmoud
Abbas's first meeting Saturday with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel
Sharon. The meeting was intended to discuss the "road map,"
which Abbas had accepted and Sharon was about to fly to
Washington to discuss his own reservations on the "road map"
with Bush.
Sharon, understandably, postponed his trip as Israel went into
mourning again for the seven dead of Saturday's bombing. And since
the first requirement of the "road map" is to end the
terrorist attacks on Israel, this latest formula to revive the
Middle East peace process is threatened with being killed off
before it is properly started.
"These attacks will continue in all the territories of 1948 and 1967, and we will not stop attacking the Zionist Jewish people as long as any of them remain in our land," the armed wing of the militant group Hamas said in a statement Monday.
The date 1948 refers to the year of Israel's birth, and its survival against the attacks of a series of Arab armies determined to strangle the infant Jewish state in its cradle. They failed. The date 1967 refers to the Six-Day War of that year, when Israel defeated the Egyptian, Syrian and Jordanian armies, and occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the lands now known as "the occupied territories," that Israel was to hand over progressively to Palestinian Authority rule under the Oslo Peace Process of the 1990s.
The problem is that Hamas and Islamic Jihad are not just against the "road map." They are, as Monday's statement made clear, against Israel's very existence. And if the Palestinian Authority's new prime minister is prepared to go along with the "road map" and accept Israel, then Hamas and Islamic Jihad are prepared to battle him too.
Henry Siegman, a Middle East specialist at the Council on Foreign relations in New York, sees a Palestinian civil war as almost inevitable. If Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority administration are to achieve a lasting peace with Israel, they will have to control Hamas and Islamic Jihad even though Israeli incursions into Palestinian Authority-administered territories over the last three years have just about demolished the Palestinian Authority's own security forces, the only tool available to enforce the its will.
"Fratricidal war within the Palestinian community probably cannot be avoided," says Siegman. "The success in the war on terror will depend on the willingness of the new Palestinian administration to engage even in this kind of war for the greater good of ultimately realizing the Palestinian national goal."
It is the context of this rivalry between moderate and extreme Palestinian groups that helps explain the bizarre position of the Palestinian Authority chairman, and traditional leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Yasser Arafat. One of the one hand, he endorsed Abbas as the Palestinian Authority's prime minister. On the other hand, in an attempt to keep his connections open to Hamas and Islamic Jihad, Arafat has been working to undermine Abbas.
The Palestinian media has been under pressure from Arafat loyalists to play down their coverage of Abbas. The paramilitary groups of Arafat's Fatah organization, the al-Aqsa Martyrs and Tanzin, have made it clear that they reject both the "road map" and Abbas' hopes for a truce period with the Israelis.
Accompanying Abbas to the talks Saturday with Israel's prime minister, Palestinian Security Minister Mohamed Dahlan told Sharon that he simply did not have the manpower or the firepower to control the mobs that Hamas and Fatah could put onto the streets of Gaza and the West Bank. If they wanted to bring down the Abbas government, Dahlan said, his own forces were simply too weak to stop them.
The "road map," agreed as the way ahead by the United States, Russia, the United Nations and the European Union, calls for "a permanent two-state solution ... an independent, democratic and viable Palestinian state living side by side in peace and security with Israel."
But the key provision, as the suicide bombings go on and the Palestinian Authority is impotent to stop them, is that the Palestinians are required to "undertake visible efforts on the ground to arrest, disrupt, and restrain individuals and groups conducting or planning violent attacks on Israelis anywhere."
That is no longer a commitment that the Palestinian Authority can deliver. It is not a commitment that Hamas and Islamic Jihad would ever dream of making. It is a commitment that is a prerequisite for Israeli participation in the "road map."
Something, at this point has to give. Either the "road map" is torn up and forgotten. Or the Israelis allow Abbas's Palestinian Authority Security Forces to re-arm and rebuild to the point where they could try to crush Hamas, which means a Palestinian civil war. Or Israel tries to crush Hamas and Islamic Jihad directly. This means another ruthless re-occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. This in turn means outraged demonstrations in Europe and across the Arab world, and in the long run probably more recruits for Hamas which will eventually be strong enough to challenge the Palestinian Authority for the leadership of the Palestinian people. One way or another, the tragedy of a Palestinian civil war is coming.