Sharon's Nightmare

By Mustafa Barghouthi

Ariel Sharon's Likud Party rejected his Gaza disengagement plan last week, but the Israeli prime minister is unlikely to let this temporary setback delay him. The Likud vote will enforce modifications to the plan, but ever since he returned, starry eyed, from Washington, the prime minister has been fixated on disengagement as the first step towards his final victory.

President George W. Bush's declaration of support for Sharon's disengagement plan, with a stroke swept aside decades of American diplomacy, all international laws forbidding the acquisition of land by conquest, and the numerous UN resolutions regarding the rights of Palestinian refugees and the illegal status of Israel's settlements in the West Bank.

As the international community, and particularly the Arab world, gasped in horror at the president's unprecedented, seismic shift in policy, Sharon triumphed at the realisation of a lifelong ambition. The fatal blow he has been seeking to deal the fragile peace process was at last struck. The right of return was revoked, the status of the West Bank's largest settlements secured. Construction of his wall could continue expropriating Palestinian land and destroying the physical possibility of a Palestinian state, while the American president was assured it remained a merely temporary measure. Troops could be redeployed from Gaza while maintaining total control of the Strip's air, land, and sea access, its water, imports and electricity. In short, the final enslavement of the Palestinian people could begin, and all with the American seal of approval.

Yet, in years to come, Sharon may find that this moment of imagined triumph in fact marked the day his worst nightmares began to come true.

Bush's reversal of years of American policy in Israel and Palestine is bound to extract a fundamental shift in the strategy of the Palestinian struggle.

If Sharon is to be left unchecked by a president fearful of his reelection prospects and unwilling to provoke his Jewish and right-wing Christian constituencies, then the two-state solution is dead. As with the refugees, the principle of settling the future of Jerusalem by mutual negotiation will be lost. Jerusalem will never again be part of an independent Palestine. The only remaining option is a single state.

Sharon is alert to the growing demographic issue in the occupied territories. A Palestinian population that currently matches that of Israel and will soon surpass it cannot be kept under open occupation indefinitely. The Gaza disengagement and partial settlement withdrawal maintains the appearance of a concession and lays the groundwork for a solution to the demographic problem while maintaining the Palestinian imprisonment.

A Palestinian state on Sharon's terms will not only be unsustainable, it will not be a state at all. The Gaza model is to be copied in the West Bank, reducing the territory to isolated ghettos in Ramallah, Jenin-Nablus and Bethlehem-Hebron. Bush may publicly state his desire for a Palestinian state that is "viable, contiguous, sovereign, and independent", but the president has already demonstrated that he will never intervene against Sharon's deliberate destruction of that state.

Sharon's vision for an independent Palestine is akin to the Bantustans established as homelands for black South Africans in 1951. Essentially ethnic reservations, these Bantustans were also depicted to the international community as a step towards decolonisation and a solution to South Africa's demographic problem, which, as in Palestine, saw the ruling minority outnumbered by an undesirable majority. It soon became clear however that the scheme was designed to legitimise the expulsion of the black population. The strategy collapsed and the world rallied to defeat Apartheid.

Israel is already extremely close to becoming a pariah state within the international community like the South Africa of old. Were it not for the US veto, the country would almost certainly be facing sanctions. If Sharon denies them all hope of a viable, free homeland, the Palestinians will have no choice but to push for a single binational democratic state.

Before leaving for Washington, Sharon visited Maale Adumim, east of Jerusalem, the largest settlement in the West Bank. Addressing a gathering of settlers, he promised that their homes would remain part of Israel "for all eternity".

This may turn out to be true, but would these religious zealots find the land they have seized so attractive if it were part of a wider binational state, encompassing all of historic Palestine? Would the land seem so important if it were not stolen, but given? Where is the appeal in living in a prefabricated concrete fortress when both Israelis and Palestinians have free access to all their holy sites?

Last week, too, Sharon publicly declared the roadmap dead. He has left no room to manoeuvre even for his allies who have claimed the existing peace process could accommodate his plan. Yet, the Likud vote against him demonstrates that the disengagement plan, bad as it is, is still a step too far for the Israeli right. The referendum can only convince the Palestinians that there is no hope for the peace process and that if two states are impossible, they have no option but to struggle for their freedom, survival and equal rights within a single state.

How would Sharon react to such a dramatic retaliatory step by the people he has conspicuously sought to demonise and destroy? Rather than the triumph he imagined as he stood in the White House, he may find his strategy to crush the Palestinian people once and for all turned hideously against him.

The writer is secretary general of the Palestinian National Initiative. He contributed this article to The Jordan Times (Wednesday, May 19, 2004), it is used here with the permission of the Jordan Times.