Writing in the Wall Street Journal on 20 October, Mahmud Abbas was typically candid as to why George Bush occupies such a central place in the Palestinian president’s strategy.

The “climate of peace needs the help of the United States and the international community. For without sustained pressure on the Israeli government to sit down and negotiate, Israel will only bolster those within Palestinian society who do not share the majority’s desire for peace… Palestinians cannot pursue the road-map alone,” he wrote, referring to the long dormant peace plan the US leader launched in June 2003.

No pressure from Bush

It looks like they will have to. At the meeting with Abbas later that day President Bush enshrined Israeli (and Palestinian) unilateralism as the governing principle for the road-map, at least in the immediate term. True, he rehearsed the usual mantras that Israel should remove “illegal” settlement outposts, freeze settlement construction and ensure that the West Bank Wall is “a security barrier rather than a political barrier”. But he made it clear that there would no “pressure” until the Palestinian Authority “earned the confidence of its neighbours by rejecting and fighting terrorism”.

Nor did Abbas make much headway with his call that, concurrent with joint steps along the road-map, Israel and the Palestinians reopen an Oslo-like secret channel to negotiate the terms of a final status agreement. Israel rejected the proposal out of hand, and so, less loudly, did the Americans.

The only gain is that Abbas appears to have persuaded Bush (who, he hopes, will persuade Israel) that it would be ill-advised for the PA to try to disarm Hamas and other Palestinian militias before the PA parliamentary elections in January. Bush’s acknowledgment — said White House officials — was less out of a conviction that Abbas’ strategy of “integrating” Hamas was the right one. It is simply that the Americans know an incapable leadership when they see one.

The US also appears to have become a little more engaged in issues still unresolved from Israel’s disengagement from Gaza last month. One day after the Washington meeting, a letter from the Quartet’s point-man for disengagement was leaked to Israel’s Ha’aretz newspaper.

In the most diplomatic terms, James Wolfensohn blamed Israel for the failure to agree terms for reopening Gaza’s Rafah crossing into Egypt (closed since 7 September); establishing a Palestinian passage between Gaza and the West Bank (closed in October 2000); and removing the settlement debris from Gaza (agreed in August 2005). “Until [these] issues are resolved we will be hard-pressed to convince governments or investors that anything much has changed” in Gaza, he wrote.

In fact the only “success” Wolfensohn could cite was the retention of 3,000 Palestinians jobs in the former settlement green-houses in Gaza — a “concession” Wolfensohn helped fund himself and which actually benefits the Israeli economy far more than the Palestinian one (MEI 757).

Separation

Abbas expected little more from his talks with Bush. According to one of his few Israeli friends — former Justice Minister Yossi Beilin — the PA leader’s sole aim in Washington was to dissuade the US from adopting Israel’s terms for Hamas’ participation in the January elections, i.e. disarmament and renouncing the article in its founding charter calling for Israel’s destruction.

This was not only because of the ongoing Palestinian turmoil that rules Gaza. In the last two months, Abbas has seen over 70 abductions in the Strip, mostly in turf wars between the various Fatah militias (official and non-official), but also involving the occasional aid worker or journalist. Two hundred and forty members of Fatah in Rafah have resigned in protest at the “chaos”. And there are the beginnings of mass protests against poverty, with jobless workers storming the Palestinian Legislative Council and medical workers going on strike. He has also seen the revival of armed resistance in the West Bank.

On 16 October three Israeli settlers were killed in an ambush near the West Bank’s Gush Etzion settlement bloc. Fatah’s Aqsa Martyrs Brigade (AMB) claimed the attack as retaliation for Israel’s assassination of several AMB and Islamic Jihad cadres, the latest a Jihad man near Jenin the night before.

Israel used the attack to establish the post-Gaza disengagement order in the Occupied Territories, very much the way it had exploited a barrage of mortars fired from Gaza on 22 September (MEI 760). In Gaza it consisted of a siege and merciless military assaults to pound the Palestinians into submission. In the West Bank it consists of separation, realized not only by the Wall and the “Palestinian-free” and “Palestinian-restricted” areas determined by the settlements, but also, now, by prohibition of all private Palestinian traffic on the West Bank’s roads.

Israel’s defence minister, Shaul Mofaz, says the ban is temporary. Few believe it.

In September 2004 Israel unveiled its “Roads and Tunnels” plan to permanently segregate Palestinians and Israelis in the West Bank. The scheme comprises 56 separate roads and 24 tunnels designed to enable the West Bank’s 430,000 settlers to drive unhindered between the settlements and Israel proper and its 2.2 million Palestinians, more circuitously, between their main towns and villages. The system is known as “transportation contiguity” and is so designed as to enable the maximum expansion of the settlement areas — either side of the Wall — with the maximum concentration of the Palestinian areas, between the roads and the settlements.

Like the Wall, the plan is primarily about Israel unilaterally determining its future borders within the West Bank. It is also a remedy for the ineffectiveness of the closure regime established by the Oslo process in the mid-1990s. This matrix of army checkpoints, blocked Palestinian roads and “closed zones” off-limits to the Palestinians has not only been the main cause of Palestinian penury; it is costly and labour-intensive to police.

In October 2004 the PA rejected the plan and called on donors to do likewise. Most have, but not all. According to a fact-sheet by the PLO’s Negotiating Affairs Department (PLONAD), 11 roads and six tunnels in the plan are currently under construction in the West Bank, enough, in any case for Mofaz to issue a ban on private Palestinian vehicles travelling on the diminishing number of roads they use jointly with settlers. According to Israel’s Ma’ariv newspaper the ban is the first step in implementing “road apartheid”, in the phrase of UN Special Rapporteur John Dugard.

PLONAD is equally clear as to where the roads lead. “In the short term, the plan means Palestinians within the major Palestinian cities and towns will experience an easing of the closure regime. But in the long term the plan means the end of the two-state solution. Rather than ending the closure regime, it entrenches it. In total, the Wall and the settlements, combined with the roads and the tunnels, will leave Palestinians with 54% of a fragmented West Bank. While Palestinians will have better access to and between their towns, they will lose access to much of their land and resources, as well as to the most essential component of a viable Palestinian state: East Jerusalem.”

The two-state solution

Bush made no mention of the road system in his meeting with Abbas. Neither did the Palestinian leader. So dependent on the Americans — and, to a lesser extent, on Hamas — is Abbas that the priorities now lie not in Israel’s rampant West Bank colonization; they lie in governance in Gaza, elections in January and the prayer that, over the rainbow of both, there will be the yellow brick road-map.

On 22 October Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmad Quray announced the PA’s plan for ending the rule of the militias. Five “training camps” will be set up to reabsorb the 500 or so AMB cadres into one or other of the PA’s security forces. The logic is clear: without disarming or co-opting the Fatah militias, Abbas and Quray will not be able to ask the same of the 1,500 or so Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters, even after the parliamentary elections.

Some AMB leaders have welcomed the pay-off. Others have kept an ominous silence. They know that, here too, the Palestinians cannot pursue the road alone.

On 23 October, a massive Israeli army force entered the West Bank town of Tulkarm and shot dead two Palestinians, including the local leader of Islamic Jihad’s al-Quds Brigade, Luay al-Saadi. Soldiers apparently ensnared in a house and shot him on the stairwell.

Jihad responded by pitching mortars into Israel from Gaza. Israel responded by rocketing a Jihad charity storehouse and other offices in the Strip. And Ariel Sharon would appear to have the Palestinians, Abbas and the road-map precisely where he wants them: fighting a useless war in Gaza while he imposes his own separate two-state solution inside the West Bank.

*Middle East International Online, http://meionline.com, October 26th, 2005.