Most observers of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians threw away their rose-colored spectacles long ago. But if they were to put on a pair now, they would be stunned by what they see. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, godfather of Greater Israel, travelling to Washington to win the US' blessing for a surrender of territory he fought so hard to keep. Hard-man Sharon, still renowned for his 1982 surge into Lebanon, now preaching pull-out from Gaza. No wonder US President George W. Bush embraced Sharon's gesture, hailing it as "historic and courageous."
But take off the rose-colored glasses and what do you see? Yes, Sharon proposes "disengagement" from Gaza, but that is only half the picture. The other half is a promise to keep hold of large chunks of the West Bank, those which now house more than 200,000 Jewish settlers. Sharon sees this as a quid pro quo: Israel gives up Gaza and in return gets to keep choice cuts from the West Bank, not for the time being or until a final peace deal but, as Sharon puts it, "for all eternity."
ILLUSTRATION: MOUNTAIN PEOPLE
It is a mark of his achievement that Sharon has persuaded the US to bless this move. By packaging it as a withdrawal and a painful concession, he has won what few thought possible: US backing for the long-held dream of Sharon and the Zionist right -- a permanent Israeli grip on crucial segments of the West Bank.
That's why Sharon looked fit to burst with pride at the White House podium last Wednesday. From his point of view, he had just shaken hands on a great deal. Gaza is a burden rather than an asset, a wretched place seething with poverty and violence, and of scant historic resonance for Jews. Giving it up is painful only to the most zealous of Israeli nationalists.
In return he has won a reversal of decades of US policy: No longer does Washington regard settlements as illegal and "obstacles to peace" but instead sees them as "new realities on the ground" to be recognized. By keeping them under Israeli rule, what's left of the West Bank will be sliced into a Swiss cheese that can never be the "viable" Palestinian state Bush still promises, thereby preventing the two-state solution which is surely the best hope for both peoples. As if that was not enough, Bush threw in a bonus, explicitly echoing the Israeli position that any return of Palestinian refugees will have to be to the future Palestinian state, not Israel.
Defenders of the Bush-Sharon move say that this is not quite as dramatic as it seems. Even the doves behind last year's Geneva accords acknowledged that the final borders between Israel and Palestine would not be precisely on 1967 lines, and recognized that most refugees would not return to Israel.
But this is different. The five settlement blocs Sharon has in mind amount to a much larger sweep of territory than earlier peace plans envisioned. Nor did Bush suggest that Israel offer any of its own pre-1967 territory in a compensatory land swap, as Geneva advocates.
Besides, there is a world of difference between two sides negotiating a compromise -- a la Geneva or former US president Bill Clinton's plan of 2000 -- and one side, backed by the world's sole superpower, deciding the final dispensation without so much as talking to the other party.
This is a break not only from Bush's own road map -- which called for a negotiated rather than imposed settlement -- but also from 37 years of US policy, under both Democratic and Republican administrations. It confirms the extent to which Bush's is the aberrant presidency, a period future historians will marvel at as a rupture from all that had gone before. The abandonment of even the attempt to appear to be an honest broker in the Middle East, along with the doctrines of pre-emptive war and unilateralism, are departures from the post-1945 US consensus with no precedent.
It has a kind of logic: Bush knows that supporting Sharon will please his predominantly conservative Christian, pro-Israel constituency, and a foreign policy achievement can only help in an election year marred by bad news from Iraq.
Harder to fathom is why British Prime Minister Tony Blair should go along with such a shift. He persuaded a reluctant parliamentary Labour party to vote for war on Iraq last year with the promise that he would push Bush to act on Israel-Palestine. His reward was the much-delayed publication of the road map, which was hardly a great triumph -- merely a set of toothless guidelines and a hoped-for timetable. Now even that is in shreds, and yet Blair smiles and takes it, welcoming Bush's green light to Sharon as a positive "opportunity."
It's beginning to look humiliating for Blair -- the one promise he extracted for his dogged fidelity in Iraq has been trampled on so publicly.
You would think now would be the moment for Blair to show some daylight between himself and Bush, if only for his own self-respect.
Don't bet on it.
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