BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR

The missing link (Yosef Goell, Jerusalem Post, February 21st, 2005)

Even yesterday, as the cabinet was approving not only the prime minister's deeply contested plan to withdraw from 25 settlements in the Gaza Strip and northern Samaria but also the most recent version of his corrected path for the stalled security barrier along the West Bank, nearly no one could bring himself to admit that the two issues were part of a package deal.

One of the reasons it has been so difficult to explain Ariel Sharon's historic volte-face, and now the dramatic change in the final vote of the Likud cabinet ministers, is that it has been considered a political no-no to discuss the details of the two issues' connectedness openly in polite society.

But the fact remains that they are inextricably linked – the missing link being Israel's relations with the Bush administration.

There is no question that the first George W. Bush administration was the most friendly to Israel (or at least to Sharon's Israel) ever, and this support is expected to solidify even more with Condoleezza Rice now firmly esconced as secretary of state. And in its time, the Clinton administration was also extremely supportive.

But on two issues these successive and mutually antagonistic Democratic and Republican administrations took issue with Israel's official policy: the settlements, and America's commitment to an independent, territorially contiguous Palestine.

It took the sweeping Bush electoral triumph last November to convince Sharon that the two decisions brought to the Israeli cabinet vote yesterday were the best deal Israel could get, even from the friendliest US administration imaginable.

The main fly in this ointment of super-political rationality is that while Arik's Israel is now totally committed to the physical evacuation of settlements by July, the solidity of Washington's commitment to its part of the deal – support for Israeli annexation of the major settlement blocs on the West Bank, through the thick and thin of negotiations on a long-term settlement with Abu Mazen's Palestinian Authority – is far from certain.

The quest for peace in the Middle East has become a kind of Holy Grail that has pre-occupied American Presidents to one extent or another since Johnson. That it must to some extent be imposed is now generally accepted, but the seemingly intractable conflict has gone on for so long that we tend to take Israeli strength, even invincibility, for granted and at times wonder is they aren't being suspiciously obstreperous. Understandably, this is not a perspective shared by Israelis. It will be important to keep the negotiations grounded in hard, cautious reality and not to let the lure of Palestinian agreement become simply too exciting to pass up, a mistake the Israelis themselves know all about.