Word: gaza
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Plenty can, and very likely will go wrong in the latest Israeli-Palestinian truce efforts, but Monday's spectacle of Israeli tanks rolling out of Gaza and uniformed Palestinian Authority security personnel taking charge in their wake could nonetheless prove to be deeply significant. It marks a first move toward a return to the pre-September 2000 status quo after almost three years of trying by successive U.S. administrations and Arab and European diplomats. The current truce is based on agreements between Israel, the U.S., the Palestinian Authority (PA) and the Palestinian militant organizations actually waging the armed intifada that...
...other hand those Palestinians to whom they refuse to speak directly - PA president Yasser Arafat, Fatah militia leader Marwan Barghouti (currently on trial in Tel Aviv on terror charges), and the leaders of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Abbas and Dahlan pointedly refused to accept security responsibility in Gaza without the consent of the militants - in the form of a hudna, the Islamic term for a temporary cease-fire, in which those organizations have undertaken to halt all attacks on Israelis for three, and in Fatah's case six, months...
...cause with an organization that currently rejects Israel's right to exist and which pioneered suicide bombing as a political tactic deepens Israeli anxiety over just where the roadmap is leading. But Abbas is dealing with the reality that Hamas may now be the most popular Palestinian organization in Gaza and a significant political presence in the West Bank. Hamas may have been something of a radical fringe movement during the salad days of the Oslo peace process, but the intifada has propelled it into the mainstream as an alternative...
...pressure is also on Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas to crack down on Hamas. He's getting some much needed behind-the-scenes help from the head of Egyptian intelligence, Omar Suleiman, who dispatched assistants to the Gaza Strip to push the terrorist group into talks on a cease-fire with Israel. But those talks are dragging on, and Abbas continues to have his own problems. Last week his security chief, Mohammed Dahlan, met with Abbas' rival Yasser Arafat, a senior Palestinian official tells TIME, and assured him that "I am loyal to you. I am willing to implement your...
...however, the militants can turn the argument around, and ask just where the road map leads. And right now, he can't convince them even that it leads to an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital, on most or all of the West Bank and Gaza emptied of the hated settlements, much less that it addresses longstanding Palestinian shibboleths as the "right of return" of refugee families who fled Israel in 1948. So, despite the reported commitment to three months of calm, the Palestinian political argument - like the wider conflict of which it is a part - remains unresolved...