[Mb-civic] Is the Road Map's Moment Gone? - Jim Hoagland - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

Is the Road Map's Moment Gone?

By Jim Hoagland
Thursday, January 12, 2006; A21

The United States, its European and Arab allies, and the United Nations 
have labored for four months to turn Israel's unilateral withdrawal from 
the Gaza Strip into a catalyst for the creation of an independent, 
viable Palestinian state. They are visibly failing.

Law and order have disappeared in the Gaza territory since the Israeli 
withdrawal. Kidnappings and gunfights, not campaign rallies, are the 
tools of electioneering there. Financial mismanagement by Mahmoud 
Abbas's Palestinian Authority has forced the World Bank to freeze $60 
million in budget support and effectively move the PA toward bankruptcy 
in a matter of weeks.

The spiral toward chaos in Gaza and Ariel Sharon's sudden incapacitation 
by a severe stroke are destabilizing blows to President Bush's 
proclaimed strategy for transforming the Middle East into a zone of 
democracies. Bush must reassess whether he can get there from here.

With Sharon in power, the odds on the "road map" diplomatic process 
delivering the democratic Palestinian state that Bush and Sharon 
conditionally endorse were slim. Without Sharon in power, the odds drop 
to virtually zero.

The Gaza withdrawal was the product not of understandings between Sharon 
and Abbas but of an ambivalent if productive relationship between Sharon 
and Bush. Ending the occupation of Gaza was above all an 
Israeli-American arrangement, tied to the expectation that the Israeli 
prime minister's time in office would begin and end roughly with the 
American president's tenure.

The eight-year political balance sheet of give-and-take that the two 
leaders set up underpinned Sharon's formal acceptance of the 
U.N.-blessed process for creating a Palestinian state. The road map 
toward peace was a risk that the audacious Sharon was willing to take to 
secure Bush's backing, not an objective he sought or ever planned.

Just as Europeans abandoned colonialism to improve their own lives and 
not the lives of the Africans, Arabs and Asians they set free, Sharon 
ended Israel's occupation of Gaza solely for Israeli security reasons. 
He would wall in the Gazans with security fences and other measures and 
remain seemingly indifferent to what became of them.

But Sharon's daring gave Bush, the international community and, most of 
all, the Palestinians an opening that seemed to promise complete 
autonomy in Gaza and significant unilateral withdrawals from the West 
Bank if Sharon won reelection in March.

Sharon's incapacitation and the Gaza upheavals now call that opening 
into question. No other Israeli politician has the domestic support, the 
audacity and the force of personality to bulldoze forward historic 
change in the West Bank by the end of Bush's term. Moreover, the turmoil 
in Gaza is closing the window of international support for such change.

The road map, like most formulas for peacemaking, is based on the 
commendable premise that everyone deserves a second or even third 
chance. Right now the Palestinians are severely testing that article of 
faith -- at a moment when they have everything to gain from taking 
responsibility for their affairs and demonstrating political maturity.

Forcing Egyptian police officers and European Union observers to flee 
their posts for safety hardly suggests maturity. Neither does the 
decision by the Palestinian Authority to raise salaries and break its 
commitment to live within the large aid flows that international donors 
provide. That act triggered the freeze on budget support by the World Bank.

After Yasser Arafat died, "we hoped for new momentum in the direction of 
governmental reforms and the fight against corruption," World Bank 
representative Nigel Roberts told the Israeli daily Haaretz this week. 
But "Arafatism" lives on without Arafat and has grown worse, Roberts added.

Instead of moving to transform themselves into the nucleus of one of the 
Arab world's first true democracies -- as Bush, Sharon and their 
road-map partners pretended the Palestinians quickly could -- the 
Palestinian territories continue to be angry, explosive ghettos. In 
Gaza, gunmen who recently were receiving financial rewards for attacking 
Israelis are now "unemployed" and threaten their neighbors and the 
Palestinian Authority.

It must be said that four months is a short time to fix the consequences 
of centuries of occupation of the Palestinians by Turks, Arabs and 
Israelis, as well as the damage caused by the scandalous insistence of 
Arab states and the United Nations that the Palestinians remain enclosed 
in permanent refugee camps, even on their own lands.

Yes, that must be said. But so must this: The striking down of Ariel 
Sharon at a crucial moment of transformation demonstrates that in the 
Middle East today, a short time is the only time you've got.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/11/AR2006011102038.html
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