The Message Sharon Refuses to Heed, Adnan Abu Odeh

Opinion, July 2003, www.aljazeerah.info

The Message Sharon Refuses to Heed

29/07/2003

Adnan Abu Odeh, The Daily Star

When John Wolf, head of the American team charged with monitoring the application of the “road map,” informed the Israeli authorities that a simple mathematical equation would show that their government dismantled only one “unauthorized” settlement and not 10 as they claim, he did more than just unmask Ariel Sharon’s deception tactics. He also uncovered the fact that the latter does not share US President George W. Bush’s vision of a two-state solution, Israeli and Palestinian, on the land of Mandate Palestine.

Israel’s relentless expansion of its settlements in the occupied West Bank simply shows that it means to continue eating up parts of Palestine until such a day, not that far off now, when any talk of an independent and viable Palestinian state, on the land of Palestine, becomes redundant, since not enough land will be left. News sources have it that it is the Israeli Peace Now movement that monitors and reports on Israel’s settlement activities, which means that it is that movement and not the Sharon government that shares Bush’s vision of a two-state solution.

However, since it is the Sharon government and not the Peace Now Movement that decides Israel’s policies, the question that begs itself now is: What is the solution in Sharon’s view? This is a legitimate ideological question to which the answer could be the transfer option – the gradual ejection of the Palestinians from their land. But this solution is not feasible due to several reasons, and chief among them is the fact that the Palestinians are holding tight onto their land and want no other.

The sacrifices that the Palestinians have offered and continue to offer since the onset of their intifada, which occupies part of the world’s consciousness due to events unfolding daily on television screens, is not the only proof of the above. There is another other war taking place, albeit a secret and unseen one.

A look at a map of the population centers in the West Bank would show dense intertwining of Palestinian villages and Israeli settlements. One would quickly see that the settlements are connected by a large network of modern roads that crisscross the old Palestinian roads – which link Palestinian villages – and end up in Israel. This brings to mind the image of warts that appears on the skin and which our mothers removed by tightly knotting a silk thread around their base to cut off their blood supply.

The bypass roads that Israel built between the settlements are like this silk thread, and if we were to follow the same logic, life in the surrounded Palestinian towns and villages should have soon come to a halt. This unbearable situation was further compounded when Israel, after the onset of the intifada, applied additional choking measures by laying many roadblocks on the old roads that link Palestinian cities and villages.

Surprisingly, however, life did not come to a halt in these towns and villages, even though life for their inhabitants did become harder and more difficult to bear. The Palestinians have actually devised their own countermeasure – bypass roads to relieve that throttling, exactly like the human body opens a new artery to bypass the blocked ones.

The ads that appear on local Palestinian television selling “shoes for bypass roads,” therefore, hold many hidden signs. Among them is one that Sharon would do well to heed, namely that the Palestinians have opted for a two-state solution as the only valid option. If, however, Israel chooses to ignore these signs, it will have no alternative, once the road map fails, but to come to terms with the only remaining option – not transfer, but the creation of a bi-national Palestinian state. But will Sharon ever open his eyes to the truth?

*Adnan Abu Odeh, a former Jordanian ambassador, information minister and chief of the royal court, is a regular contributor to THE DAILY STAR

Earth, a planet hungry for peace

The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03).

The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers in the West Bank (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03).