Road map to peace?

We know how they treat Palestinians. The Israelis know we know. But they don't care because they figure there is nothing we can do. But the climate is changing. Sharon and the likudniks around Bush must be panicking. The war was supposed to give Sharon a free hand to deal with the Palestinians as he saw fit. Now it seems Bush is determined to force through a peace solution incorporating a viable Palestinian state, something Sharon has been prepared to use any means to thwart in the past.

The convoy is passing and dogs aren't barking
By Gideon Samet
Israeli policy is becoming one immense deception. The extent and depth of the political deceit is influenced by that political riddle, whereby the downtrodden, complaining Israelis who are stuck without a political settlement and with a sinking economy continue to show signs of satisfaction or at least blitheness. Otherwise, it is difficult to understand the success of this disastrous government not only in getting elected but also in leading the convoy while the dogs - in contrast to what former prime minister Yitzhak Shamir said back in the `80s - are no longer barking.

This week, a few whines of protest accompanied the economic plan. It passed, of course. It is impossible to deny the specific logic it has as its basis. However, despite the impressive PR campaign by Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, it is of no value. Even if it goes a little way toward improving a few economic indices, its achievements will be swallowed up within the diplomatic non-peace plan that dictates economic paralysis and continued national regression.

Netanyahu is making quite charming efforts to convince a nation, which is neither knowledgeable nor interested, that his plan is designed to get us on the road to America. The finance minister - himself some sort of embodiment of an American model - has, of course, hidden the main fact: For the governing paragon of America it is unthinkable to fund at an enormous rate a pet ideological project of the ruling political camp. In America, there could not be anything like settlements on the back of the nation. It is untenable there that any administration would waste federal money in such a way and expect to survive. Even if only in this respect, the talk of improving the economy by means made in the U.S.A. is just empty churning.

Symbolically, both of the routes of the government convoy came together this week. While Netanyahu was knowingly lying to his listeners, that the economic plan would succeed without a diplomatic revolution, exemplary America - the fantasy queen of the Israeli dream - released a diplomatic plan to resolve the conflict with the Palestinians. As befits the image of the convoy, this is a map that aims at getting Israel and the Palestinians on the right route. This, too, is an illusion. The American plan is deceptive not because - just like Netanyahu's economic program - it is not fundamentally correct. It is a hoax because within it are concealed, and have already begun to sprout, the explosive charges that are going to wipe the plan out.

The mantra heard from every government mouth is, of course, the Palestinians' inability and unwillingness to ever live with us in peace. To change this label, the Palestinian Authority has chosen a new government. But Sharon's government has snorted at it scornfully, as if it were a shadow government of the Labor Party. The defense minister, the chief of staff and the dark army chorus have not given any chance for the success of the complicated political move on the other side. The top political echelon, for its part, continued to prepare the ground for the blowing up, targeted elimination and emptying of all content of the road map.

But the real problem is that the American administration has not shown any sign this week that, apart from the public relations act of submitting the plan, nicely bound, to the Israeli and Palestinian prime ministers, it is going to implement it with the necessary determination.

Like a secret agent, U.S. Ambassador Dan Kertzer slipped out under the cover of darkness, clutching the file close to his chest, to Sharon's residence. At the same time - with no prior announcement - Eliot Abrams went through the prime minister's back door. Abrams is head of the Middle East desk at the National Security Council and one of President Bush's most conservative and reactionary advisers. A very influential group cut from the same ideological cloth can be relied upon to see to it, from the Pentagon and the White House, that a Palestinian terror government will not hit any jackpot (and that the "so-called occupied territories," as defined by the American defense secretary, will not be evacuated in any great haste). After Iraq, this diplomatic front has only become deeper. And therefore it was no coincidence that the new queen of Baghdad refrained from giving the road map to Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas with her own lily-white hands. This role was delegated to the bench-layers of the Quartet, three components of which (the United Nations, the European Union and Russia) Washington has scores to settle.

With no signs of American pressure, the Israeli convoy will continue its advance toward its destination, that is - round and round the parade ground, marching in place. Secretary of State Colin Powell changed the administration's intention of postponing his visit here and will arrive next week. Hear him, listen to the polite, banal phraseology and compare this to the way the White House talks tough when it wants to - when it goes to war, for example.

In a week like this, when ostensibly comprehensive plans were submitted on the two most important matters facing this country, it is a crying shame to see how they are continuing on the way to nowhere: A politics of glorifying a past that balks at a reshaping of the national identity, and an economy that is dragged behind it like a floor rag behind the bucket.