MID-EAST REALITIES © - www.MiddleEast.Org - Washington - 4/14: From what would usually be called the far far left in Israel and whose voice is rarely heard these days beyond their own circles -- but which we would term the serious, sophisticated, highly committed and principled Israeli intelligentsia -- there is a magazine published every other month called "Challenge". This Editorial is from the issue published about a month ago:

The new Intifada arose because, for Palestinians, the Oslo Accords have failed. On the Israeli side, the move to establish a national unity government means that Zionist leaders have reconciled themselves to this failure. Likewise, the new Bush administration in Washington has declared itself "not bound" by the Clinton Plan. In short, the political agenda of the last decade for this part of the Middle East has collapsed.

The Oslo Accords expressed an attempt by the Labor Party, which came to power in 1992, to break the long stalemate between the two main currents of Israeli politics: "Left" and Right, Labor and Likud. By a daring procedure, thought Labor's leaders, they would not only bring peace to the region, but also economic prosperity, which would attract a solid electoral majority to their side. The procedure has failed, because Israel, the dominant factor, did not take into account the political forces at work among Arabs. Israel intended to keep the main dividends to itself. The outcome of the agreement was supposed to be acceptance, by the Arab world, of Israeli dominance over the region.

The attempt to achieve this weird objective encountered difficulties from the start. The Israeli Right wasn't willing to accept a more moderate version of the Occupation. The Palestinian side, which was ready at first to give the Israeli plan a chance, suffered disappointment with the way it was implemented - not only by the Israelis, but also by its own PA (Palestinian Authority). In the face of these impediments, Israel wobbled between Right and Left. In 1995, Yitzhak Rabin was murdered. In 1996, Benjamin Netanyahu came to power, only to fall prematurely three years later. Then Ehud Barak rose up like a savior who was supposed to pull the peace process out of the mire - and fell even lower than Netanyahu. As a result of Oslo, both major currents in Israeli politics are weaker, and now they must cling to each other to survive.

Israel is caught in predicaments on many levels. It now has unprecedented security problems with the Palestinians in the Territories, and it lacks the means to solve them. For example, Israelis are shocked to discover their own Jerusalem neighborhoods under fire. In fact, these neighborhoods (Gilo, French Hill, Pisgat Ze'ev) are all West Bank settlements - a detail Israelis forgot long ago, but their neighbors haven't. Or a Palestinian driver, in his fifth year of working for Egged (the national bus company), uses his vehicle as a weapon to run over and kill eight soldiers who are waiting at a bus stop. The driver - 35 years old, a father of five - doesn't fit the "profile" of a suicide fighter. It seems that the Israel of today is not safe from any Palestinian. Even within its 1948 borders, the Arab citizens have undergone radicalization.

On top of all that, there is a deepening recession, not only because of the Intifada, but also because of the slowdown in America's economy, to which Israel has bound itself. Thus, from out of their newly discovered weakness, the leaders of Likud and Labor must invent a political agenda by which they can try merely to manage the conflict - with no hope of solving it.

Campaigning for re-election as Prime Minister, Ehud Barak was under attack not only by Jewish and Arab voters, but also within his own party. For a year and a half he had ruled alone, excluding major party figures, resorting to extreme and often contradictory tactics. His isolation outdid even Netanyahu's before the latter's downfall in 1999. Shimon Peres breathed down Barak's neck almost to the end of the race. The Arab population was bent on punishing him because he had allowed the killing of its demonstrators in October 2000. Single-handedly, Barak had managed to destroy the strategic alliance between the Arab sector and the Labor Party. He had created an explosive situation, which today threatens Israel from without and within.

When the election results arrived, Barak resigned from the party leadership, saying he would take a break from political life. Within days, however, he accepted the offer by Prime Minister Elect, Ariel Sharon, that he should join a national unity government as its Defense Minister. In response, younger leaders, including Knesset Chairperson Avraham Burg and Haim Ramon, Minister for Jerusalem Affairs, called for a rebellion against Barak - not because of his willingness to join a Sharon government, rather because they wanted to inherit his place. It is another wing of the Labor Party, led by Yossi Beilin, that opposes going to national unity.

Under enormous public criticism, Barak resigned a second time, announcing again his intention to leave politics. Within Labor, however, there is no leader who is able to combine public credit with personal influence in order to unite this fragmented party.

If a year ago you had told the leaders of Labor that in the year 2001, they would be standing in line to enter a national unity government under Ariel Sharon, none would have believed you. The man symbolizes everything from which Israel has been trying to distance itself in the last decade. His name is associated with massacres (Kibya, Sabra and Shatila) and acts of barbarity in Palestinian refugee camps. In 1982 an investigative commission ordained that he must never again hold the post of Defense Minister. He has always been chief patron to the settlers in the West Bank and Gaza. It was he who visited the al-Aksa compound in September 2000, lighting the match that set off the new Intifada. Throughout the recent campaign, Sharon tried to hide his biography, for he needs national unity even more than the leaders in Labor do. They require it for the sake of positions - springboards to the future. Sharon needs unity, however, in order to be able to govern at all. In the 1999 elections, Netanyahu left the Likud with a mere 19 Knesset seats (compared with Labor's 26, out of a Knesset total of 120). Now Oslo, Labor's project, has spawned a new Intifada. Sharon knows that the entire world is watching his moves. The violence is exacting a very high price, isolating Israel from the rest of the world both politically and economically. By forging a partnership with Labor, Sharon can lower the price that he personally will have to pay if the government carries out a policy of oppression in the Territories. Hence, his eagerness that Labor take Defense. It was Labor, after all, that brewed the broth, so at least it should help him eat it.

Ironically, the political future of both Likud and Labor now depends on Yasser Arafat and the PA. But Arafat too has problems. He has run out of financial reserves with which to pay his bureaucrats and security forces. Israel refuses to release to him the Palestinian taxes and customs duties it has collected. It wages a regime of sanctions against him. If he tries to quell the Intifada, he will only succeed in nullifying himself. Arafat, in short, stands helpless before an uncertain future.

The new Middle East came into being with the war against Iraq in 1991. The outcome of that war gave birth to the Madrid Conference, then to the Oslo Accords. Now Oslo has collapsed, and the sanctions against Iraq are likewise collapsing. The US is finding it hard to impose its will. Heralding the first Middle East visit by Secretary of State Colin Powell, it sent a "calling card" in the form of air strikes, as if to remind everyone who the enemy is. But as long as the Israelis and Palestinians are at each others' throats, the US will find it hard to persuade its old Arab partners, much less the Arab peoples, that the need of the hour is to stop Saddam.

Those who have held the fate of the Middle East in their hands for the past decade - namely, the governments of the US and Israel, the PA and the Arab regimes - have brought the area to the verge of chaos. The peoples, especially the Palestinian people, can no longer afford to let these forces dictate the regional agenda. It is the peoples who derailed Oslo. Only they can create an alternative.

* The magazine "Challenge" is published every other month and available by subscription by check made out to "Challenge" for $30, 20L, 55DM or, for a local subscription 75 NIS, to: POB 41199, Jaffa 61411, Israel.