The ultimatum to Israel is pathetic business and will be laughed out of court in the Mideast and elsewhere. Says great big Uncle Sam to Gen. Ariel Sharon: For every mile you extend your wall, we'll deduct the cost of that construction from the money we are paying you. The invocation of an economic perspective in the matter of the Israeli wall is road-map trivialization. It is on the order of informing the Soviet Union, in August 1961, that we would put in a claim for the cost of the Berlin Wall. What is now inconceivable, in terms of national pride, is that Sharon will interrupt the construction of the wall, which is costing $2 million per mile.
Mr. Bush's road map has evolved as a great fiasco. If the administration was not willing to see the plan through, it should not have been promulgated. The United States has for decades declined to specify the terms of an Israeli-Palestinian rapprochement, though our see-through alliance with Israel has been obvious and steadfast.
What happened after the abandonment of the Oslo accords was a departure in U.S. policy. The president declared that the U.S. was prepared to recognize a Palestinian state provided that the two sides made certain concessions. Prime Minister Abbas was to take action against the Hamas terrorists, and Israel was to evacuate the West Bank, while taking appropriate steps to assure its security.
All three sides to the intended reforms were delinquent:
(1) Abbas did not move against the terrorists. The only way to do this would have been to defy Arafat, who has the backing of the 7,000-man elite security force, as also the backing of the Palestinian "street." Abbas would have precipitated a civil war if he had moved effectively on the terrorist organizations.
(2) Israel did practically nothing in the matter of the settlements. Sharon will not abandon the irredentist wing of his supporters in the Knesset and elsewhere, men and women who see the West Bank as a part of the land of Zion, to say nothing of the 200,000 Israelis who live in the settlements.
(3) And the United States exerted no substantial pressure on either party. Minor concessions were made, as when the Israeli defense forces permitted one gateway through the fence to permit Palestinian children in one town to pass through to their school, otherwise requiring a one-hour commute through a maze of concrete and barbed wire.