Wednesday, February 09, 2005
Urging New Path, Sharon and Abbas Declare Truce
By STEVEN ERLANGER
SHARM EL SHEIK, Egypt, Feb. 8 - Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, and Ariel Sharon, prime minister of Israel, held summit talks at this Egyptian resort on Tuesday - the highest-level meeting between the sides in four years - and declared a truce in hostilities.
Mr. Abbas said he and Mr. Sharon "have jointly agreed to cease all acts of violence against Israelis and Palestinians everywhere," while Mr. Sharon said they "agreed that all Palestinians will stop all acts of violence against all Israelis everywhere, and in parallel, Israel will cease all its military activity against all Palestinians everywhere."
Officials said Israel would also pull back its troops from five West Bank cities - Jericho, Bethlehem, Ramallah, Tulkarm and Qalqilya - in the next three weeks and stop the arrests and assassinations of top militants if they agree to put down their weapons.
There was an immediate reminder of the fragility of those declarations when spokesmen for the radical Palestinian group Hamas said the truce was not binding on them.
The summit meeting on the shores of the Red Sea was nonetheless filled with the symbolism of renewed hopes, as the Israeli and Palestinian leaders sat at a round table with their host, the Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak, and King Abdullah II of Jordan.
In the hall, the Israeli flag was displayed next to the Egyptian, Jordanian and Palestinian flags.
Israeli spokesmen gave their interpretations on Egyptian and Arab television stations, and both Egypt and Jordan announced that they would soon return their ambassadors to Israel.
Mr. Abbas and Mr. Sharon, in coordinated statements, spoke of a new "opportunity" for peace and calm, and of a new beginning - a chance "to disengage from the path of blood," as Mr. Sharon put it, "and start on a new path."
Mr. Abbas said, "The calm which will prevail in our lands starting from today is the beginning of a new era," and he vowed to spare no effort "to protect this emerging opportunity for peace."
Both avoided the word "cease-fire." But if they succeed in turning this period of relative quiet into a real cessation of violence, followed by agreed moves to reduce the impact of Israeli occupation on the Palestinians and serious negotiations about peace, the day will mark an important turning point in relations. The speed with which Hamas expressed lack of cooperation was noteworthy.
In Beirut, a Hamas spokesman, Osama Hamdaneh, said the cease-fire "does not commit the Palestinian resistance" because it was not fully negotiated with Hamas and all Palestinian prisoners were not released.
In Gaza, another Hamas spokesman, Mushir al-Masri, said the Abbas declaration "expresses only the position of the Palestinian Authority and does not express the point of view of the factions," and he insisted that "the summit hasn't led to anything new, and the Israeli position hasn't changed."
Hamas has agreed to a temporary period of quiet, and its statements on Tuesday may be more rhetoric than substance, an effort to remind Palestinians that Hamas has been fighting the Israelis, not making concessions to them. But they are a sharp reminder of the limits of Mr. Abbas's authority right now, even with the backing of Egypt and Jordan, and of the fragility of the declarations made Tuesday.
Israel has made it clear that if attacks do continue and Mr. Abbas does little to stop them, Israel will resume its military activity.
"One can only have a cease-fire with a state or authority that controls security," a senior Israeli official cautioned here on Friday.
"You can't have a cease-fire with armed terrorist groups, because you give them a veto over peace," he added. "What we have today is a cessation of violence, and it can become something more if Abbas moves to crack down" on the militants, take away their weapons and destroy their mortar and rocket factories.
Mr. Abbas has not yet appointed a new cabinet or reformed his security forces, the Israelis point out, with one senior military official saying, "We know he needs time, and we will give him time, but he doesn't have a limitless amount of time."
Mr. Sharon, on only his second visit to an Arab country as prime minister - he commanded Israeli forces that took this resort in the Arab-Israeli war in 1973 - had a long and cordial meeting with Mr. Mubarak, whose aides talked of a visit to Israel. Mr. Sharon also invited Mr. Abbas to his farm for a working visit.
Mr. Abbas, who was elected president of the Palestinian Authority in January after the death of Yasir Arafat in November, said it was time for the Palestinians "to regain their freedom" and "put an end to decades of suffering and pain." He promised Palestinians that they would live under "one authority, one weapon and political pluralism" - meaning an end to political chaos, armed gangs and resistance groups, and representation for Hamas and Islamic Jihad through democratic politics.
Mr. Abbas urged the Israelis to move quickly back to the peace plan called the road map sponsored by the United States, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations. He called for serious negotiations about a final peace settlement. And he said the declarations made Tuesday, together with what will follow, are already important parts of the road map's first stage.
"We want to replace the language of bullets and bombs with the language of dialogue, to have the language of dialogue instead of the wall," Mr. Abbas said, referring to the barrier Israel is building in the West Bank that it says is to guard against suicide bombers. If there is a real cease-fire, pressure will mount on Israel to stop building the barrier, especially on Palestinian land.
But Israeli officials insisted that the Tuesday declarations still left the two sides in what one of them called a "pre-road map situation," suggesting that Mr. Sharon was too vulnerable with his plan to pull Israeli settlers out of Gaza to be able to deal with more controversy over illegal settlements and outpost construction in the West Bank.
Israel, in other words, is insisting that Mr. Abbas implement his obligations to destroy the infrastructure of terrorism in the first stage of the road map before Israel begins to implement its own obligations to stop new settlement activity and dismantle up to 50 outposts erected after March 2001. Hamas's statements on Tuesday are likely to solidify that Israeli position.
Mr. Abbas is working to co-opt Hamas and the other radicals by bringing them into democratic politics and negotiating a political role with them in return for an end to violence. His current foreign minister, Nabil Shaath, said Tuesday that Mr. Abbas "will explain to our brothers and to consolidate their adherence to the cease-fire." But Mr. Shaath also warned that "from now on, any violation of the truce will be a violation of the national commitment and will have to be dealt with as such."
But Israelis are not only skeptical that Mr. Abbas will crack down on Hamas, they also do not regard even a long truce as a substantive change in relations with the Palestinians until Hamas and the other militants are firmly under the control of a new, reformed Palestinian security force.
Still, quiet in Gaza will make it easier for Mr. Sharon to carry out his Gaza plan, both politically and militarily, because it will let the police and army dismantle the settlements and evacuate the settlers without being shot at. And quiet will make it much easier for Mr. Abbas to carry out his urgent domestic agenda of reform - of his own Fatah movement, of the security forces and of the Palestinian Authority itself.
The absence of an American mediator made the meeting seem, in a way, more important, because it was Cairo, not Washington, that had brought the sides together.
Speaking in Rome, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice warned of a long road ahead. She acknowledged the limits of the Palestinian security forces, but said, "There are places where they can act." When Palestinian forces arrest someone, they should hold him; when they see a bomb making facility, they should destroy it; and when they see smuggling, they should stop it, she said, in words that will cheer Mr. Sharon.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
