A Bitter Sense of Deja Vu for Palestinians

As they mourn today’s anniversary of the birth of Israel, Palestinians find themselves living through a new disaster, a mismatched struggle with the Jewish state that threatens what they have accomplished in the past eight years.

This year’s observance of the Nakba (catastrophe), as Palestinians call it, is a time of painful deja vu. As in 1948, when the Arab armies and Palestinian militias attacked Israel after it declared independence, Palestinians feel that their existence is threatened. And again their leadership seems to be fumbling, incapable of either protecting them or leading them to peace.

The grinding confrontation poses a dilemma for Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat. He desperately needs an easing of Israeli strictures if he is to salvage the economy and government he has been building since the 1993 Oslo accords and secure independent statehood.

But Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is offering Arafat nothing tangible that would justify to the Palestinians a backing away from confrontation and a return to negotiations. Sharon is offering the aging leader no way out, one Palestinian analyst said, “except total surrender.”

The prime minister has rejected Arafat’s calls to resume talks where they left off with the previous Israeli government. Sharon refuses to meet with Arafat and continues to urge President Bush to shun him. Some Palestinians are beginning to suspect that Sharon is uninterested in resuming talks despite back-channel contacts he maintains with the Palestinian leadership through his son Omri.

“What political plan does Sharon have other than his ridiculous plan for a cease-fire to be followed by long-term interim talks, which he himself knows will not be accepted by the Palestinians?” asked Ziad abu Amr, a Gazan academic and member of the Palestinian Legislative Council. “It seems that peace and mutual recognition are not a part of his thinking. With the last government, we quarreled about terms. With this government, we quarrel about principle.”

Sharon’s position is that Arafat can have talks once the shooting stops and a period of calm prevails. The Israeli army will keep hitting Arafat where it hurts, targeting his security forces and driving into Palestinian-held territories in pursuit of gunmen, until Arafat puts a stop to attacks on Israeli soldiers and civilians.

The Israelis maintain that Arafat still has enough control over the militias and security forces to enforce his will, a view the Bush administration endorses.

But the Palestinians say Arafat cannot rein in the gunmen as long as the Israeli army shells and shoots civilian areas and rockets buildings housing his security forces.

The attacks make him look weak. The mounting civilian casualty toll undermines Arafat’s authority and fuels internal criticism of his government’s handling of the crisis.

“Israel hopes that the need to survive will be sufficient incentive for the Palestinian Authority to move and to provide the security Israel wants,” said Khalil Shikaki, a Palestinian pollster and political analyst. “The institutions of the Palestinian Authority, other than education, health and the security forces, are collapsing. The legitimacy of the Palestinian Authority is being questioned from the left and the right, from the Islamists and the nationalist opposition.”

As Arafat allows attacks on Israelis to continue and the Israelis increase the economic and military pressure on the Palestinians, Shikaki said, “each side is playing a waiting game, waiting to see who will blink first.”

Israeli, Palestinian and Western analysts agree that Sharon is not ready to write off Arafat as a potential peace partner. But the retired general is far less committed to his old enemy’s survival, or to the continuation of the Palestinian Authority that Arafat heads, than was former Prime Minister Ehud Barak.

The analysts say Sharon is far less interested in launching talks that could pull apart the broad-based coalition government he worked so diligently to form just two months ago.

So Arafat has accepted an Egyptian-Jordanian initiative for restarting negotiations that calls for a freeze on Israeli settlements, a halt to violence and a resumption of final status talks. He has embraced the report of the international commission led by former U.S. Sen. George J. Mitchell, which recommended a halt to settlement construction as a crucial step toward stopping the violence. But Israel has rejected any freeze on construction inside settlements, leaving Arafat little room to maneuver.

Searching for Ways to Resume Talks

Over the weekend, Arafat dispatched senior peace negotiators to meet with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and other Bush administration officials to discuss ways to resume talks. He has restarted meetings with representatives of the Israeli left, and he continues to urge the European Union to take an active role in searching for a way back to the negotiating table.

But what he hears from some Israeli Cabinet ministers is that the government should declare the Palestinian Authority an enemy and should consider expelling it from the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Israeli Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer told a gathering of the Labor Party recently that Israel may simply have to wait for a new generation of Palestinian leaders before it can again attempt negotiating peace.

“I don’t think this government has made up its mind once and for all,” said Abu Amr, the Gazan academic. “The question for it is whether expelling the Palestinian Authority and Yasser Arafat would better serve the security interests of Israel, and it doesn’t seem that the government is united on the answer to this question. With the Labor Party inside the government, the party that originally made peace with Mr. Arafat, there is no consensus on the destruction of the Palestinian Authority.”

Another Plan for Peace

Israeli Transportation Minister Ephraim Sneh agreed that there is no consensus within the government. Sneh recently came up with his own plan that calls for the Palestinian Authority to take steps to halt the violence and for Israel to respond with measures aimed at rejuvenating the Palestinian economy and giving Palestinians greater freedom of movement. After six months of calm, Israel would hand over enough land to give the Palestinians territorial continuity, and the two sides would restart final status talks.

Sneh said the U.S. has expressed interest in his plan, as have the Egyptians and Jordanians, but Sharon has yet to respond.

Sneh dismissed both the notion of waiting for a new generation and expulsion of the current Palestinian leadership. “We can’t afford to wait so long as it would take for a new generation. And to expel them is so stupid--a partner is a partner, for peace and for war.”

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Times staff writer Tracy Wilkinson contributed to this report.