In his May 22 statement, summarized in the Ha’aretz newspaper, Sharon said that the Israeli forces could fire "in case lives are endangered; to rescue civilians or soldiers; in direct reaction in case of verifiable identification of the precise source of fire; and in special cases involving IDF [Israeli Defense Forces] entry into Palestinian Authority-controlled areas."

In the weeks before the declaration, Israeli forces had mounted a number of raids into such areas in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, using helicopters, tanks, and bulldozers in their attacks and to demolish houses and farmland to clear their lines of fire. Tel Aviv also unleashed F-16 fighter bombers in May 18 strikes against PNA security installations.

Palestinian officials cited by Ha’aretz noted that Sharon had dubbed this announcement a "cease-fire, when actually, [he] merely ordered the IDF to refrain from offensive operations." The announcement, they said, was designed to defuse growing international criticism of the IDF’s actions in the territories, and "to blur the fact that this is an occupation, not a war between two armies."  
 
U.S. envoy lectures Palestinians
U.S. president George Bush, on the other hand, praised Sharon for his May 22 announcement. As part of a new diplomatic initiative from Washington, Bush appointed William Burns as the new U.S. Mideast envoy. Burns, who has been the U.S. ambassador to Jordan, met Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat and Sharon separately May 27. The U.S. diplomat used his meeting with Arafat to condemn car bombings in downtown Jerusalem earlier that day. Taking the same position as the Israeli government, he urged Arafat "to do everything possible to stop such attacks."

Washington is presenting the report by a committee headed by former U.S. senator George Mitchell, which was established under the previous administration of William Clinton, as a basis for negotiations. The foreign minister in the Israeli coalition government, Shimon Peres of the Labor Party, originally objected to a statement in the report that "the cessation of Palestinian-Israeli violence will be particularly hard to sustain unless Israel freezes all settlement construction activity."

On May 23 Peres said that he accepts the freeze "in principle." At a cabinet meeting Sharon and Peres stated that according to the Mitchell report, a settlement freeze would "come only after a cease-fire and a cooling-off period," reported Ha’aretz. A government spokesperson said, "If we accept the Mitchell report from A to Z, the discussion of the settlements will arrive about the letter X."

Since the unrest stepped up in October last year the expansion of the settlements has continued apace, including with the construction of new roads and buffer zones--as always, at the expense of Palestinian farms and homes. On May 13 the government reaffirmed a decision of the previous government of Labor prime minister Ehud Barak to construct a new ring road in Jerusalem, stretching from the north to south of the city. On this occasion, reported Ha’aretz, Peres opposed the move, saying that "this work requires the confiscation of Arab land and the demolition of homes, [making] Jerusalem a focus of international anger."

The Israeli rulers also take advantage of the actions of the rightists who set the political tone for many of the settlements. A typical tactic of such forces involves the setting up of mobile homes on disputed land, followed by demands for assistance from the government and military.

A New York Times article in November of last year indicated the character of the settlements as outposts of the Zionist state inside the West Bank and Gaza. The 17 settlements in the Gaza Strip, reported the article, were "established in the 1970s and ‘80s. [They] were distributed in a way that was intended to strengthen Israeli control, breaking up the territorial unity of Palestinian communities, which could serve as the basis for a future state."

The Financial Times reported on Palestinian farmer Ibrahim al Tus, 81, who inherited a small farm from his grandfather. Over the past several years the threat of attacks from settlers who have illegally occupied the ridge above his farm has prevented him from tending crops. He was beaten up when he had to drive his tractor through the settlement to the farm. "I’d be happy for the settlers to live next to me as a neighbor," al Tus told the Times, "if they respected me as a human being."

The paper noted that although the settlements account for only about 2 percent of the land in the West Bank, they "have had a pervasive and destructive effect on attempts at Palestinian nation building." The Times added that "bitterness has intensified as Israeli security forces have razed large areas of vegetation, destroyed trees and demolished houses to create buffers around the Jewish zones."

Didi Remez, a spokesperson for Peace Now, said that to "go from Hebron in the south [of the West Bank] to Jenin in the north, you would be stopped at least 20–30 times by Israeli checkpoints."

Meanwhile, the Israeli minister of labor and social affairs, Shlomo Beizri, has instructed the police to arrest and deport a minimum of 1,000 "illegal" workers a month. "I don’t call this deportation, I call it returning them to their country of origin," he said on May 14. "I’m not afraid of the bleeding hearts."

Many workers have traveled to Israel from Eastern Europe and elsewhere since Tel Aviv clamped down on the occupied territories, blocking tens of thousands from traveling to their jobs in Israel. In a May 13 Ha’aretz column, Gideon Levy cited official statistics that place the number of foreign workers at 130,000. He reported that Filipino, African, Romanian, and Thai workers "live in overcrowded sections of destitute city neighborhoods, and on the rough periphery of moshav and village communities."  
 
 
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