The Palestinian Authority wants to “stop the military aspect of the intifada, especially by Hamas and Islamic Jihad, in order to achieve our objective of a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital and a just settlement for the refugee problem,” Abbas told the daily

“We want to negotiate,” he later told reporters.

Two days later, Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon gave a major policy speech outlining Tel Aviv’s aims to open negotiations with the new Palestinian leadership.

“The most genuine and greatest opportunity for building a new and different relationship with the Palestinians was created following the death of Yasser Arafat, who constituted the primary obstacle to peace,” Sharon told an audience December 16 at the Herzliya Conference, where he first outlined Tel Aviv’s “unilateral disengagement” plan last year. “Now there is a real chance that new Palestinian leaders will rise, those who will be elected, who will truly abandon the path of terror, and instead will advance a strategy of reconciliation and negotiation without violence.”

Abbas is the favored candidate of both Washington and Tel Aviv for the presidency of the Palestinian Authority. Washington signaled its desire to prop up Abbas by announcing that direct financial aid to the Palestinian territories would be doubled “if the Palestinian elections set for Jan. 9 occurred successfully and if the new government cracked down on militant groups,” reported the December 17 New York Times.

“Disengagement from Gaza is uniting the people,” he said in the December 16 speech. He was referring to Tel Aviv’s plan to withdraw its 7,500 settlers who currently occupy 20 percent of the Gaza Strip, a narrow stretch of occupied Palestinian land that is home to 1.3 million Palestinians. “It is uniting us in distinguishing between goals which deserve to be fought for…such as Jerusalem, the large settlement blocs, the security zones and maintaining Israel’s character as a Jewish state—rather than goals where it is clear to all of us that they will not be realized.”

Under Sharon’s “disengagement plan,” which is supported by a majority of the Israeli ruling class, Tel Aviv plans to make a series of secondary concessions to the Palestinians, beginning with the removal of the 7,500 Israeli settlers and ending direct rule in Gaza, dismantling isolated, far-flung settlements on the West Bank, and ending Tel Aviv’s military control over Gaza’s southern border. The broad aim of the Israeli rulers is to shore up the long-term viability of Israel as a junior imperialist power in the Middle East.

“The understandings between the U.S. president and me protect Israel’s most essential interests,” Sharon continued. “Not demanding a return to the ’67 borders; allowing Israel to permanently keep large settlement blocs [with] high Israeli populations; and the total refusal of allowing Palestinian refugees to return to Israel.”

The 1967 borders of the occupied territories encircle 22 percent of the land that once was Palestine. Sharon has made it clear that any future Palestinian “state” that comes out of negotiations will not grant the Palestinians control over the entire 22 percent. Israel has built more than 100 miles of a wall that, when complete, will openly annex 15 percent of the West Bank to Israel.

The refugees Sharon referred to are about 700,000 Palestinians who were driven from their land when the state of Israel was established in 1948. They have lived for the past five decades, along with their descendents, in refugee camps in the occupied territories and surrounding countries. A key demand of the Palestinian national struggle has been their right, and the right of their estimated 4 million descendents, to return to their homes.

Sharon’s plan has drawn the ire of the right wing of his governing party and coalition. Many figures in Sharon’s Likud party and other right-wing members of the ruling coalition have quit or been fired over their opposition to the plan, leaving him temporarily leading a minority bloc in Israel’s parliament. Sharon is now moving to establish a new coalition with the Labor party, whose leading spokespeople broadly support the disengagement plan.

This is another step in the “peace” process between Tel Aviv and the PLO that started with the 1993 Israeli-Palestinian Oslo accord. It is a product both of the inability of the Israeli regime to crush Palestinian resistance, as well as the bourgeoisification of the PLO leadership. The top leaders of the PLO have more and more turned their eyes away from the ranks of the fighting Palestinian people and relied first on the Arab regimes in the region and then on accommodation with Washington in the struggle for a Palestinian homeland.

Over the past four years, in the absence of revolutionary leadership in the national liberation struggle, groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad—bourgeois organizations that advocate “driving the Jews into the sea” and establishing an “Islamic state” in Palestine—claimed the mantle of the armed struggle, focusing on suicide bombings and targeting mostly civilians in Israel.

This course of action and the increasing isolation of these groups have made them the main target of Israel’s offensive, which is directed at any Palestinian who dares resist the occupation. Since 2002, Tel Aviv has dealt crippling blows to those who took up arms against the Israeli occupation, including assassinations of many leaders of Hamas. At the height of the conflict in 2002, two Palestinians died for every Israeli who was killed. Today that ratio is five to one.

In his speech at Herzliya, Sharon said Israel has made headway in winning legitimacy for this crackdown on Palestinian resistance, which it has carried out under the banner of fighting the “war on terrorism.”

“In 2005 we have the opportunity to establish a new partnership with the international community in the struggle against terror and regional and global instability,” Sharon said. “The world, and especially Europe, has learned to understand what we have faced for many years.”

“Israel and the moderate Arab states, as well as the entire world, share a common interest to support regional stability, stop terror, and defeat extremism which threatens the entire world,” he said.

Sharon called for further isolation and pressure on the governments of Iran and Syria. Tehran, he said, “is publicly calling for the elimination of the State of Israel, and continues in its efforts to obtain weapons of mass destruction.” The Syrian regime, he added, “supports dangerous terror organizations such as Hezbollah, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad, and acts to thwart the United States’ efforts to bring democracy and genuine reforms to the Middle East.”  
 
 
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