Marie Colvin - On the Front Line

The lineup for his cabinet includes retired generals Ariel Sharon, the former defence minister who launched the 1982 Lebanon war, tipped for the finance portfolio, and Rafael Eitan, candidate for the Ministry of Domestic Security (police), who as Sharon’s chief of staff enforcing the siege of Beirut announced the Arabs were ‘trapped like drugged bugs in a bottle’. Netanyahu’s new Israel is likely to bear little resemblance to the vision many have had in their sights in the past three years.

Israeli bulldozers rev up for showdown in Jerusalem

JERUSALEM

16 March 1997

Sasson Shem-Tov drives a black Jaguar and wears sunglasses whatever the weather. He does not usually take much interest in politics. But this week he finds himself in the middle of a dispute between Israel and the Arabs that risks bathing his country in blood.

Shem-Tov is about to order his bulldozers into Arab east Jerusalem to help build a Jewish settlement that the Palestinians have vowed to stop by any means. Even America, which is usually supportive of Israel, has denounced its plan to build 6,500 homes for Jews on a hill within sight of the church spires of Bethlehem. On Thursday the United Nations general assembly called for construction to stop.

Yasser Arafat was so angry that he twice refused to take calls from Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister. It is not only the settlement plans that have provoked Arab ire: Netanyahu recently announced that the first step of a three-phase withdrawal from rural areas of the West Bank, mandated under the Oslo accords, would include only a fraction of the territory Palestinians expected. The prime minister then ordered the closure of four Palestinian offices in Jerusalem, a move whose legality is being debated.

King Hussein of Jordan sent a bitter letter charging that the Israeli prime minister was ‘dragging the peace process to the edge of the abyss’. When a Jordanian gunman opened fire on Israeli schoolgirls on Thursday, killing seven of them, commentators in both countries suggested he had been angered by Netanyahu’s intransigence and insinuations.

Shem-Tov, a wealthy Israeli construction magnate, is unperturbed. ‘We are going in next week,’ he said over his car telephone. His yellow bulldozers were already in place near Har Homa, the pine-covered hill Israel seized from Jordan in the 1967 war, which he has been contracted to clear for the new homes. To him, it is just business. But for the right-wing Israeli government, the settlement means much more.

If built, Har Homa will close the last gap in a half-moon of Jewish settlements constructed on hilltops around the outer edges of Arab east Jerusalem. By encircling the Arab area with these self-contained Jewish townships, right-wing Israelis want to create ‘facts on the ground’ to ensure they will never have to cede an inch of Jerusalem to the Palestinians, who claim east Jerusalem as their capital.

Under the Oslo accord, the final status of Jerusalem is supposed to be decided in talks scheduled to conclude in 1999, but Palestinians argue that there will not be much to talk about if Israel keeps building. Netanyahu showed no sign of backing down. ‘I am building Har Homa this week and nothing is going to stop me,’ he said in an interview. The Israeli cabinet on Friday reaffirmed his decision, and government sources said the bulldozers are likely to move in tomorrow.

The army will no doubt be called in to keep back protesters, who have vowed to lie down in front of Shem-Tov’s machines. Palestinian leaders have pledged that the demonstrations will be peaceful, but emotions are running so high among Palestinians that they are widely expected to explode into violence. ‘The minute the bulldozers go in I think only God knows the consequences of what will happen,’ said Saeb Erekat, a Palestinian minister involved in the Israeli–Palestinian negotiations.

Yesterday Arafat made a last-ditch effort to thwart Netanyahu diplomatically. Amid Israeli condemnations, he gathered American, European and Arab sponsors of the peace process to an emergency conference at his seaside headquarters in Gaza to seek their help in stopping the Har Homa settlement and putting the peace process back on track.

Although the Americans used their veto in the United Nations vote, they showed their opposition to the settlement plans by sending Edward Abington, the American consul in Jerusalem, to the talks, despite a direct Israeli request that Washington should boycott the meeting. The Palestinian president is making no secret of his anger. ‘The situation is really serious,’ Arafat told envoys to yesterday’s meeting. ‘We are facing a plan to destroy the peace process.’

The conference in Gaza is not expected to make any difference on the ground. Arafat called the meeting to send a signal to Netanyahu that he is not alone; the governments who sent envoys wanted to reassure Arafat of support, which they hoped would head off an explosion of Palestinian violence.

The threat of bloodshed is no secret. Under the codename Thornbush, Israeli army units with tanks have been practising manoeuvres to re-enter cities on the West Bank controlled by Arafat’s Palestinian authority, in case Palestinians fight to stop the building at Har Homa. Israeli intelligence sources said yesterday that the army wanted to be better prepared than it was in September, when 60 Palestinians and 15 Israeli soldiers were killed in clashes after Netanyahu’s decision to open a tunnel in Jerusalem.

Given the reluctance on both sides to fight, there is still a good chance violence can be avoided. Crises have come and gone since Netanyahu’s government took over from Labour in May, and generally he has compromised.

Nor is Arafat in a strong position. His army is no match for the Israeli forces. If he had to fight, the peace process that would finally win a homeland for Palestinians would be shown up as a failure. He would then be vulnerable to Islamic extremists.

Netanyahu needs the support of the ultra-right-wing parties in his coalition government. But he may well have miscalculated the strength of anger his moves have inspired among Palestinians. The test of that will come when the bulldozers close in on Har Homa.

Arafat encircled in battle for Jerusalem

6 April 1997

In his first interview with a foreign journalist since the latest Middle East crisis erupted, the Palestinian leader tells Marie Colvin in Gaza why the new Israeli township must be stopped.

It was an odd spectacle: Yasser Arafat marched briskly around his modest office, arms swinging, eyes fixed on the carpet. He might have been deep in thought. But the diminutive Palestinian leader calls his compulsive pacing ‘speed walking’, a form of daily exercise that seems a perfect metaphor for his political predicament: he has little room for manoeuvre.

Sweating in the heavy military jacket he wears in all seasons, he marched round and round on Friday, skirting the conference table and ignoring the breathtaking view from his windows of the sparkling Mediterranean sea. After half an hour’s wear of the dull, grey carpet, he sat down, mopped his forehead with a yellow Kleenex and turned his attention to a visiting reporter.

On his desk were reports of yet another day of violent Palestinian protests in the West Bank against the decision by Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, to build a new Jewish settlement in Arab east Jerusalem.