Haaretz
Kislev 2, 2004
The United States will press Israel to
allow East Jerusalem residents to participate in elections for a new
Palestinian Authority chairman and Palestinian legislature. Elections are
expected to take place in January.
Washington will also ask
Jerusalem to withdraw the Israel Defense Forces from Palestinian cities
and to ease Palestinian travel throughout the West Bank in order to
facilitate the election campaign and the balloting.
However, both
American and Israeli sources in Washington said the U.S. would not demand
a full withdrawal of Israeli forces to the pre-intifada lines - and even
withdrawals from Palestinian cities would depend on indications that the
new PA leadership was prepared to take responsibility for security and
prevent areas evacuated by the IDF from serving as launching pads for
terror attacks.
The Oslo Accords explicitly allow East Jerusalem
residents to participate in PA elections, and they did so in the last
election, in 1996. The Palestinians want East Jerusalem residents involved
this time as well, and Washington is backing this stance, as it believes
that Israel must do everything possible to bolster the legitimacy of the
election, and hence of the new leadership that it will
produce.
Israel's government, however, is split over whether to
accede to Washington's demand. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon favors
Palestinian elections, but said that the participation of East Jerusalem
residents "requires discussion," and no such discussion has yet occurred.
Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom opposes allowing East Jerusalem residents
to participate, while Interior Minister Avraham Poraz favors their
participation.
But several senior Israeli officials who last week
expressed vehement opposition to allowing East Jerusalem residents to
participate in the election changed their tunes over the weekend in
response to U.S. President George W. Bush's public support for elections.
Yesterday, these officials said that Israel would have trouble opposing a
democratic process that enjoyed American and international backing.
Moreover, they said, just as U.S. citizens living in Israel voted in the
recent American elections, PA citizens living in East Jerusalem should be
able to vote in Palestinian elections.
Speaking at a joint press
conference in Washington on Friday with British Prime Minister Tony Blair,
Bush said that he was determined to bring about the establishment of a
Palestinian state by the end of his second term, but declined to unveil
any new initiative toward this end, and specifically rejected Blair's
proposal for either an international peace conference or a special
American envoy to the Middle East. Instead, he reiterated that an
essential precondition for Palestinian statehood was Palestinian
democracy, and therefore, the focus right now must be on facilitating the
upcoming Palestinian elections.
For this reason, Bush also
refrained from making any public demands on Israel that were unrelated to
elections, such as a settlement freeze, saying that Israel's main task now
must be to facilitate the elections.
In Israel, the defense
establishment was surprised by the PA's decision to call elections in
January, having previously predicted that elections would take much longer
to organize. Defense establishment discussions of "the day after" Yasser
Arafat's death had therefore completely ignored the issue of elections.
Now, the defense establishment will have to reevaluate its suggested
"gestures" of troop withdrawals from Palestinian cities and increased
Palestinian freedom of movement in the West Bank, as it had originally
proposed implementing them gradually, over a period much longer than the
next two months.
"It's clear that we will make an effort to enable
freedom of movement for [election] activists and voters, and arrangements
for the day or two of the elections," said a senior government source.
"It's possible to reach an agreement; this is a mutual
interest."
The source cited the IDF's withdrawal from Ramallah
during Arafat's funeral as an example of successful coordination. Israel
has also permitted Palestinian policemen in Ramallah to bear arms until
Tuesday, when the official mourning period for Arafat ends; at that point,
this concession will be reassessed.
But government sources said it
was unlikely that Israel would free Tanzim leader Marwan Barghouti, a
popular politician who is currently serving five life sentences for
murder, to run in the PA elections. "In Israel, there is a separation of
powers, and the man was convicted in a judicial proceeding," said one
source.
Arafat's death is expected to spark a wave of high-level
visits to Ramallah, as Israel's long-standing refusal to receive any
diplomat who visited the PA chairman expired along with Arafat. The first
visitors will include the foreign ministers of Britain, Egypt and Turkey.
U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, who will meet with Shalom in
Washington tomorrow, is also considering visiting Jerusalem and Ramallah
next week.
For now, the United States is refraining from any
dramatic gestures toward the new PA leadership, both for fear that an
American embrace would undermine it, and because the situation in the
territories remains unclear. But sources in Washington said that after the
PA elections, if the new leadership appeared to be serious about reform,
Bush was likely to press Sharon to turn his unilateral disengagement plan
into a negotiated withdrawal.