A lethal arrest raid, a suicide bombing, fresh land expropriations, a threatening Hamas video: That's the follow-up so far to Israel's historic Gaza pullout.
Rather than seize the moment to jump-start negotiations, Israelis and Palestinians appear to be falling into a familiar pattern of violence and rhetoric. Still, the withdrawal from Jewish settlements in Gaza is of such significance that even the latest spasms are unlikely to torpedo all momentum for peace.
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon won praise for fulfilling his pledge -- in a dramatic, breakneck sweep that ended last week -- to evacuate 8,500 settlers from the Gaza Strip and another 500 from the northern West Bank. Now the Israeli leader wants to send a very clear message that terrorism won't be tolerated and that major West Bank settlement blocs will remain Israeli.
"Israel cannot return to the '67 or '48 borders, because of the settlements," Sharon said in an interview on Monday, referring to Israel's frontiers before it captured Gaza, the West Bank and other lands. "The settlement blocs will remain in sovereign Israel. They are of vital strategic importance."
He added, however, that some other settlements would have to go in a final peace deal.
Sharon's critics say now is the time to capitalize on the goodwill created by the Gaza evacuation, not to flex muscles. Many fear the two sides already have begun to squander a unique historical opportunity. And the recent friction has brought home the pitfalls of trying to get Israelis and Palestinians together after five years of trust-destroying violence.
Both sides say they're still prepared to talk, however. Officials said a meeting is possible between Sharon and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas when the two are in New York this month to address the UN.
And Sharon's withdrawal, ending 38 years of Israeli presence in the Gaza Strip, is likely to have long-lasting ripple effects on peacemaking that could weather some setbacks. With the settlers gone, the army is expected to complete its own pullout in the coming days.
"We understand that Mr. Sharon has to show the Israeli people that he is conceding on one side and strengthening his position on the other," Palestinian chief of staff Rafiq Husseini told reporters. "That worries us, but I think that in the end, justice will have to prevail."
Officials on both sides expressed hope that the pullout would create momentum for a return to Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking. Then, an Israeli arrest raid in the West Bank town of Tulkarem deteriorated into a shootout that killed five Palestinians, and a suicide bombing on Sunday critically wounded two security guards at a bus station in the southern Israeli city of Beersheba.
That bombing came a day after Hamas militants in Gaza released a videotape purportedly showing their top bombmaker, Mohammed Deif, celebrating the Gaza pullout as a victory for armed resistance and threatening more attacks until Israel is destroyed. Deif has been in hiding from Israeli security forces since 1992.
And Israel, just two days after the last Gaza settler was evacuated, announced plans to confiscate Palestinian land around the West Bank's largest Jewish settlement to build a separation barrier that would, in effect, annex it to Jerusalem. Israel also said it would build a police station between the settlement, Maaleh Adumim, and Jerusalem -- another step that alarmed Palestinians.
"In exchange for the evacuation of people who shouldn't have been there in the first place, [Israel] is going to steal more and more Palestinian land," said Diana Buttu, legal adviser to the Palestinian Authority.
Buttu said Israel can't claim that it has ended its occupation of Gaza because it still controls the coastal strip's borders and air and sea space.
But she said an agreement, approved by the Israeli Cabinet last weekend, to have Egypt deploy 750 troops along the Gaza-Egyptian border so that Israel could pull out of the area was "a step in the right direction."
Another promising development occurred on Monday when Palestinian militant groups in Gaza told an Egyptian envoy that they remained committed to a six-month-old truce with Israel.
At the same time, however, an Islamic Jihad leader said his group reserves the right to respond to what he called Israel's "brutal massacres."
Military officials said Israeli army chief Lieutenant General Dan Halutz did not give final approval for the arrest raid in Tulkarem that killed five Palestinians and set off a new round of violence. The officials said Halutz criticized the raid as ill-timed and lacking "sensitivity."
Still, some saw the raid and other measures as an attempt to shore up government support among Israeli hardliners after the Gaza pullout alienated large sections of Sharon's right-wing Likud party.
David Landau, editor of Israel's Haaretz daily, said he thinks Sharon has hurt himself "so badly with the Right that I honestly can't see much that he can do by way of winning them back over."
On May 7, 1971, Henry Kissinger planned his first, ultra-secret mission to China and pondered whether it would be better to meet his Chinese interlocutors “in Pakistan where the Pakistanis would tape the meeting — or in China where the Chinese would do the taping.” After a flicker of thought, he decided to have the Chinese do all the tape recording, translating and transcribing. Fortuitously, historians have several thousand pages of verbatim texts of Dr. Kissinger’s negotiations with his Chinese counterparts. Paradoxically, behind the scenes, Chinese stenographers prepared verbatim English language typescripts faster than they could translate and type them
More than 30 years ago when I immigrated to the US, applied for citizenship and took the 100-question civics test, the one part of the naturalization process that left the deepest impression on me was one question on the N-400 form, which asked: “Have you ever been a member of, involved in or in any way associated with any communist or totalitarian party anywhere in the world?” Answering “yes” could lead to the rejection of your application. Some people might try their luck and lie, but if exposed, the consequences could be much worse — a person could be fined,
On May 13, the Legislative Yuan passed an amendment to Article 6 of the Nuclear Reactor Facilities Regulation Act (核子反應器設施管制法) that would extend the life of nuclear reactors from 40 to 60 years, thereby providing a legal basis for the extension or reactivation of nuclear power plants. On May 20, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) legislators used their numerical advantage to pass the TPP caucus’ proposal for a public referendum that would determine whether the Ma-anshan Nuclear Power Plant should resume operations, provided it is deemed safe by the authorities. The Central Election Commission (CEC) has
When China passed its “Anti-Secession” Law in 2005, much of the democratic world saw it as yet another sign of Beijing’s authoritarianism, its contempt for international law and its aggressive posture toward Taiwan. Rightly so — on the surface. However, this move, often dismissed as a uniquely Chinese form of legal intimidation, echoes a legal and historical precedent rooted not in authoritarian tradition, but in US constitutional history. The Chinese “Anti-Secession” Law, a domestic statute threatening the use of force should Taiwan formally declare independence, is widely interpreted as an emblem of the Chinese Communist Party’s disregard for international norms. Critics