In early March -- when the world was distracted by Iraq -- Sharon quietly announced that the security barrier currently carving out chunks of Palestinian farmland near the northern West Bank border will go east, severing the central West Bank region from its Jordan Valley hinterland. In April he mused that mammoth Jewish settlements like Ariel that lie 20 kilometres within the West Bank would eventually be "on our side of the fence".
If so, these walls would cage the emerging "Palestinian entity" into three disconnected cantons in the north, centre and south of the West Bank, covering about 42 percent of its territory but hosting most of its two million or so denizens. This is the "occupation" Sharon wants to end: Israel's occupation of the Palestinian "people", not the occupation of the land and resources that is their patrimony.
"The provisional Palestinian state is a new term for Sharon's old strategy for achieving a long-term interim agreement," says PA Labour Minister Ghassan Khatib. "We know that if we get trapped in this phase we won't be able to move to the final status phase -- there is no chance Sharon will allow this. We also know that the provisional state will be autonomy in effect but occupation in practice. Only it won't be called autonomy -- it will be called statehood and Israel would be let off the hook."
Of the many reservations Palestinians have about the roadmap, the provisional Palestinian state idea is perhaps the gravest. They are aware from bitter experience that Israel's provisional arrangements have a habit of becoming permanent borders. Their quiet hope is that Sharon and the present Israeli government will collapse before that "second" phase is reached. The fear is that in accepting the roadmap Sharon is actually offering them a trapdoor, and less a brake on his colonial ambitions for the West Bank than their realisation.
Graham Usher Al-Ahram 29 May - 4 June
