The Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, last night signed into law legislation surrendering most of his powers to a new prime minister, and opening the way for US President George Bush to meet his commitment to release the US-backed ”road map” for a Middle East peace settlement.
Earlier in the day, the Palestinian parliament rebuffed an attempt by Arafat to cling to some of his powers. Instead it invested in the new prime minister what legislators described as the ”real authority” demanded by Bush as a condition for reigniting the peace process.
The US secretary of state, Colin Powell, said he would have liked the new prime minister to have more power.
”We would have preferred to see even greater authority vested in a prime minister, but it is nevertheless a positive step,” he said.
However, Britain can be expected to put pressure on the White House to follow through swiftly on Bush’s commitment to release the road map, crafted by the ”quartet” of US, European Union, Russia and the UN ,which envisages a Palestinian state within three years.
On Friday, the US leader abandoned his recent insistence, at Israel’s urging, that the plan would have to wait until after a war in Iraq. In an apparent attempt to bolster domestic political support for Tony Blair, he said the route to a Palestinian state would be released when a new Palestinian prime minister with ”real authority” was confirmed in office.
Yesterday, Blair told parliament that the release of the road map was imminent.
All that is left is for Arafat formally to nominate his choice of prime minister. He has already named his deputy in the Palestine Liberation Organisation, Mahmoud Abbas, also known as Abu Mazen, as the candidate.
Arafat surrendered most of his powers, with the exception of control on security and the final arbiter on any peace agreement, under pressure from the US, Britain and other European states after the Israelis said they would no longer deal with the man they called the ”godfather of terrorism”.
The defeat of Arafat’s bid to retain authority to approve ministerial appointments and call cabinet meetings represented a further waning of his political influence, and a strengthening of a legislature which has grown increasingly critical of his leadership.
”It’s the beginning of a transition, a turning point and a qualitative shift in the political culture,” said a legislator, Hanan Ashrawi.
The Israelis have praised Abbas as a man committed to ending violence and corruption. He has long been a critic of the intifada.
The government had previously denounced him for ”supporting terrorism”, and he was widely vilified as a ”Holocaust denier”. But now the Israeli army has suddenly removed from its website extracts from a thesis and book by Abbas that question whether the Nazis used gas chambers to exterminate Jews, and which said that the number murdered was ”less than a million”.
Abbas also suggested that the extermination of Jews was a conspiracy between Zionists and the Nazis. ”The Zionist movement led a broad campaign of incitement against the Jews living under Nazi rule to arouse the government’s hatred of them, to fuel vengeance against them and to expand the mass extermination,” he wrote.
While bolstering Abbas, Israel yesterday continued its pursuit of those who take a harder line.
The army killed another two prominent Hamas figures as the military continued its hunt for leaders of the Islamic fundamentalist group.
Soldiers shot Ali Alian, the Hamas chief for the southern area of the West Bank, in a dawn raid on a village near Bethlehem. The army accuses him of masterminding a suicide bombing in Haifa a fortnight ago that killed 17 people.
Hours later, the army shot dead a Hamas leader from Nablus, Nasser Assida. The Israelis accuse him of a role in the killings of 25 people.
The detention on Sunday night of a prominent Palestinian legislator, Hussam Khader, an outspoken critic of corruption and Arafat, indicates that the Israelis are also trying to neutralise political rivals of the new prime minister.
Officially, the Israelis say Khader ”directed and financed terror in the Nablus area”. But he is the first Palestinian legislator detained since the arrest of the West Bank Fatah leader, Marwan Barghouti, in April.
Some of his Palestinian colleagues believe the Israelis wanted to remove a strident critic of the new political set-up. Khader argued that the new prime minister lacks power to negotiate a fair settlement for the Palestinians. – Guardian Unlimited Â