Yasser Arafat, Jewish settlers, and even members of Ariel Sharon’s cabinet were united yesterday in damning the Israeli prime minister’s grudging concessions toward the creation of a Palestinian state at the Aqaba summit with George Bush on Wednesday, although they disagreed on whether he had gone too far or not far enough.
Arafat said Sharon had offered nothing tangible, and some settlers denounced him as a traitor for promising to begin dismantling Jewish outposts on the West Bank.
A member of his cabinet, Effir Eitam, accused the prime minister of jeopardising Israel’s existence.
”What you are doing is giving birth to a monster of terror,” he told thousands of angry settlers.
The vitriol prompted a fearful debate about the danger of Israel’s Jewish population sliding back into the extreme polarisation that led to the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin when he was prime minister in 1995.
Arafat, the Palestinian Authority president, who was barred from the summit, said that Sharon’s promise to dismantle illegal Jewish outposts amounted to little, because it would not change the reality created by the sprawling established settlements.
”Unfortunately he has not yet offered anything tangible,” Arafat said at his headquarters in Ramallah, which was wrecked last year by the Israeli army.
But he stopped short of condemning the road map process, which polls show has the growing support of the Palestinian population.
The Israeli defence minister, General Shaul Mofaz, met senior officers yesterday to discuss plans to remove the first Jewish outposts.
The government is expected to disband about a dozen of the estimated 120 outposts dotted across the West Bank as a first step, although it is not expected to act until after this weekend’s Shavuot religious holiday.
Eitam, the housing minister and leader of the National Religious party, the party most closely identified with the settlers, said opponents of the road map would vigorously oppose the dismantling of the outposts.
But any resistance would be non-violent, he added.
”We will oppose the evacuation of outposts, but this opposition will take place in the framework of the law,” he went on.
”For Jewish reasons, legal reasons, democratic and humanitarian reasons, we fully condemn any violence against [the Israeli] security forces and against the state of Israel’s symbols of democracy.”
”If someone on the outer margins will consider it, or God forbid do something, we’re saying from the outset that he will have no part in our camp.”
But the most recent attempt to close an outpost, which occurred at the end of last year, led to a sometimes violent confrontation between soldiers and thousands of religious Jews, most of them youths.
Israel’s internal security service, Shin Bet, is reviewing the security arrangements for Sharon. Already, in far-right circles, he is being derided as a traitor and is being compared to Rabin, who was murdered by a violent opponent of his concessions to the Palestinians in pursuit of peace. – Guardian Unlimited Â