The Boss Has Gone Crazy

When the fruit sellers at the Tel Aviv market shout “the boss has gone crazy!” they meanthat they are selling their merchandise at ridiculously low prices.

In the world’s capitals, a similar cry is now being heard: “The boss has gone crazy!” – butit is not about the price of tomatoes. It refers to the new situation, after the reelection ofGeorge W. Bush for four more years.

In many places, Bush is seen as a crazy cowboy, the kind who rides into town shooting in alldirections. He has attacked Afghanistan. He has attacked Iraq. His neo-con handlers want toattack Syria and Iran in the next phase. They want to establish subservient regimeseverywhere (“promoting democracy in the Middle East”), station permanent Americangarrisons in the region and control the world’s oil market, and – last but not least – help ArielSharon to fulfil his plans.

Now, in his second term of office, Bush can do pretty much as he pleases.

The Middle Eastern rulers have drawn this conclusion with impressive speed. Every one ofthem rushed for cover in the nearest political cave, until the danger is over.

• The Syrian ruler, Bashar Assad, has started a peace offensive, to the sound of a hundred angelic trumpets.
• The Egyptian ruler, Husni Mubarrak, has suddenly discovered that Sharon is his

long-lost brother, a man of peace from the cradle onwards. He now presents himself as Bush’s viceroy in the Middle East.

• The Jordanian ruler, King Abdallah II, is making similar noises (after taking the opportunity to clip the wings of his younger brother.)
• The rulers of Iran, the tough Ayatullahs, executed a hasty withdrawal and agreed to give up their nuclear program.
• And the Palestinians are uniting behind Abu Mazen, who is favored by President

Bush.

Optimism has a field day. The winds of hope are blowing throughout the region. Diplomatsfrom all over the world are arriving for sudden visits hoping to capitalize on the expectedsuccess, like bees descending on flowers. International commentators, prophets who have anuncanny ability to foresee the past, talk about the Middle Eastern Spring.

(This, by the way, is a geographical misconception. Spring is the symbol of hope inEurope, where nature awakens after the cold, hard winter. In our region, the symbol of hope isautumn, when nature awakens after the hot, dry summer.)

Have all these hopes any substance?

One can examine, for example, the Syrian hope. Assad Jr. is proposing negotiationswithout preconditions. A seductive offer. Will Sharon accept it?

Once, in the throes of a political debate in the Knesset, I addressed the Prime Minister,Golda Meir: “It seems to me that you are faced with a fateful decision: whether not to give theWest Bank back to King Hussein or not to give it back to the Palestinians.” Today Sharon is facedwith a similar dilemma: what to do first – not to give the Golan back to the Syrians or not to giveback the West Bank to the Palestinians?

Like his predecessor, Ehud Barak, Sharon would not dream of giving the Golan back. Even ifhe had been ready to do this (as he is not), he would not dare to propose the evacuation of thedozens of settlements there.

In his autobiography, ex-President Bill Clinton recounts what happened last timeSyrian-Israeli peace was placed on the agenda. Ehud Barak, the then Prime Minister,requested Clinton to call a Syrian-Israeli conference. Clinton, eager to garner aninternational success, readily agreed. He was pleasantly surprised when Assad Sr. gave upall his former demands (i.e. “to dangle his feet in the Sea of Galilee”) and agreed to all theIsraeli demands. Then, at the very last moment, when everything was ready for signing, Baraktold Clinton that on second thoughts he had decided to call the whole thing off.

Now there is no Clinton around, and Sharon has no need to pretend. He remarkedcontemptuously that Assad talks about peace only because of the American pressure. (So what?Isn’t this the perfect opportunity to achieve peace?)

Sharon rejected the Syrian offer out of hand. Assad offers peace without preconditions?Good, but we have some of our own: first of all, he must drive all the leaders of the Palestinianorganizations out of Damascus and disarm Hizbullah in Lebanon. That means that Assad mustgive up every single one of the few cards he holds, before negotiations can even begin. One hasto be pretty naive to believe that then Sharon would then give up even one single settlement.The more so since Bush has given a clear-cut order: don’t talk with the Syrians, don’t make itdifficult for me to attack them if I decide to do so.

Therefore, all the hope is now concentrated on the Palestinian front. If Abu Mazen iselected President of the Palestinian Authority next month, will real negotiations start?

It doesn’t look that way. Sharon has indeed agreed to withdraw the army from the towns onelection day – but not before. In the meantime, Sharon’s offensive goes on relentlessly: thisweek another “targeted assassination” was attempted (it failed), practically every dayPalestinians (including children) are being killed, the systematic humiliation at theroadblocks goes on, the building of the infamous wall continues, settlers are uprootingPalestinian olive groves without hindrance. One of the candidates for president,left-leaning Mustapha Barghouti (a distant relative of Marwan) was stopped at a checkpointand severely beaten by the soldiers.

However, the real question is not whether there is a temporary easing of restrictions, asa gesture towards Abu Mazen (and, more importantly, towards Bush), but whether Sharon isready to enter genuine negotiations for the establishment of a real Palestinian state withEast Jerusalem as its capital and a return to the pre-1967 Green Line, more or less. There is noindication of that.

True, Shimon Peres declares that he is going to join the government in order to facilitatethe Gaza “disengagement, and that immediately afterwards he will push for a solution for theWest Bank. But those are empty words, calculated to silence his opponents in his own party.After all, when he served as a minister in Sharon’s previous government, he did practicallynothing for peace. Now, when he crawls back into the government and everybody knows that hewants to stay there whatever happens, he will achieve even less.

In the new government, Sharon can do what he wants. If he wants to, he can implement the“disengagement plan”. If he wants to, he can annex most of the West Bank.

The boss has gone crazy? The last thing he will do is to put pressure on Sharon.