Vicious Sharon-US plan on hold

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon suffered an overwhelming 
defeat within his own Likud Party when 59.5 percent of members 
voted in a referendum to reject his plan to withdraw a small 
number of settlers from the Gaza Strip. The vicious plan, given 
unconditional support last month by US president George W Bush, 
would have deprived the Palestinian people of their homeland.

The plan for unilateral separation from the Palestinians 
established that the extensive blocs of colonies in the West Bank 
would be maintained under Israeli control, behind the apartheid 
wall that Israel is constructing in that territory.

Following his defeat, the Palestinian Authority called on Sharon 
to apply the Road Map, the latest international peace plan that 
until now Israel has refused to implement.

"After this failure, the Israeli Government should take up 
negotiations immediately with representatives of the Palestinian 
people in order to seriously apply the Road Map", said Nabil Abz 
Rudeina, principal advisor to the Palestinian Authority's 
President, Yasser Arafat.

Proposed in June 2003, the Road Map anticipates the creation of 
an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza 
Strip.

Giving his backing to Sharon's proposal, Bush had declared that 
Israel will not have to return to the pre-1967 borders. He 
sanctioned the annexation of large parts of the West Bank — that 
would have been part of the new Palestinian state — and he has 
ruled out the return of Palestinian refugees and their 
descendents who were evicted from their homeland by Zionist 
settlers in 1948-49.

Sharon's plan proposed that Israel would withdraw from the Gaza 
strip and wind up the small settlements of Jewish occupiers, 
around 7000. All the major West Bank settlements would remain and 
Israel's new borders would be drawn around them.

It would in effect have meant only four out of the 120 
settlements scattered over the West Bank being dismantled, 
annexing big chunks of West Bank territory into Israel. But even 
the prospect of this wholesale dispossession of the Palestinian 
people was unacceptable to the reactionary settlers.

Up to this point the United States had officially maintained that 
there has to be a negotiated settlement between Israelis and the 
Palestinians on the question of the occupied territories, which 
Israel annexed in the 1967 war, even though the United States 
tacitly supported the Jewish settlements in the West Bank and 
Gaza.

The implication of this new US stance is to nullify the two-state 
solution, even though Bush reiterates support for it. If Sharon's 
plan were implemented it would rule out completely an independent 
Palestinian state. Sharon and the US have not abandoned these 
aims, and will attempt to revive them in some form or other in 
the future.

Meanwhile, in a demonstration of just how out of step Bush and 
Sharon are with the rest of the world on these issues, the 191-
member United Nations General Assembly last week overwhelmingly 
re-affirmed the right of the Palestinian people "to exercise 
sovereignty and to achieve independence in their State, 
Palestine".

With a vote of 140 in favour to six against (Israel, Marshall 
Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau and the United States) and with 
11 abstentions, the Assembly adopted a resolution that also 
confirmed "the status of the Palestinian territory occupied since 
1967, including East Jerusalem, remains one of military 
occupation." The text further stated, "the Palestinian people 
have the right to self-determination and to sovereignty over this 
territory".

Australia again displayed its craven foreign policy position on 
the crisis by joining the abstainers.