Violence buoys Sharon, Arafat but hinders peace push

The Middle East`s two oldest adversaries have both emerged stronger from a bloody 35-day showdown in the West Bank and the cause of peace seems paralysed by their mutual hostility, analysts said.

Ariel Sharon has popularity unprecedented for an Israeli prime minister, a halt to Palestinian suicide bombings, and jailings or pending deportation of wanted militants to show for the army offensive which has wound down in the past week.

Yasser Arafat, weakened by past criticism of his running of the Palestinian Authority, has reasserted his leadership by toughing out a siege of his headquarters as Israel is attacked abroad for the army`s destruction of West Bank infrastructure.

The army was ready to quit the last Palestinian town it occupied if a deal went ahead under which gunmen besieged inside Bethlehem`s Nativity Church agreed to go into exile in Italy or be transferred under US guard to the Gaza Strip.

But hopes that weariness with conflict will permit a diplomatic breakthrough seem likely to fail in the face of the two sides` persistent mutual mistrust and dislike.

In Washington, Sharon was lobbying President George W. Bush to ostracise Arafat and dump a Saudi peace plan unpalatable to Israel by airing captured documents alleged to show that the Palestinian leader and Riyadh have funded terror against Israel.

For his part, Arafat used the language of conflict rather than conciliation last week after Israeli troops quit Ramallah to let him out of his wrecked compound, calling Israelis "terrorists", "Nazis" and "racists" for besieging the Nativity church.

Palestinians smoulder over the army`s continued encirclement of West Bank towns and fresh raids to flush out more alleged militants, defying Bush`s call for full Israeli withdrawal from autonomous zones created under interim peace deals.

Sharon`s government says the policy is needed to prevent a renewal of suicide bomb attacks in Israel, where scores of civilians were blown up before the army stormed West Bank towns in late March.

"If Palestinians continue terrorist attacks and (Palestinian leaders) do not stop them, we will need to do it even if that means going in deeper and wider to strike at the terror," said Israel`s army chief of staff, Lieutenant-General Shaul Mofaz.

Palestinians insist they will not be intimidated as long as Israel consolidates its occupation in much of the West Bank and Gaza Strip by expanding Jewish settlements, and say Sharon`s drive to sideline Arafat is doomed to fail.

"One cannot be optimistic about peace talks given that Sharon, after first insisting that Palestinians stop violence first, is trying to impose changes on the Palestinian Authority (PA) leadership," said Palestinian analyst Ghassan el-Khatib.

"It`s not only wrong, it`s impossible. It`s the Vichy approach, resembling what the Nazis did in occupied France.

"Sharon is imposing such conditions because he knows they will be rejected and thereby prevent negotiations on Palestinian independence according to longstanding UN resolutions calling for withdrawal to the 1967 borders," Khatib said.

Analysts said Israel`s refusal to dismantle settlements on land taken in the 1967 Middle East war and the Palestinian refusal to embrace a ceasefire unless Israel commits itself to political talks, remained fundamental obstacles to progress even after Sharon`s crushing crackdown on "nests of terror".

Israeli strategic analyst Mark Heller, alluding to a US proposal for a conference to map out peacemaking ideas, predicted "a lot of diplomatic motion without much movement" because of entrenched Israeli and Palestinian attitudes.

"Arafat still seems to think that violence will pay off. On the other hand, Sharon has neither defeated, isolated nor made Arafat irrelevant as he had intended," he said.

"We see a subsidence of Palestinian violence due to the shock wrought on the West Bank by the size and scope of the Israeli military operation, but no decisive defeat of Arafat that would make him fundamentally reassess policy.

"Sooner or later we will see more terror. A more than temporary calm will require a compromise on the settlements."

But Sharon is ruling out any reconsideration of settlement policy for now, keen not to alienate small nationalist parties crucial to his coalition or lose his party`s next election primary to hardline ex-premier Binyamin Netanyahu.

Analysts said Sharon`s efforts in Washington to erode US support for a Saudi peace plan envisaging Israel withdrawing from Palestinian lands to the pre-1967 borders and keeping Arafat as a peace partner, were not likely to bear fruit.

But they said Sharon could put off substantive peace talks indefinitely, given divisions among US foreign policy makers over how much pressure to exert on each side to reach a settlement.