Prime Minister Ariel Sharon risks antagonizing Israel's closest ally the United States by demanding 48 hours of absolute calm -- an almost impossible task -- before he will allow a cease-fire meeting, analysts say.
Talks between Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, crucial for Washington's bid to get moderate Arab countries to join its anti-terrorism coalition, were postponed again on Monday.
The immediate reason this time was the shooting death of a 28-year-old Israeli settler woman in the West Bank in an ambush claimed by the radical Palestinian group Islamic Jihad.
The hard-line Sharon has not bothered to hide his opposition to the meeting, which he believes will play into Arafat's hands amid the tense atmosphere after the hijacked jetliner bombings in New York and Washington.
Last week he finally gave into pressure from US President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell, and agreed the meeting could proceed.
But he set as a condition 48 hours of absolute calm in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, where a Palestinian uprising has raged for nearly a year.
Arafat declared a Palestinian cease-fire last week to create the conditions for the meeting.
Yet the 48-hour requirement in effect gives radical Palestinian groups like Islamic Jihad, which oppose the peace process and have sworn to ignore the cease-fire, a virtual veto over any direct talks with Arafat.
Israeli analyst Gerald Steinberg believes Sharon is "taking a risk" with the United States but said the prime minister would likely have allowed the meeting later Monday had the settler woman not been killed.
Sharon "reached a position where he had no choice" and could not have postponed it again, said Steinberg, a researcher for the BESA Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University near Tel Aviv.
"If today we had not had the murder in the Jordan valley and if Peres and Arafat had not met, if Sharon had still refused to allow the meeting, it would have been damaging to Sharon's image in the United States," he said.
Instead Sharon can now say Arafat was responsible for the death, even though he admitted to French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine on Monday that the Palestinian leader is seriously trying to stop the bloodshed.
In the short-term, the latest Israeli murder will probably increase US pressure on Arafat to rein in more radical Palestinian elements.
But even Peres has stressed the difficulty of totally stamping out attacks in the volatile region, and pointedly called the murder "an exception."
Some in Washington's corridors of power are now likely to feel Israel, which receives three billion dollars in annual aid from the United States, is not doing its bit to help in their anti-terrorism crisis.
By delaying the meeting again, Sharon has given the impression he never wants it to happen, which is not going over well among Arab nations the US desperately wants on its side right now.
Nor is Sharon's stance being well received by the Palestinians, who inevitably will help determine the future of the peace process.
"As long as [Sharon] is not allowing this meeting, my conclusion is that there is not enough pressure on him" by the United States, Palestinian analyst Ghassan al-Khatib, of the Jerusalem Media and Communication Center, told AFP.
"It seems that there is no pressure. It seems that this is just verbal pressure because if there were real pressure, I don't expect Sharon just to say no to Colin Powell or the president," Khatib said.
"If [the United States] cannot influence the Israelis for such a minor thing, which is the meeting itself, then how can they be consistent with themselves when they say they want to establish a coalition to fight terror and to restore the respect for international law?" he said -- JERUSALEM (AFP)
© 2001 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
