Global Policy Forum

By Danny Rubinstein

Israel and the Palestinians will find it very difficult to clear the first hurdle on the long track of obstacles in the political process known as implementing the road map. It's the hurdle of releasing Palestinian security prisoners. The issue is loaded, on both sides, and it's nearly impossible to see an Israeli-Palestinian agreement on the list of prisoners to be released. On the Palestinian side, they are very clear: For every family celebration over a freed prisoner, there will be anger in another family because of someone left in jail.

Meanwhile, something new has come up to cloud the atmosphere between the sides - visits by Jews and foreigners to the Temple Mount. While the police have been organizing visits by Jews to the Al-Aqsa plaza, they closed access to the mosques on Friday to tens of thousands of Muslim worshipers. All the streets around the Old City were blocked. Only worshipers over the age of 46 were allowed on to the plaza plateau for prayers.

Yasser Arafat and the PLO executive called for speedy international intervention to halt the new Israeli provocation, and the Arab press once again described a process of "Judaization of East Jerusalem," which Israel is turning into a military barracks. The Palestinian speakers were not exaggerating by much when they described how the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron has been turned from a mosque into a synagogue. Now they are warning that if they aren't on guard, the same thing could happen to Al Aqsa.

From the Palestinian perspective, there is, of course, still the problem of the checkpoints and freedom of movement on the roads. In the West Bank, the issue has yet to be dealt with seriously. The minute the constraints are loosened on Palestinian movement in the West Bank, the settlers will respond angrily, and they have the political power, perhaps, to prevent any decision to reopen the territory roads to Palestinian traffic. The Palestinian demand to lift the sieges of the cities and villages also includes the demand to halt the construction of the separation fence and to lift the siege from Arafat and the Muqata. "Without that we cannot make progress," said Ahmed Qureia, the speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council, two days ago.

The hudna and the relative calm are very fragile. And there are plenty who would like to undermine it. "This is a temporary situation and Hamas has not changed its policy for the destruction of the Jewish state," Hamas radical Abdel Aziz Rantisi said on Saturday in Gaza.

The dynamics of regression are very familiar. On both sides there will be a sense of fatigue and disappointment. Israel will give the Palestinians only a smidgen of what the Palestinians demand. As one Palestinian journalist put it, "we're given `gestures' but we are ordered to `deliver the goods,'" explaining that the essence of the relationship is that Israel does the Palestinians "favors," but demands they pay the full price.

Therefore, it can already be assumed that there will be a rise in the number of attempted attacks in the not too distant future. Some new group, with a murky identity, will pop up, like the "popular resistance committees" operating in a few places in Gaza and whose membership runs the gamut of Palestinian factions. Just as in the past we heard about new groups - Fatah Hawks, Tanzim, Black Panther, Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, Al Qassam Brigades - we'll hear about some new underground enemy group that has presumably received a "green light" from people in the Palestinian leadership and the vicious cycle of bloodshed will return in full force.

How can we get out of it? Apparently only through very dramatic steps that are much more comprehensive than negotiations over which prisoners will be released, which checkpoints removed and which roads opened - let alone the evacuation of a trailer and two tents at an empty outpost nobody has ever heard of.

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