From the Palestinian point of view there is hardly any doubt that in the coming months, efforts to renew the peace process will hit a dead end. This will happen some time after the uproar of the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and the northern West Bank, and at the latest toward the end of the year, when the agreement for maintaining the "calm" that Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas reached with the Palestinian organizations comes to an end. There is a certain amount of similarity between the situation today and that in the summer of 2000, after the five years of the interim agreement in the Oslo framework came to an end. The summit meeting of then prime minister Ehud Barak and PA chairman Yasser Arafat at Camp David failed - and the result of that dead end ultimately was the second intifada.
Now we can expect a similar outcome. The focal points of the coming crisis are clear: Although Marwan Barghouti has called from prison to hold huge victory celebrations after Israel's pullout from the Gaza Strip, official Palestinian spokesmen are reiterating that the withdrawal from there is not a withdrawal as long as Israel does not hand over to them control of the land, sea and air border-crossing points. "Without control of these crossing points and without the possibility of Palestinian mobility between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, Gaza will turn into one big prison" - this has been a standard headline in the Palestinian media for months now. There is hardly any chance for an agreement on these matters. Although the Egyptians are talking about the border at Rafah (the Philadelphi Route), there too an agreement is not in sight in the near future. The trap for Israel is clear: If the Israel Defense Forces remain on the Philadelphi Route, the border strip will turn into a battlefield - and if we withdraw from it, vast amounts of materiel will flow into Gaza.
An equally important locus of crisis is the security fence around the West Bank in general and around East Jerusalem in particular - and to this must be added the almost permanent problems concerning the security of the Palestinian public. Groups of armed men have turned the West Bank into the Wild West. In the Palestinian judicial system at present there are strikes and protests because judges and attorneys cannot function. They are constantly threatened and beaten, and there have also been cases of shooting and abduction. In the hospitals, too, violence results when families are not pleased with the medical care.
In some of the cases the armed groups are made up of young wanted men, whose problems the authorities are not managing to solve, and of family members and friends of security prisoners whose number, according to the Palestinians, is close to 9,000. Many of them will hold a hunger strike tomorrow so that Abbas and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon will not forget them in their meeting.
On this backdrop, the Palestinians are trying to depict how the next violent outbreak will look. It will be different from the first and second intifadas.
The first intifada was called the intifada of stones. It focused on blocking roads, commercial and school strikes, flying Palestinian flags, and throwing stones and Molotov cocktails. The second intifada was far more violent. Its headline was suicide attacks on buses and in Israeli entertainment centers.
The third intifada, signs of which have already been seen in Gaza and Sderot, will be the intifada of what in military language is called weapons with a steep trajectory. That is, an intifada of mortar shells, rockets and missiles. The means for manufacturing them in Gaza - which will no doubt reach the West Bank as well - are rather primitive and these weapons usually do not exact many victims. The prime minister's adviser Dov Weissglas has called them "flying objects," but they do cause fear and panic, and thus are the most effective weapons at the disposal of the PA once the evacuation of the Strip is completed, and when the walls and fences are completed in the West Bank and Jerusalem.
From the Palestinian perspective the third intifada looks inevitable in light of the unilateral Israeli disengagement, which is not a step in the direction of a peace agreement, but rather a stage in military deployment.
