Road map in peril as cease-fire ends

"If Abbas acts, at long last, then that means the road map is still valid and that they [the Palestinians] are valuable partners," says Dr. Arad, echoing foreign diplomats in Jerusalem. "Should they fail to do so, it could very well mean the road map is dead and that Abu Mazen has outlived his usefulness - he doesn't deliver. This may be a real turning point."

Palestinians deride the Israeli argument that Abbas's days are numbered, with its underlying assumption that Israel can remove a democratically appointed Palestinian politician. And they argue that Israel put Abbas in a position where he couldn't have succeeded. Israeli troops have not withdrawn from the vast majority of Palestinian areas. "There hasn't been any move to allow Palestinian security to work," says Palestinian legislator Ghassan Khatib, who argues that Abbas "cannot and will not" confront militants.

Others argue that Israel did not want Abbas to succeed or the roadmap to work. They point to the pattern of Israeli assassinations and militant attacks that have checkered the cease-fire, including a failed Israeli attempt to kill Mr. Rantisi in June, shortly after the road map was launched.

"Israel has an active interest in making sure the road map doesn't succeed," says Michael Tarazi, a legal adviser to the PA. "Israel knows the best way to get out of a lull in so-called violence is to assassinate. I'm not even going into the 22 Palestinians killed during the cease-fire, the [Palestinian] homes and businesses demolished and the number of settlement outposts remaining."

Most members of Mr. Sharon's right-wing government do oppose the road map, but Israel officials say they are complying with the plan as much as Palestinian actions allow.

"It's simply illogical to ask Israel to make concessions failing to insist on reciprocity," says Arad, who argues that Palestinian security obligations must precede and outweigh any Israeli obligation. "Certain things are not on same moral level," he says. "Settlements do not come near in importance to the security issues, which are an issue of much greater salience in Israeli terms and objective terms because the lives of people are at stake."

Up until this point, Hamas and Islamic Jihad had announced that they would "respond" to Israeli actions with their own attacks, all the while maintaining the cease-fire.

Some Israeli analysts suggest that Hamas was trying to create a dynamic of "mutually assured deterrence" with Israel by responding to every assassination with a bombing. These analysts say the scale of the Aug. 19 attack, conducted by the group's West Bank wing, took Hamas's Gaza leaders by surprise and threw the delicate balance of deterrence off kilter. The attacks' timing, coming immediately after the suicide bombing on the UN headquarters in Baghdad, was also damaging.

The logic of this conflict suggests continued violence ahead. Hamas promises retaliation for Abu Shanab's death, while Israeli officials have loosened restrictions in place on the army during the cease-fire. Wednesday night, military operations were already underway in and around the West Bank cities of Ramallah, Nablus, Jenin, Hebron and Tulkarem.

"The immediate result will be an all-out deterioration in security situation for both Palestinians and Israelis," says Hisham Ahmed, a political science professor at Bir Zeit University in the West Bank.

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