Rice's job in Gaza

SECRETARY OF State Condoleezza Rice's visit to Israel this week reflects a welcome, if belated, understanding that ominous shadows are falling across the Israeli disengagement from Gaza that is scheduled to begin in a month. The two sides need help badly, not only to coordinate security arrangements and economic plans but also to overcome the tremendous internal stresses affecting both the Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas and the Israeli government of Ariel Sharon.

Rice will have to be tough with both sides yet understanding of their domestic pressures. She must make it clear that the United States will not stand for renewed large-scale violence from either camp. At the same time, she needs to muster a certain amount of subtlety in calibrating the political effects of US pressure on both Abbas and Sharon.

The immediate need is to stop Palestinian mortar and rocket attacks on Israelis. As a consequence of a recent suicide bombing, Israeli retaliation, and more than 100 mortars and rockets being fired at Israelis, Israeli troops are now assembled just outside Gaza, preparing for an operation aimed at stifling the forces behind the rocket attacks.

If it comes to that, the truce of the past five months will be shredded. Even if the Israeli disengagement from Gaza might still be implemented, the meaning of the event for both camps would be changed for the worse. Instead of the withdrawal becoming a precedent for a comprehensive land-for-peace accord, it would play into the hands of hard-liners on both sides who argue that no peace is possible with the other side.

While urging restraint on Abbas and Sharon, Rice will have to be mindful of their domestic difficulties. Sharon faces settler extremists who challenge the authority of the Israeli state, rabbis who encourage soldiers to disobey orders, and fanatics capable of assassinating him as one of their number murdered Yitzhak Rabin. Abbas has seen Hamas fighters shoot Palestinian Authority police in the past few days. He must know he will have little chance of surviving a cycle of provocations that leads to an Israeli military incursion into Gaza and a third intifada.

Egypt has been mediating between Abbas and Hamas recently, persuading the Islamists to cut down on their rocket attacks. Nobody, however, can intervene between Sharon and his extremists. Rice will be helping both sides if she prevails on Abbas to stop the rockets and suicide bombings, even if that means imprisoning Hamas leaders. She will also help both sides if she declares publicly that the United States regards the settler groups defying Israel's democratic government as one of the forces sabotaging democracy and peace in the Middle East. These are strategic goals shared by Israel and America.