On the Road to Disengagement in Gaza
RABINOVITCH, ABRAHAM
Wrestling with the Right On the Road to Disengagement in Gaza By Abraham Rabinovitch Jerusalem President George W. Bush has the Jewish vote locked up, at least in Israel. A recent poll...
...The 3,000-member Likud Central Committee, a raucous assemblage that still clings to the hard line abandoned by Sharon, pointed out that he is in office because it chose him as the party's candidate...
...Prime Minister Ariel Sharon would probably win an Israeli electoral contest today handsomely as well...
...Thus he initiated talks with his longtime personal friend and political foe, opposition Labor Party leader Shimon Peres, about reaching a government arrangement that would ensure approval of the Gaza pullout plan when it reaches the Knesset for final authorization...
...Polls have shown strong backing for disengagement among the general public...
...There are some who see ariskthat Sharon will undermine his own political legitimacy if he consistently turns his back on the central forum of the party he supposedly represents...
...So formidable is the prospect that the Israeli Army and police, who have dealt with Palestinian terror head-on over the past four years, gingerly toss responsibility for dealing with the Israeli hardliners to each other...
...The settlers and their supporters will want to make the experience so traumatic that neither the Sharon government nor any successor government will try to follow up with departures from scores of other settlements on the West Bank that any peace agreement with the Palestinians would require...
...The skirmishes have involved far more violence than did the 1982 evacuation of the town of Yamit and other settlements in northeast Sinai, carried out as part of the peace agreement with Egypt...
...In late July, the rejectionists organized 130,000 men, women and children in a 55-mile-long human chain from the Gaza Strip to the Western Wall in Jerusalem...
...They regard him now as having turned senile, crazy or a traitor...
...The turmoil that has overtaken the Palestinians in recent months is directly attributable to Sharon's surprise announcement...
...Will there be civil war...
...Even if they engaged only in passive resistance, forcing the soldiers to carry them off one by one, the impact on the nation's nerves would be searing...
...The demonstrators there showed restraint by not pushing the ladders over, which would have caused serious injuries or even deaths among the troops climbing to remove them...
...The prospect of a Gaza Strip free of an Israeli presence has for the first time since the 1967 Six Day War jarred the Palestinians into fresh tMnking...
...There are indications that Hamas is prepared to cooperate with the Palestinian Authority in Gaza once the Israelis depart...
...Those are the awesome dangers Ariel Sharon faces as he pushes ahead with his disengagement plan...
...But it is clear to all that if and when evacuation actually gets under way, the protests will turn ugly...
...They turned the Likud referendum, which opinion polls had predicted would be a clear victory for Sharon's initiative, into a loud rejection by sending settler families on a door-to-door campaign to plead their case directly to registered Likud voters...
...The settlers will try to deter the government and the Israeli majority by threatening a civil war," says Knesset member Avshalom Vilan, a founder of Peace Now and a former officer in the elite Sayeret Matkal commando unit...
...Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin had the moral authority to pull this off, but his assassination by a Right-wing fanatic underscored the difficulty of the task...
...And none has been friendlier than the present Oval Office occupant...
...Although disengagement is not linked to the so-called road map to peace drawn up by the international community, Israel's withdrawal from Gaza would nevertheless shatter the status quo and alter fixed patterns of thought, making political movement of some kind a possibility...
...A likely scenario is an attempt to infiltrate tens of thousands of demonstrators into the targeted settlements on the eve of evacuation—a modest percentage of those who formed the photogenic Gaza-to-Jerusalem human chain this summer...
...The experience with the illegal outposts, though, suggests that resistance will hardly be passive...
...The police say they do not have the manpower for such an immense task...
...But they held their tongues, even after he referred to Israel's presence in the West Bank and Gaza Strip as an "occupation...
...Before he reaches the stage of epic confrontation, however, he must wade through the clammy estuary of party politics...
...Nothing personal against Kerry...
...In a similar vein, some Leftist spokesmen are drawing a comparison with the Altalena episode of June 1948...
...Sharon himself haughtily brushed off the results of a Likud referendum rejecting the Gaza pullout and dismissed far-Right ministers who protested...
...Still, that could be enough to cause mayhem...
...These are religious youths with fanatic fervor who have grown up in settlements and often live in isolated outposts that they themselves have founded...
...Abraham Rabinovitch is author of The Yom Kippur War: The Epic Encounter That Transformed the Middle East...
...But he could not brush off the refusal of close to half the Likud parliamentarians to go along with him, whether for ideological reasons or fear of not being renominated by the Central Committee for the Knesset when elections are next held...
...Others believe the prime minister owes allegiance only to the nation...
...What kind of rule do we really want to see in place...
...In clashes with police, it is argued, there will be no such restraint, making bloody confrontations inevitable...
...As at Yamit, however, there was no use of weapons—a possibility no longer regarded as unthinkable...
...Left-wing activists were moved to expressions of admiration for this display of flower power, and even voiced regret at not having thought of such a demonstration themselves...
...Somewhat ironically, all of this frenetic maneuvering has been sparked by a proposal that does not even presume to be part of a peace process...
...The symbolic slap he suffered October 11, when they orchestrated an unprecedented refusal to approve his address opening the Knesset's winter session by a vote of 53 to 44, was merely the latest in a series of actions aimed at thwarting him...
...The hope would be that the ensuing chaos in the Middle East would nullify thoughts of disengagement...
...Ben-Gurion'sorderto fire on fellow Jews to preserve the sovereignty of the state is regarded as one of the cardinal decisions in Israel's formation...
...He will need solid parliamentary backing as well to deal with the turbulence that will surely accompany evacuation of the settlements...
...Since the committee's ruling has no legal standing, Sharon is free to ignore it, just as he ignored the spring referendum rejecting disengagement...
...Who will take over...
...Resistance to the planned pullout from the 17 Gaza settlements, plus four in the northern part of the West Bank, is expected to be several orders of magnitude greater than anything yet seen...
...Certainly the option should give Likud activists pause as they ponder the likelihood of a drastically shrunken party...
...The uprooting of a score of settlements at one go would set a precedent for the uprooting of more...
...But Sharon has made it clear Israel is prepared to undertake ground incursions into the Strip if rockets continue to be fired from there, and will respond by air, too, or even with artillery, an arm not used heretofore against the Palestinians...
...He remains an authentic, battlehardened hero they will follow, even toward "painful concessions...
...Some of the prime minister's supporters have suggested a "big bang" approach...
...Sharon has been resolute in declaring the Gaza pullout to be a unilateral Israeli act...
...A nightmare scenario for the security establishment is an attack by extremists on the Al-Aksa Mosque, Islam's third holiest site, in Jerusalem's Old City...
...Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion ordered the Army to open fire on the Altalena, a vessel transporting arms for Menachem Begin's Irgun organization and carrying Begin himself...
...Evacuation of the 7,500 Israeli settlers in the Gaza Strip would free large tracts of land and leave the area entirely to the 1.3 million Palestinians now living mostly in refugee camps...
...He did not name Ariel Sharon and he did not have to...
...It has to be made clear now that we will fight the violence of extremist settlers using every means," he says...
...In the 1970s, a group of settlers planned such an attack but was apprehended in time...
...Many of the settlers believe they are not simply fighting for their homes but are carrying out a God-given mission to preserve Jewish hegemony in the Biblical homeland, and they will act accordingly...
...The pullback is being contemplated without any guarantee that it will end hostile activity from the Gaza Strip...
...They had winced at his talk of a Palestinian state and the need for Israel to make "painful concessions" on the road to peace...
...The settlers and Right-wing ideologues have impressively demonstrated their skills at mobilizing public opinion...
...This would have Sharon abandon Likud, which he founded 31 years ago, and lead a new centrist alignment designed to attract like-minded Likud members as well as Labor and Shinui Party voters...
...Sharon has not shown any great enthusiasm for the idea, but political observers do not dismiss it...
...Indeed, it is precisely those who rode Sharon's coattails into the Parliament and the Cabinet who have turned his political life into a torment as he attempts to move the country toward taking a historic step...
...In August the Likud Central Committee rejected his bid to bring the Labor Party into the coalition...
...For the less ideologically committed on the Right, though, he is still "Arik, king of Israel"—not a "softie" like Labor's Shimon Peres...
...The vessel was sunk off Tel Aviv, but Begin ordered his followers to refrain from retaliation to avoid a civil war...
...Hamas...
...The reverberations of these questions, both conscious and unconscious, have led to significant challenges within the Palestinian camp to the byzantine style of Arafat's rule, if not yet to a serious challenge to Arafat himself...
...Hovering over all this is the fear expressed by the head of Israel's Shin Bet security service, Avi Dichter...
...Sharon's people hastened to note in response that Likud now provides an unprecedented number of "jobs for the boys," not to mention access to the seats of power, only because of the Prime Minister's appeal to the electorate...
...Sharon's credentials as the Right's bold flag-bearer and the driving force behind massive settlements have been irreversibly tarnished in the eyes of hardliners...
...His constituency, though, would be very different from the one that gave him such a large majority in last year's election and enabled his Likud Party to double its seats in the Knesset...
...At Yamit soldiers used scaling ladders, as in a medieval assault, to reach hundreds who were holding out on rooftops...
...The Army has already begun devising tactics to be employed against massive resistance in the settlements, just as it worked out highly effective plans for dealing with an armed Palestinian uprising before the latest intifada broke out...
...Israelis simply tend to pray for the well-being of any friendly U.S...
...A recent poll showed 48 per cent of Israelis supporting his re-election, compared with 29 per cent for Senator John Kerry...
...Some settler rabbis hitherto considered moderate, he points out, are already saying, "We won't use violence if they don't use violence against us"—a mindset that is halfway to condoning violence...
...In addition, they note, the settlers, despite their passion, regard soldiers as "our children" and will not use unrestricted violence against them...
...In Israel, the impact of disengagement promises to be no less profound...
...Ami Ayalon, a former head of the Shin Bet who has become prominent on the political Left, maintains that only a Rightwing figure can lead the nation through disengagement and its consequences...
...Nor is the assassination of specific leaders the greatest threat...
...The Palestinian Authority...
...Army officers contend that police are better trained for such duties than conscript soldiers...
...I'm afraid that in extreme situations they are likely to make good on that threat...
...It would ineluctably create a new mindset that envisions the evacuation of settlements on a large scale as a political possibility—assuming, of course, the Palestinian side is forthcoming with concessions of its own...
...They would provide an opportunity for Sharon to leapfrog the Likud Central Committee and put a final decision in the hands of the Israeli electorate...
...He told a Knesset panel recently that some 200 Jewish extremists would like to see Sharon assassinated, and that a few among their number are prepared to do the deed...
...Knesset member Vilan, for one, is not put off by the thought that security forces might have to resort to gunfire to suppress armedresistance...
...The number of true believers who might be willing to take up arms to preserve Jewish rule over all of the land is generally regarded as no more than several hundred...
...No one in Israel foresees a civil war in the sense of half the nation fighting the other half...
...Rabbi Yoel Bin-Nun, a settler himself but a widely respected moderate, also fears that evacuation of the Gaza settlements without a broad consensus supporting the move will lead to bloodshed...
...Thus it is that the fate of the Middle East, at this swing of the pendulum, hangs on an overweight 76-year-old moving impassively through an explosive landscape, surrounded by a cordon oftall men with sunglasses and distancing himself with every step from his past...
...Elections are now considered likely sometime in 2005, a year before they are officially required...
...incumbent...
...Attempts in recent years by soldiers and police to evacuate a few illegal outposts—generally a handful of mobile homes atop some remote hill—have met with fierce resistance led by so-called "hill boys...
...Will the struggle against Israel continue once Israel has left...
...Hard-core Likudniks balk at following his shift from the Right to the political center, and perhaps beyond...
...However, when instead of rhetoric he put forward a concrete proposal last spring to pull all Israeli settlements out of the Gaza Strip—his socalled disengagement plan—forbearance gave way...
...There will be no negotiations with the Palestinians, he insists, until there is a total end to terror and Palestinian Authority President Yasir Arafat is replaced with someone Israel can trust...
...And if there is no choice, if, heaven forbid, they make us do it, we will be compelled to open fire...
Vol. 87 • September 2004 • No. 5
