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Tuesday, Feb 9, 2010
Israel's withdrawal from Gaza signals Sharon's abandonment of the deluded settlement policy he created. But can he survive the political fallout?
Aug 18, 2005 | D-day arrived on Wednesday. Following two intense years of preparation, political struggle, popular doubts and soul-searching, Israel's military and police were ordered to carry out Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's plan to evacuate the Jewish settlements from the Gaza Strip. Thirty-eight years of Israeli settlement in the midst of a densely populated Palestinian area reached their end in an emotional scene of unarmed soldiers and officers, wearing blue caps and vests with Israel's flag and national emblem, carrying the remaining settlers, one by one, to the waiting buses under the scorching August sun.
The first day of forced evacuation -- the settlers were allowed to leave on their own until Wednesday -- went better than planned. The massive concentration of force decided the battle even before it began, and both settlers and soldiers have shown remarkable restraint. There was almost no physical violence, only verbal abuse by angry settlers, who equated the government's forces to Nazis deporting Jews to their death in the Holocaust.
The news from Gush Katif, the heart of the Gaza settlement enterprise, focused on the tears of uniformed soldiers and orange-clad settlers. These were not easy images for the Israeli public, whose national identity has been built around the army as the "melting pot" of an immigrant society. Nevertheless, the unity of emotions did little to hide the visible gap between the representatives of the state, and the religious fanatics on the other side. A senior official, involved in the decision-making process before the withdrawal, watched the pullout on TV and wondered aloud, "Who are these people?"
Half of the 21 Gaza settlements were empty by Wednesday evening; the toughest points of opposition, where hundreds of "infiltrators" - mostly from West Bank settlements -- holed up inside synagogues, were left for the next day. The military expects to fulfill the mission before the Sept. 4 deadline. Most of the scary scenarios that were floated in the previous months, anticipating a breakdown of Israeli democracy, have turned out to be false, at least for now. The military isolated several dozens of refuseniks, but there was no massive defection of religious soldiers and officers, despite the calls of prominent rabbis to disobey the evacuation order. The military kept its discipline, and the rule of law prevailed.
Alas, one bleak scenario did mature: Jewish terror against Palestinians, meant to stir a reaction that may halt the Gaza withdrawal. Asher Weisgan, a driver from a small West Bank settlement, snatched a rifle from a security guard and murdered four Palestinians near another settlement. It was the second incident of Jewish terror connected with Sharon's "disengagement." Two weeks ago, Eden Natan Zadah, an AWOL soldier, used his gun to murder four Israeli Arabs on a bus and was soon lynched by an enraged crowd.
The authorities expected such attacks but failed to intercept the perpetrators. Sharon was quick to denounce them as terrorists and acted to avoid an escalation. The Palestinians, who pledged to keep quiet during Israel's Gaza withdrawal, agreed. Both attacks expose the violent nature of Jewish extremism and serve as a warning sign for the future. They erode the Israelis' sense of moral superiority over the "murderous" Palestinians. Worse, they threaten to drag both peoples back to the bloodshed of the past five years.
For most Israelis, Gaza has been hell on earth, a poor, dangerous area to be avoided. Few could understand the motivations of the settlers, who lived under a rainfall of mortar shells, rocket attacks and shootings during the recent Palestinian intifada. Everybody knew that those places had no future, given the unbearable demographic balance vis-à-vis the Palestinian neighbors. (Nine thousand Jews lived next to 1.3 million Palestinians.) All Israeli governments, however, had been paralyzed when discussing what to do with them. Sharon's predecessors were afraid to confront the strong settler lobby and therefore decided to leave all settlements in place until final status agreements were reached.
Hundreds of Israelis and Palestinians were killed in recent years in the fighting around the Gaza settlements; thousands of Palestinians were left homeless by Israel's counterterrorism operations in the area. Hundreds of millions of dollars were wasted on the infrastructure and defense of Gush Katif and several isolated settlements. All were sacrificed in vain, the price of Israel's shortsighted settlement policy during the 1970s and 1980s. Only Sharon, who originally planted these places in the sand, who once proclaimed that "Netzarim [a Gaza settlement] is the same as Tel Aviv," eventually had the political guts to turn against his erstwhile allies and to remove the hopeless villages and bring their inhabitants back to Israel proper, with full compensation and alternative housing.
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