Sharon's Gaza plan: what to make of it
February 12, 2004

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon announced this week that he is prepared to dismantle 17 of the 22 settlements in the Gaza Strip. As it stands, 7,500 Jews live among 1.2 million hostile Palestinians, with soldiers constantly deployed to keep them safe. Far from being a public relations maneuver or ploy to distract from bribery charges, this is serious business. It was Sharon who once said that the fate of Netzarim – a settlement in Gaza – is the fate of Tel Aviv.

The announcement portends the next step towards Israeli ‘unilateral disengagement.’ Every peace plan has been predicated on progress through reciprocal measures – the Palestinians arrest terrorists, and in return Israel withdraws troops. But now Sharon has decided that Israel will act on its own – meaning withdrawing troops and settlers – without waiting for the Palestinians to return the favor. To him, the Palestinians are neither capable nor willing to fulfill their obligations under the road map – or any other peace plan since 1993. This is what unilateral disengagement means.

Sharon says that dismantling the 17 settlements is necessary for Israeli security and important in demonstrating goodwill to the other side. However, there is a third, often unspoken, rationale. Unilateral action puts pressure on Palestinian leaders to get serious and get to the negotiating table. Why? First, because it generates international pressure on the PA to reciprocate Israeli moves (which has already begun to occur). And second, the presumed end game of such a policy is that Israel removes most of the settlements, pulls back troops, builds a wall and end of story. If this happens, Israel will set the border that walls it off from Palestinian areas. Palestinians know full well that they will get a far more generous deal if it is negotiated. Withdrawal from Gaza is popular with the Israeli public, supported by nearly 60%, according to Yediot Aharanot.

Curiously, it was always the Israeli left that championed the idea of unilateral disengagement, also known in Israel as ‘divorce’ (from the Palestinians). And it was the right that decried the danger in withdrawing under fire, fearful that such a move would send Palestinians the wrong message: the terrorism is working, keep it up and Israel will keep making concessions. They point to Lebanon in 2000 as an example, where an Israeli withdrawal seems to have emboldened Hezbollah. Here, they claim that dismantling settlements in Gaza without any change in behavior on the Palestinian side will encourage Hamas to increase the terror in order to compel further withdrawals.

They are on firm ground in saying this. Already, Hamas leaders have said Sharon’s announcement was proof that their attacks had paid off – and that they were winning the struggle – and therefore their violence would continue.

For Sharon, the Gaza move is freighted with political risk. It threatens to break up Sharon’s center-right coalition. The National Religious Party has promised to leave the government if Sharon goes forward with the plan, and the National Union would probably do the same. This would leave only Likud (itself sharply divided) and Shinui. Should this occur, Sharon’s coalition would hold around 45 seats, not enough to control the 120-seat Knesset. Should the far-right bolt, however, it’s possible Labor would step in to save the government, given how important settlement dismantlement is to them. (Recall that from 2001-03, Sharon’s first term, a Likud-Labor alliance reigned.)

What follows is a New York Times news article on the Sharon plan, some letter responses to a NYT editorial that praised the Gaza announcement, and an editorial from the British journal The Economist.

Sharon to Plan Removal of 17 Settlements From Gaza Strip
by James Bennet

The New York Times -- JERUSALEM

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said Monday that he might seek to evacuate almost all Israeli settlers from the Gaza Strip, outraging members of the settlement movement that he helped create.

“I am working on the assumption that in the future there will be no Jews in Gaza,” Sharon told the liberal daily Haaretz. He made similar comments in a tense meeting of legislators from his Likud Party, people who took part said.

It was Sharon’s most specific disclosure about what he calls “unilateral disengagement” from the Palestinians, a step that he has said he will take if he judges that the Bush administration’s peace initiative, known as the road map, has failed.

Sharon said he had given orders to plan for the evacuation of 17 of at least 20 settlements in Gaza. But his spokesman, Ranaan Gissin, cautioned that this was the most far-reaching of three options that Sharon was preparing to submit for the approval of his Cabinet.

“It may be less settlements that have to be evacuated,” Gissin said. “We have to prepare for an interim plan that will maximize security for our citizens and minimize friction with the Palestinians.”

Sharon set no time line for a withdrawal, though his allies said it could begin by summer. His opponents on the right and skeptics on the left were quick to accuse him of posturing to divert public attention from a bribery investigation. Sharon has not been charged in the scandal.

Settlers warned of political action to bring down Sharon’s government, but far-right parties did not immediately bolt his governing coalition, an indication that they did not consider action against settlements to be imminent or inevitable.

Palestinian officials suggested that the announcement might be nothing more than a public relations maneuver.

In the last 18 months Sharon has made a series of statements that have alarmed longtime allies on the right.

The following two letters are in response to a New York Times editorial that praised the move:

To the Editor:

''Gaza First'' (editorial, Feb. 4) points out Israel's historical shortcomings and current requirements regarding Gaza and an overall peace settlement. Conspicuously absent is any mention of Palestinian responsibility.

You say that for a Palestinian state to be viable, it must ''be made up of the entire West Bank and Gaza, with small adjustments.''

I would have thought that for a Palestinian state to be viable, it would need to confront and defeat terrorism, have transparent financial dealings, stop hate-mongering against Israel and Jews, and have democratically elected leaders.

Dealing with geography alone is not enough.

DAVID TWERSKY

Elizabeth, N.J., Feb. 4, 2004

To the Editor:

Call it capitulation, call it misguided faith, call it desperation, call it eagerness to please Washington, but please don't call it sanity for Israel to uproot thousands of Jews from their homes and their lives without receiving anything in return (''Gaza First,'' editorial, Feb. 4).

Sanity would be concessions based on a complete and lasting cessation of Palestinian terror and incitement. Anything less is just plain crazy.

BRACHA OSOFSKY

Jerusalem, Feb. 4, 2004

Israel and the Palestinians
Sharon's surprise

Feb 5th 2004
From The Economist print edition

Scepticism is in order. But leaving Gaza could help Israel towards a wider peace

UNTIL this week, the peace process in the Middle East looked stuck. The so-called road map under which the Americans proposed to guide Israel and the Palestinians towards George Bush's “vision” of a two-state solution had been rolled up if not thrown away. Ahmed Qurei, the Palestinians' prime minister, was refusing to meet Ariel Sharon while Israel continued building its controversial security wall. Mr Bush failed even to mention Palestine in his state-of-the-union speech. Hope was being kept alive mainly by freelance initiatives such as the Geneva Accord, a splendid plan concocted by private Israelis and Palestinians with no authority to make a deal.

What, then, to make of Mr Sharon's startling announcement that he intends to evacuate all Jewish settlements from the Gaza Strip (see article)? Among peaceniks, the first reaction has been extreme scepticism. Mr Sharon has talked vaguely before about the “painful concessions” he would be willing to make for peace, but for which the moment is somehow never ripe. He has done next to nothing to fulfil Israel's obligations under the road map, arguing that the Palestinians have not lived up to their obligation to cease fire and dismantle the terrorist networks of groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Besides, might Mr Sharon's diplomacy be motivated by a desire to divert attention from the corruption inquiry snapping at his heels, rather than a genuine change of heart?

Scepticism is plainly in order. But it would be a mistake to dismiss Mr Sharon's announcement as merely a stratagem. If it were no more than that, would he have dared to antagonise so many within his own Likud Party and the parties to the Likud's right that prop up his coalition? It is true that he could probably rely on Labour to support his government if the right bolted—but only if Labour was sure that this time Mr Sharon meant what he said. And although withdrawing the 7,500 Jewish settlers from the Strip would be traumatic for the wider settler movement, it might not be unpopular with Israelis as a whole. Polls suggest that 60% favour the move.

But after Gaza, what next?

In short, there are good reasons to suppose that Mr Sharon may indeed be willing—over a year or two, according to his deputy—to evacuate Gaza. But here lies a paradox. The very things that make his Gaza plan just about believable also add to Palestinian scepticism about his broader intentions. Of course it would suit Israel to get out of the Strip: Mr Sharon has already threatened to “disengage” unilaterally from the occupied territories if no deal can be signed. Quitting Gaza, the Palestinians fear, will simply give him diplomatic cover, and free resources he can concentrate on his longer-term strategy, which they claim is to use the security wall to carve out a Greater Israel on large chunks of the West Bank, the bit of occupied territory Israel really cares about and where there are settlers in their hundreds of thousands, not just thousands.

Here, the sceptics are on stronger ground. Mr Sharon says he accepts Mr Bush's vision of an independent Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza. But neither he nor a lot of other Israelis accept the Palestinian argument that its borders should be the pre-1967 armistice line that separated Israel from Jordan. The wicked issues—Jerusalem, settlements and refugees—that wrecked Bill Clinton's Camp David summit between Labour's Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat four years ago are no less thorny today; and after all the killing of the ensuing intifada, the hatred goes deeper. So although an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza would be good in itself, easing life for the Palestinians there and reducing armed friction between the two sides, it would not lead automatically to a broader peace.

This is, nonetheless, an opportunity. For Mr Sharon has now signalled that even an Israeli super-hawk and ardent champion of settlement is pragmatic enough to have given up the Likud's Begin-era dream of clinging on to all of the occupied territory for ever. The issue now for most Israelis is not whether to withdraw and evacuate settlements, but how far to withdraw, and which settlements. Some fear that by quitting Gaza unilaterally—“under fire”, as when Israel left Lebanon in 2000—Mr Sharon will encourage the Palestinians to think that they can claw back all the land by continuing the intifada and making no peace. That would be a bloody mistake. The Palestinians would do better to resume their negotiations with Israel, and thereby connect Mr Sharon's Gaza-first plan to a more comprehensive arrangement. And that calls in turn for Mr Bush, America's election year notwithstanding, to unroll that road map—and kick the two sides along it.