When the Jewish residents of Gush Katif in Southern Gaza first heard that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was planning to turn their villages over to the Palestinian Authority, they launched a media campaign with a slick video. The camera pans down palm-lined streets, past Miami-style villas and brightly painted playgrounds. But suddenly the vacation illusion ends, followed by images of bombed-out houses, mutilated children, and interviews with grieving parents. “Why, after three years of bravery under fire,” Rachel Saperstein asks in the video, “must I leave my home, and why must this house be given to the families of suicide bombers?” “The country took our son,” laments Sami Hilberg, “and now they are taking away his grave.”
For the longest time, the Israeli prime minister was their personal hero, a tough politician who championed the settlement movement—its patron saint and father figure. And many of the 8,300 settlers in the Gush can remember how the prime minister regularly appeared in their villages. “Sharon’s ranch is quite close, and he liked to spend Friday nights with us,” recalled Yitzhak Elya, assistant municipality chief of Gush Katif, when I visited him at his office. “I’d get a call from the gatekeeper. ‘The fat man is here,’ he would say, and then I’d go down to the kitchen and make sure a large platter of bourekas was ready. The first thing he’d do was polish off the complete platter and then he would turn to me, and say, ‘Itsik, you are screwing up. Don’t you get it that you need to be having lots more babies . . . . Your presence here will only be guaranteed if there are many more of you. Itsik, these settlements are Israel’s front line,’ he would repeat over and over again. But since he declared his plan, Sharon has not come anywhere near our village.’’
The Disengagement Plan calls for the complete evacuation by July 20 of Gush Katif, a block of twenty-one Jewish settlements in southern Gaza, as well as three villages in the north end of the Strip and four encampments on the West Bank. Settlers who refuse to go peacefully will be pulled from their homes, and as the deadline approaches, the military is expected to deploy 30,000 troops to join the battalion already stationed in the Gaza. Few expect the pullout to go smoothly; the slightest friction could ignite a chain reaction. Maybe it will begin with a single bullet fired on a soldier or a villager. Instead of a few thousand settlers, the army could be confronted by 100,000 protesters streaming into the region, and, quite possibly, soldiers will refuse orders to uproot their countrymen. Any of these scenarios is capable of tumbling Israel into a civil war. “The allure of executing a spectacular attack to prevent a withdrawal from Gaza remains strong among extremists,” writes Matthew Levitt of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. And Sharon has neither demonstrated his skills at juggling nitroglycerin balls, nor ever balked at the challenge.
To date, Sharon has not revealed a larger vision against which the strategy behind his withdrawal from the Gush can be evaluated. So, while a straight-faced prime minister could claim in an address to the Knesset that the Disengagement Plan “does not replace negotiations,” or “permanently freeze the situation,” his chief advisor, Dov Weinglass, offered the opposite argument, suggesting that this pullout will be the first and last concession Sharon intends to make, providing an excuse to go no further in talks with the Palestinians. “The significance of Sharon’s plan is the freezing of the peace process,” said Weinglass. “The Disengagement Plan actually supplies the formaldehyde into which all other [peace] plans can be put.”
Perhaps this is the reason why the lines separating the plan’s supporters from its detractors are as murky as they are. For example, many members of the Labour Party, presently part of Sharon’s coalition government, say they have no real clue what he is up to. A Labour Party member, Amram Mitzna, who was Sharon’s main opponent in the last election and who first proposed the unilateral Disengagement Plan, told me that the only reason he remains in the coalition is that he believes that “history is larger than Sharon and that once disengagement from Gaza is implemented, there will be no stopping a withdrawal from a far larger area of the occupied territories.”
Many Israelis take the opposite view, suspecting that by disengaging from Gaza, Sharon intends to consolidate Israel’s hold on the West Bank and Arab East Jerusalem. If so, you would expect to see many more West Bank settlers supporting Sharon’s plan as the lesser evil—rallying behind it to safeguard their own turf. Yet in the synagogues of Judea and Samaria, settlers refer to Sharon as the dictator—“the converted one, who in the process of forsaking his religion, tears up sacred books in public.” And two prominent settlement leaders, Rabbi Zalman Melamed and Rabbi Dov Lior, are now calling on all soldiers to disobey orders to remove the settlers.
The scheming, seething cauldron that is the settlement community these days is all too reminiscent of the conditions that prevailed in the weeks prior to the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. Although Sharon himself refuses to wear a flak jacket (“they don’t make one in my size”), there is no denying that his life is on the line. Many senior ministers have received death threats; security around the prime minister is extraordinarily thick, and pre-emptive arrests called “administrative detentions,” used to detain Palestinian suspects, are now being directed at troublemakers among the settlers.
Still, the majority of Israelis want their government to take whatever steps are necessary to make the withdrawal a reality. In early February, a poll published in Israel’s influential daily newspaper Haaretz claimed that despite fears that resistance to the disengagement could lead to civil war, a clear majority supported moving ahead even if the settlers deployed weapons against the soldiers. At the moment, only about 17 percent of the nation think the evacuation should be halted outright.
Israelis seem to have taken on the prime minister’s characteristic bravado. When yesha, the group representing settlers across Israel, called for a referendum on the issue, an editorial in Haaretz was telling in its opposition. “The settlement enterprise began in Hebron during Passover in 1968,” Haaretz editors wrote. “Had the citizens of Israel been asked, at any stage [whether they supported the enterprise], it is doubtful whether they would have agreed . . . . The settlers chose to operate far from the public eye and to rely on lobbying in the corridors of power. Referenda are not part of Israel’s political culture. . . . Just as the public was not asked in a referendum whether to privatize the banks, cut welfare allowances, or go to war, it should not be asked about the disengagement.”
Whether yesha’s request for a referendum is justified or not is beside the point. The cynical toute comprendre, the swagger, the bravado is the point. What it is saying is that a poker game is in progress. The major players, including the Israeli media, the public, and many parliamentarians, seem to have all agreed not to force Sharon to show his hand, to declare, for example, whether he considers the Gaza evacuation the beginning or the end of concessions. The game seems to be progressing on the assumption that in the end the settlers will be stared down, take the money they are being offered—on average $250,000 (US) per family—and leave without a fuss.
