September 2nd, 2005 -- It all went according to plan, and on schedule (albeit slightly deferred) to boot. On 23 August Israel completed the evacuation of its settlers from the Gaza Strip and a few small communities in the north of the West Bank. Settler resistance was minimal, a massive anti-climax, in fact, after all the speculation of recent months. The world’s media recorded the event in terms of a great personal success for Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
In those narrow terms, the “Gaza disengagement” was indeed a success for Sharon. But the fall-out from the unilateral withdrawal is likely to be long and slow over the Israeli political arena. Sharon’s own Likud party may never recover from the divisions induced by the disengagement. Its Central Committee will meet on 30 September to set a date for a primary election for party leader. Such is the hostility towards him within the party generated by the withdrawal, the prime minister may well succumb to the challenge of his erstwhile finance minister, Benyamin Netanyahu.
And yet Sharon continues to offer “concessions” to the Palestinians. The details, as enunciated to a TV interviewer on 29 August, are vague. The August evacuations were a “one-off” event. “There are no more stages of disengagement.” But “not all the settlements will remain”, he said of the West Bank. He even mentioned the road-map and final status talks.
Palestinians can be forgiven for failing to view such talk as offering concessions. Nothing is actually on the table, because no diplomatic process is taking place.
Of course, it has long been clear that Sharon’s intention was to pull out of Gaza and a few settlements on the West Bank — with maybe some more smaller ones there thrown in at a later date — while consolidating Israeli control of the territory’s big urban settlements and slicing up the rest of the land into isolated enclaves. As long as the United States shows no inclination to reverse President Bush’s stated support for that intention, and indeed continues to make no bones about the road-map, Palestinians can only believe that “Gaza first” means, to all intents and purposes, “Gaza last”.
That he seems neither to envisage nor desire any way out of the diplomatic impasse he has effectively created reflects Sharon’s preference for short-term goals over such concepts as posterity or international esteem which influence other Israeli leaders. He may never win the Nobel Peace Prize, but he expects to win the next Israeli election, whichever party’s colours he sports. That his expectation is likely to be fulfilled is a reflection less of how far polarized the Israeli body politic has become than of how far to the right the broad consensus of opinion has shifted.
For all the noise and spectacle created by the settlers and their supporters in response to the Gaza disengagement, they were unable to win over the large majority of public opinion to their cause. But that can be of little comfort to the Palestinians, given that public opinion has become ever more anti-Arab in recent years.
The 20% of Israeli citizens who are Palestinians may be less vulnerable to the excesses of either the Israeli state or the settlers and their supporters than their compatriots over the Green Line, but that community is increasingly exposed to what a Palestinian NGO in Nazareth calls a “general culture of anti-Arab racism”. When a 19-year-old army deserter opened fire on a bus in the Galilee on 4 August, fellow passengers managed to disarm him after he had killed four people. They then beat him to death.
Similar events have occurred in Israel before, with victims overpowering and then killing their assailant. But this time the assailant was a Jew and the victims Arabs. Much of the Israeli media talked about the “lynching” of the gunman, Eden Natanzada, who turned out to be a member of an organization so violently extremist that it was banned even in Israel; supported was expressed for his family’s stated desire for revenge.
Nor, it turns out, are the victims’ families eligible for the monthly stipend which the state routinely pays to relatives of victims of Palestinian violence. Only the victims of the “enemies of Israel” can claim such an entitlement, said the Defence Ministry. Even Sharon, who described Natanzada as a “bloodthirsty terrorist”, was reportedly outraged.