E-Mail This Article to a Friend The Gaza pullout, continued

TIME AND SPACE

So a change was called for, even long overdue. But why Sharon? And why now? When I put that question to a senior western diplomat, he reminded me that in December 2003, when Sharon first talked about the need "to reduce as much as possible the number of Israelis located in the heart of the Palestinian population," he was fighting off pressure on a number of fronts. He did not want to get pushed prematurely into "roadmap" negotiations brokered by a quartet of parties — the US, the UN, the EU, and Russia. Nor did he want as a negotiating partner a Palestinian team led by Yasser Arafat with a rising Hamas nipping at his britches. And he was not anxious to hear Colin Powell and others urge adoption of a so-called Virtual Geneva Accord reached by an informal group of liberal Israelis and Palestinians, but which he regarded as amounting to a giveaway of Israeli lands.

Meanwhile, even hard-headed Likud types were warning him that the rapidly growing Palestinian population would soon surpass Jews in the combined territories of Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank, meaning Israel could be Jewish or democratic, but not both. By giving up 1.4 million Palestinians of Gaza while relocating a mere 8500 Jews, Sharon could buy both political and demographic time, leaving the question of a Palestinian state to what the western diplomat called, "a slowly evolving arrangement that ends in a shape nobody sees now."

Demography was, of course, only part of Israel’s problem. Security was even more compelling. Gaza, with its massive refugee camps, radical-breeding poverty, fierce Hamas presence, and underground-clan battles, posed an unremitting threat to the settlers who lived there and the soldiers who had to defend them. According to IDF figures cited by the Jerusalem Post, in Neveh Dekalim — one of Gaza’s religious settlements — since the second Intifada started in October 2000, one out of five homes has taken a direct hit from missiles, mortars, or gunfire. During the same period, Gaza’s Jewish communities have suffered more than 14,790 attacks by automatic weapons, mortars, Qassam missiles, infiltrations, anti-tank rockets, and car bombs. The attacks killed 149 civilians and soldiers.

But Gaza, safely back in Palestinian hands without the settlements, poses a far lesser threat to the State of Israel. One reason, say military and intelligence officials, was the construction 10 years ago of a fence — described by military people as an integrated detection, defense, and pursuit system — which has never once been defeated by would-be infiltrators, assassins, or suicide bombers, and which has served as the prototype for the far more ambitious system now under construction on the West Bank.

Politically, Gaza today is a vastly different place than the one I surveyed in 1985-’86. Thanks to the Oslo Accords, Arafat and his fellow exiles were able to return in 1994, establishing Gaza as his governmental headquarters. Despite massive corruption, little political freedom, and the proliferation of police, security, and local militia units, something close to political self-rule developed. Thus when Arafat died and Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) — himself a Gazan — was elected his successor and the Israelis began their withdrawal, at least a crude infrastructure was in place to talk about how to educate children, administer welfare, and fashion an approach to economic resuscitation. What’s more, Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza would be total.

Yes, the Israelis could impose security conditions for using the airport or building a port and they would control access to the West Bank and Israel itself. But the boundaries of Gaza would be those that existed prior to the 1967 war. It would be Gaza’s own Palestinian establishment that developed the institutions of statehood and established the rule of law, either bringing competing sources of power, such as the Hamas militia, to heel or suffering the consequences of anarchy.

A few hours’ drive around the West Bank underlines the vastly different circumstances. Here the closing of four settlements was accompanied by no Israeli withdrawal, the IDF staying to provide security on the ground. Israeli checkpoints continue to dot the landscape producing delays that make life difficult and cripple the economy. Israeli jails bulge with Palestinian prisoners, as many as 9000 at last count.

The fence is, without doubt, a bulwark against suicide attack, but also, with every ambitious deviation from the 1967 borders, a means of asserting control that falls just short of sovereignty, blocking Palestinian access to disputed East Jerusalem sites and seeking to fashion organic links between such large settlements as Ariel and Gush Etzion and cities like Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. The smaller settlements seem to be growing from every hill and knoll with little distinction between the legal and illegal status. A study commissioned by the prime minister’s office early this year concluded that most illegal outposts, including those that lawlessly appropriate private Palestinian lands, are protected and financed by the collusion of the very government agencies that should be regulating them.

During my period with ABC in Israel I ran a five-part series for Good Morning America called "Land For Peace," reporting how the proliferation of settlements was playing havoc with the corpus of the controversy, predicting that they might prove a greater complication at the negotiating table than finding a formula for recognition and peace. Even today I don’t know whether I was right. Ehud Barak came close to a fair land deal at Camp David and Taba. The Palestinians continue to insist on the right of return, a formula for Israel’s demographic suicide.

Those failed talks and the bloody suicide bombings that followed discredited the Israeli left, leaving most Israelis convinced the Palestinians could never be trusted and breathing life into the sails of those urging a different approach. "We have no negotiating partner," says Dan Schueftan, the academic who coined the term "unilateral separation." "To Israelis the question is one of survival," he says. "To Palestinians it is one of justice. Neither side will budge." Schueftan would have Israel appropriate the big West Bank settlement blocs, relinquishing the others, all unilaterally.

Now the Palestinians want to go back to final status negotiations to resolve the questions of borders, settlements, refugees, and Jerusalem. They prefer to skip the first stage of the roadmap, which would require dismantling the infrastructure of terrorism, and the second, which contemplates the possibility of provisional borders.

MATTER OF TRUST

To Avi Dichter, who ran Shin Bet throughout the second Intifada, the Abbas crowd is as reluctant to address the question of terrorism as was Arafat and his henchmen. He recalls occasions when Shin Bet received word of a suicide mission about to be launched. "We would turn the information over to the PA and instead of looking for the terrorist, they would look for the source of the information. We burned a lot of sources that way."

He is bitter over the world’s failure to appreciate the extent of Israeli civilian losses, citing 1058 deaths and 6000 injured, 70 percent of them civilians. The US equivalent, given population disparity, would have been 50,000 killed and 300,000 wounded on 9/11. The figures and the fact that terrorists require communal support justify, in his belief, the harsh measures still in operation on the West Bank.

On a steamy morning in Ramallah I was introduced to Sheik Hasan Yousef, the Hamas leader on the West Bank. Courtly, almost dapper, he spent part of his time criticizing US policy for its heavy-handed support of Israel and the other part declaring his organization’s desire for improved relations with Washington. Like his senior Hamas colleague, Sami Abu Zuhri, whom I would meet in Gaza a few days later, Yousef interpreted the Israeli pullout as "a victory for our people. Maybe the resistance in Gaza had something to do with it." Zuhri went a bit further, saying the move proved both the value and continuing need for "armed resistance against the Israeli occupier."

Despite Israeli concerns, both pledged that Hamas would permit the withdrawal to occur without firing Qassam rockets or taking other action to embarrass the Israelis. "We want Israel to pull out of our lands and we will not put any problems in front of this, and there will not be any shooting on our side during this disengagement," said Yousef. Then, strikingly, he added, "Hamas has integrity. We are not like Fatah. When we say something, we do it."

Some weeks after we talked, Yousef was the target of an unsuccessful assassination attempt. He took advantage of resulting press inquiries to get in yet another dig against PA credibility. "I have heard that Abu Mazen and several Palestinian officials say they won’t use force to disarm Hamas," he said. "There hasn’t been any talk about disarming anyone."