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David Horovitz: Ask All the People

If Sharon pushes on regardless of the Likud vote, he will invite a campaign of deligitimization, with potentially devastating consequences for all of us.

Ariel Sharon made a drastic and uncharacteristic miscalculation in seeking endorsement for a Gaza pullout from the Likud membership. He should not now compound his error by ignoring the "no" vote. Instead, he should trump it. Much less surprising than the overwhelming opposition to leaving Gaza displayed by Likud voters in the May 2 referendum was that the prime minister, one of the wilier of our political foxes, had at any stage anticipated victory in this arena. This is the party whose central committee defied him in May 2002, by passing a resolution outlawing Palestinian statehood anywhere between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. This is the party whose membership has been quite openly swelled in recent years by the resolute loyalists of the radical rightist Meir Feiglin, who advocate Israeli annexation of the West Bank and Gaza, a policy that would spell the end of Israel as a democracy. And this is the party whose more excitable elements actually heckled Sharon during his victory speech at Likud HQ on election night in January 2003 (after he had become the first prime minister in a generation to win reelection and doubled the Likud's share of Knesset seats), because he dared to invite all Zionist parties who could live with his platform to join the government.

It is supremely ironic, but also now entirely irrelevant, that Sharon would never have initiated the referendum had he known far enough in advance that President Bush would publicly back him by rejecting a Palestinian "right of return" to Israel and legitimizing Israeli rule over major West Bank settlement blocks. The prime minister believed that only the backing of the party rank-and-file would yield support at the cabinet table from the likes of Benjamin Netanyahu, Silvan Shalom and Limor Livnat. As it turned out, Bush�s new stance brought those ministers on board; then the referendum rejection swept them off again.

What is relevant, for Sharon and his course of action in the weeks ahead, is that those Likud voters who bothered to turn out and vote for keeping Gaza do not represent mainstream Israel. Most Israelis see no future in Gaza and just want to pull out, notwithstanding widespread reservations about the perceived victory for terrorism and its implications for more attacks and hostility. Where the Likud hawks were reinforced in their determination to have Gaza�s Jews stay put by the despicable ice-blooded murder of Tali Hatuel and her four young daughters on referendum day, many other Israelis were, rather, reinforced in their perplexity over why Jews are laying down their lives for Gaza�s sake in the first place.

If Sharon now merely amends his plan somewhat and pushes on regardless of the Likud referendum, as he has indicated he intends to do, he will invite a campaign of delegitimization, with potentially devastating consequences for him and for all of us. Opponents of Yitzhak Rabin attempted to claim, in the fall of 1995, that because he had at no stage put the Oslo process to the country, and had won only wafer-thin parliamentary support for the "Oslo B" withdrawal from major West Bank cities, he had no legitimate mandate to relinquish control. An assassin then emerged who believed, in the fevered climate of protest, that much of Israel would quietly applaud him for gunning the prime minister down. Opponents of Sharon, should he attempt to sidestep the Likud vote, will have a stronger basis than Rabin's critics ever had to argue that the prime minister is acting without moral legitimacy: The central plank of his political program has been soundly rejected by the largest forum to which it has been submitted for approval; the party leader has been told by his members that they want him to change course.

To avert a campaign of delegitimization, the prime minister must demonstrate that he is acting in what most Israelis regard as their interest. He must either call general elections or hold a nationwide referendum on disengagement. Either course would require several months� preparation, but that is no critical impediment. Israel has retained Gaza for almost 37 years; indeed, Sharon has only been talking about completing a withdrawal by the end of 2005. The resort to a nationwide vote might tear apart the Likud, but Sharon, especially now, would presumably be more than ready to put country before party. A resounding "Yes" vote in a nationwide referendum, or electoral endorsement of a Sharon political program in which disengagement featured ominently, would not silence the opponents, but it would deny them the right to credibly accuse the prime minister of acting without the necessary public mandate.

And if the country followed the Likud and said "No"? Well, then Israel, all of Israel - in contrast to a few tens of thousands of Likud members - would have spoken. And all of Israel would expect to live with the consequences.