Halukat Ha'aretz: Yisraelim Hoshvim al Hahitnatkut
(Partition: Disengagement and Beyond)
By Ari Shavit (Hebrew) -
Keter and the Jerusalem
Center for Israel Studies
254 pp.; NIS 79 (paper)


Nearly three dozen Israeli 'thinkers' explain why the state is right - or very wrong - in unilaterally withdrawing from Gaza and part of the West Bank

The chief merit of "Partition" is that it asks the right question: Does the prime minister's plan to withdraw from Gaza and the northern West Bank help or harm Israel's chances of survival as the state of the Jews? That, in Ari Shavit's view, is the fundamental strategic imperative by which the plan should be judged. Too much of the public debate has been framed in simplistic tactical terms, as if preventing Qassam rocket fire on Ashkelon is the be-all and end-all of the Zionist enterprise. Shavit's book establishes a far broader field of discourse.

Shavit, a journalist for Ha'aretz, with a reputation for searching interviews, put his question to 33 Israeli "thinkers," among them politicians, army men, academics and intellectuals, representatives of the left, right and center of the political spectrum. The interviewees include former prime ministers Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak, former Foreign Ministry directors general Shlomo Avineri and David Kimche, former Mossad bosses Shabtai Shavit and Ephraim Halevy, one-time military intelligence chiefs Shlomo Gazit and Uri Saguy, and Middle East scholars Shimon Shamir and Asher Susser. There are only two women in the Shavit gallery - Justice Minister Tzippi Livni and law professor Ruth Gavison - and only one rabbi, Yoel Bin-Nun. In each case, Shavit has brilliantly distilled long interviews with his subjects into coherent and concise monologues.

The starting point for several of the proponents of Sharon's plan is to ask what would happen over time if there were no withdrawal from Gaza. Former air force chief Eitan Ben-Eliahu raises the specter of a binational Israeli-Palestinian state, in which the Palestinians would be the majority. He points to three powerful processes driving toward Israel's political demise and the emergence in its stead of a single state in the area that includes Israel, Gaza and the West Bank: Jews continuing to settle in Palestinian-populated areas, Israeli Arabs and Palestinians developing a common identity, and Jews becoming an overall minority in the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. All three processes reduce the possibility of a two-state solution, which, in Ben-Eliahu's view, is the only way to assure the continued existence of a Jewish state with a Jewish majority. "To save the Zionist enterprise, Israel must put a border between itself and the vast majority of the Palestinian people," he says. That, in his view, is what the withdrawal, or "disengagement plan," is all about: a first, necessary step in the separation between Israelis and the Palestinians. If it is derailed by its enemies, it "will mean the end of the Zionist dream, and the Jewish state will be lost."

Sharon himself has never explained his plan in quite these terms. In the book, Sharon adviser Eival Giladi, a former head of army planning, and now the chief coordinator of the withdrawal plan, gives an insight into the prime minister's thinking. According to Giladi, Sharon is driven by two overarching ideas: that the cornerstone of Israel's foreign policy, good relations with the U.S. and Europe, is inconsistent with continued occupation of Palestinian territory; and that the modus operandi for ending the occupation must be guided by the lessons of the failed Oslo process. Chief among these are that the Palestinian leadership is not ready for true accommodation with Israel, that the time is not ripe to attempt a final peace deal (mainly because of continued Palestinian insistence on the right of Palestinian refugees to return to Israel proper), and that if Israel can initiate a slow, positive process, Palestinian leaders may become more amenable and final-status problems (such as the refugee issue) more tractable over time.

The aim of the disengagement plan, says Giladi, is to set such a process in motion: to improve the security, economic and political situation on both sides, creating conditions further down the road for a final peace deal. It is a subtle, patient gambit to secure Israel's long-term survival by retaining international legitimacy, while slowly defusing the conflict with the Palestinians.

The right-wing case against the disengagement thesis is strongly argued by Netanyahu, who caused a political uproar in early August with his resignation as finance minister over the issue. According to the former prime minister, the Palestinian definition of self entails the destruction of Israel. It is to be achieved on the model of the Arab capture in the 12th century of Crusader castle after castle. A series of unilateral withdrawals, one after the other, feeds into this model and reinforces Palestinian irredentism. The end result, says Netanyahu, will be a Palestinian state, not committed to peace with Israel, and posing a lethal threat.

Moreover, acceptance of the principle of separation will lead to calls for further Palestinian autonomous areas in the Galilee and the Negev. Therefore, Netanyahu argues, Israel must insist on the democratization of Palestinian society, to alter the Palestinian concept of self, and on reciprocity, to break the Palestinian "castle after castle" mind-set.

Settler leader Ze'ev Hever (Zambish), once one of Sharon's closest confidants, adds his first-hand view of the old Sharon, the driving force behind the settlement movement, versus the new, determined dismantler of settlements. The old Sharon, he says, did not believe peace was possible, and that, therefore, Israel had to show the Arabs that "the Jews are strongly entrenched on the land. That we are not a transitory phenomenon. That it is our land." This approach, Hever says, spawned Sharon's "double column plan," with Israel holding onto a 15-kilometer-wide belt in the Jordan Valley and a 12-kilometer-wide belt east of the Green Line, with connecting roads between them. The settlements Sharon helped build all over the West Bank were meant to give Israel title to the land. Inexplicably for Hever, the disengagement plan totally contradicts the old Sharon. In Hever's view, it means going back to the Green Line without having been forced to, which is tantamount to admitting Israel had no right to be in the West Bank in the
first place. "Therefore," he concludes, "the disengagement undermines our sense of the justice of our cause. That is its worst failing."

Hever's analysis raises a key question: how far the new Sharon wants to go with the disengagement concept. For example, what does he want to do with the Jordan Valley? On the left, suspicions abound that Sharon wants to keep as much of the West Bank as he can, and that because he won't go far enough, the result will be more and possibly worse violence. Hebrew University Middle East historian Emmanuel Sivan encapsulates the left's ambivalence toward Sharon and his plan. Its importance, he says, is that it starts a dynamic of decolonialization; its deficiency, that Sharon intends to "park" along the new lines after the Gaza withdrawal, halting the decolonialization process in midstream. Moreover, says Sivan, Sharon has tellingly failed to articulate a vision for post-colonial Israel, the way Charles de Gaulle did for France before the withdrawal from Algeria.

Left-wing Yahad-Meretz leader Yossi Beilin is blunter. Sharon, he says, is sacrificing 25 settlements in Gaza and the northern West Bank to save the rest. Still, Beilin supports the disengagement process, because he believes Sharon will not be able to control it. He posits two conflicting scenarios.

In the first, as soon as the Palestinians cotton to Sharon's game, a third intifada erupts. The violence strengthens both the Israeli right and Hamas, and starts a process leading to Israel's delegitimation as a Jewish and democratic state.
Shavit's book shows both the left and the right opposing the unilateral nature of Sharon's withdrawal plan: the left because it believes only a negotiated final peace deal can secure Israel's future and win it full international legitimacy; the right because it believes that only by demanding a quid pro quo for every move it makes can Israel maintain its deterrent posture. But the last word in the book goes to the thinkers in the center, who include Shavit himself, who argue that Israel can't allow itself to be held hostage by the Palestinian obsession with the right of return, or by the right's exaggerated appraisal of Arab power and the left's
delusions about the chances of achieving a final peace.

The Jerusalem Report, September 5, 2005 issue