With just two weeks to go before the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, it appears that the pullout will be anything but smooth or peaceful. Reports suggest that up to 20,000 Israeli troops might try to sabotage the move, hundreds having signed a petition vowing to disobey orders to remove Jewish settlers.
The Israeli Army says the claim is exaggerated. But even a couple of thousand mutineer soldiers can severely disrupt the operation. When it comes down to throwing families out of their homes, some Israeli troops who do not have the appetite for the operation will have second thoughts. They might at the least try to thwart the plan by not following orders properly. Israeli troops will not carry guns and will only use non-lethal weapons such as water cannons, against settlers. But many of the settlers are armed, thus creating the real fear among the authorities that Jewish extremists will resist the withdrawal violently.
On the other side, and just weeks before the Palestinian Authority takes responsibility over Gaza, an independent study of the Palestinian security forces has concluded that they are weak, ill-equipped and divided. It also says that PA forces are overstaffed and outgunned by activist groups. In effect, the Palestinian forces are caught between far-better equipped groups like Hamas on the one side and the Israeli Army on the other.
So the scenario is clear: Palestinians against Israelis, Palestinian turning on Palestinian, Israeli vs. Israeli. The Gaza withdrawal will ignite an inferno when, by contrast, the pullout was to have started a new page in the peace process.
The PA hopes that the withdrawal from Gaza will be but the beginning of a process that would lead to the end of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the creation of a viable Palestinian state as envisaged in the road map peace plan. This hope seems more wishful thinking than a realistic expectation given that despite numerous meetings between Israeli and Palestinian officials, almost every major issue over the future of Gaza remains undecided. They include the fate of abandoned settlers’ homes, which Israel plans to demolish, the border crossing with Egypt and the movement of Palestinian exports.
Hamas and other Palestinian resistance groups have indicated that the resistance against the Israeli occupation will continue even after the withdrawal from Gaza. The conflict with Israel is not merely over Gaza. The PA may well succeed in getting Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other lesser known factions to help facilitate a smooth transfer in Gaza and to maintain their truce as long as there is genuine political movement toward ending the Israeli occupation in the West Bank. In the absence of such movement, as well as coordination on Gaza, and if the international community fails to exert meaningful pressure on Israel to carry out its road map obligations, the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, while it may herald the beginning of a new chapter in the region, also starts a book with no fairy-tale ending.
