A PICTURE engraved in memory: Ariel Sharon in the Knesset. Around him the storm is raging. The members rush about, shouts ring out from all sides. The member on the podium waves his arms, denounces and curses him. Sharon sitting at the government table. Alone. Immovable. Massive and passive. No muscle in his face is moving. Not even the nervous tic of his nose, that was once his trademark (and that many people considered a kind of lie-detector). A rock in the raging sea.
This is the man who decided alone to withdraw from Gaza and dismantle the settlements. The man who is implementing this practically alone. The man who is this week facing a hurricane that has no equal in the history of Israel.
The patron of the settlements, the man who planned most of them, put them where they are and helped them to strike root and expand — he is the man who is now setting the fateful precedent of dismantling settlements in this country.
The dimensions of the “miracle” can be grasped only by posing some hypothetical questions: What would be happening if the Labor Party were in power, if Shimon Peres were in charge, if Ariel Sharon were leading the opposition and commanding the orange-shirts? The very thought is a nightmare.
If this were the only miracle that is happening to us, that would be plenty. But it is accompanied by a second miracle: The Israeli Army is conducting the fight against the settlers. That is a miracle so wondrous that it could make the most secular pork-eater run to his rabbi.
For 37 years, the Israeli Army has been the Settlers Defense Army. It has planned, openly and in secret, the placement of the settlements, including the “illegal” settlement outposts all over the West Bank. It has devoted most of its forces and resources to their defense. That has reached grotesque dimensions: For example, the Netzarim settlement, in the middle of the Gaza Strip, was defended by three whole battalions. Seventeen male and female soldiers lost their lives in the defense of Netzarim, about which Ariel Sharon said some years ago: “Netzarim’s fate is the same as Tel-Aviv’s!”
Between the army and the settlers, a real symbiosis has come into being. The boundary between them is now blurred: Many settlers are army officers, the army has heavily armed the settlements in the guise of “territorial defense”. In recent years, a sustained effort has been made by the national-religious camp to infiltrate the junior, middle and senior ranks of the officers’ corps, and fill the gap left by the kibbbutzniks, who have all but disappeared from the ranks. The creation of the “arrangement yeshivot”, homogeneous units who obey their national-religious rabbis, was a betrayal of the core values of the national army — even more than the release from compulsory army duty of tens of thousands of Orthodox seminar pupils.
In hundreds of demonstrations against the establishment of settlements, peace activists were faced by soldiers who lobbed tear gas grenades at them and shot rubber-coated bullets, and sometimes live ammunition. When the settlers drove Palestinian villagers from their olive groves, stole their olives and uprooted their trees, the soldiers generally defended the robbers and evicted the robbed.
And lo and behold, the same officers and soldiers are uprooting settlements and evict settlers, to defend the Israeli democracy and fight its enemies.
We must not be deterred from calling things by their names: The present struggle is a kind of civil war, even if — miraculously, again — no blood will be spilled. The Yesha people are a revolutionary movement. Their real aim is to overturn the democratic system and impose the reign of their rabbis. Anyone who has studied the history of revolutions knows that the role of the army is the decisive factor. As long as the army stands united behind the regime, the revolution is condemned to failure. Only when the army is disintegrating or joins the rebels, the revolution can win. Therefore, the settlers cannot win this battle.
Thirty-two years ago, the senior army officers blocked Gen. Sharon’s path to the Chief-of-Staff’s office. Now they stand united behind Prime Minister Sharon. If that is not a miracle, what is?
Of course, all these only look like miracles. They have quite natural causes.
The foreign journalists who are besieging Gaza at this moment are asking again and again: Why did he do it? What caused him to devise the disengagement plan?
This question has several answers. Like every historic event, the withdrawal has more than one motive.
The plan was not the result of consultations. Prior to it, there was no orderly staff-work, neither military nor civil. Sharon just drew it from his sleeve, so to speak, when he threw it into the air a year and a half ago. It answered several immediate requirements.
As will be remembered, the Americans demanded that he come up with some peace initiative. President Bush needed this in order to demonstrate his promotion of peace and democracy in the Middle East. For Sharon, the American connection in general, and the Bush connection in particular, is a central pillar of our national security. The unilateral disengagement plan looks somewhat like a peace plan, and therefore it delivers the goods.
He also wanted to preempt other peace plans that were hovering around.
Sharon’s is a classic Zionist ideology, consistent and pragmatic: To enlarge the borders of the Jewish state as much as possible, in a continuing process, without including in it a non-Jewish population. To settle everywhere possible, using every possible trick.
He wants to expand Israel’s borders as much as possible, and minimize the number of Arabs within them. Therefore it makes sense to him to give up the tiny Gaza Strip with the million and half Palestinians living there, and also the centers of Palestinian population in the West Bank. He wants to annex the settlement blocs and the sparsely populated areas, where new settlement blocs can be set up. He is content to leave to future generations the problem of the Palestinian enclaves.
David Ben-Gurion laid down a basic principle: The state of Israel has no borders. Borders freeze the existing situation, and to this Israel cannot agree. Therefore, all his successors, including Yitzhak Rabin, were ready to reach interim agreements, but never a final agreement that would fix permanent borders. That’s why Sharon insists that all his steps are unilateral, and that, after the disengagement, new interim agreements may be reached — but under no circumstances a final peace agreement.
This approach may necessitate the dismantling of more settlements in the West Bank — small, isolated settlements in areas where no new settlement blocs can be established because of the density of the Palestinian population. This idea makes it practically certain that there will be more clashes with the settlers, whose hard core did not grow up on the teachings of Ben-Gurion but on the vision of the messianic rabbis, who think about the border of the Land Promised by God. Sharon’s pragmatism does not impress them.
Many oppose the disengagement because of Sharon’s long-term intentions. But history shows that intentions are not necessarily important. Those who set in motion historical processes do not control the results.
For the first time, settlements in Palestine are being removed. The settlement enterprise is for the first time moving backwards. And that is more important that the intentions of Ariel Sharon.
