GAZA, 3 June 2004 — It is hardly the Mediterranean’s shiniest pearl. Yet all eyes are on the Gaza Strip. It is Sharon who has given this benighted sliver of land its sudden prominence. His Operation Rainbow, bulldozing home after home in the Rafah refugee camp, put the place back on the TV news. Meanwhile, his “disengagement” plan, which calls for a phased Israeli withdrawal from the strip over the next year, has replaced the road map as the Middle East initiative of the hour.
He first launched the idea in February and all sides have been trying to fathom its meaning ever since. Some believe it is little more than a trick. This is why, say the skeptics, he put his Gaza pullout plan to a referendum last month of Likud voters — the one group guaranteed to reject it. It’s an appealing theory, but I don’t buy it. If this was a deliberate bit of stage-managed self-sabotage, it badly backfired. Sharon is now fighting for his political life, wounded by the referendum rebuff and fending off a Cabinet revolt. The buzzards are already circling, eyeing up Sharon’s job, with former Prime Minister Netanyahu first in the pack.
Does this mean Sharon is genuine about pulling out of Gaza? Those around him insist he is. One blue-tongued member of his inner circle told me last week that Sharon “wants to get the ... out of Gaza — with all his heart. He needs it the way he needs another arsehole.” Which is not to say the old man has undergone a late conversion, turning peacemaker in his twilight years. Sharon has his own pragmatic reasons for wanting to get out. Those are best articulated by Sharon’s deputy, Vice Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. Unpopular with the Likud rank-and-file, he has become an outrider for the prime minister, going further and faster than Sharon ever could — but thereby revealing his boss’s true direction of travel.
When I spoke to him on Tuesday, he was pretty explicit about the strategic thinking behind the Gaza plan. It is all about demographics. Within a few years, he explained, there will be an equal number of Arabs and Jews living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea — the combined area of Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, all currently under Israeli control. In 15 years, thanks to their faster birthrate, the Palestinians will be a majority. “I want to live in a Jewish state,” Olmert told me. “I don’t want to live in a non-Jewish state.”
For years, he said, he and others hoped this matter would be resolved by a peace agreement which would create two states, one for Palestinians, the other for Israelis. “After Camp David, I realized that an agreement was not coming any time soon... and that time is not playing in our favor.”
Olmert understands that the demographic calculation is beginning to enter Palestinian thinking, too. Aware that they are fast becoming a majority in historic Palestine, the Palestinians are poised to shift their struggle from what Olmert calls an Algerian model to a South African one. Instead of demanding an end to occupation and national self-determination, he reckons the Palestinians are set to ask for nothing more than one-person-one-vote in all of the territory Israel now governs — the West Bank, Gaza and Israel itself.
If they get their way — and Olmert knows that international opinion could hardly oppose such a demand — they would soon have majority rule in a single entity and Israel would cease to exist as a Jewish state.
This sounded the alarm for him and, it seems, Sharon too. According to David Landau, editor of the liberal daily Haaretz, the prime minister, afraid of being remembered as the man who lost the Jewish state by sheer inaction, “went for the simplest, crudest solution: To dump Gaza and its 1.3 million Arabs in the hope that that would ‘buy us’ 50 more years”. And there would be a second benefit. The world would see what a “painful concession” Israel had made by giving up Gaza, and therefore would look kindly on its retention of key settlement blocs on the West Bank. Olmert told one right-wing Israeli newspaper last week that he saw his role as “trying to guard” those blocs: The implication being that Gaza is the necessary price.
“This is compromise,” Olmert told me, “you give some, you gain some.” (Lest we forget, this is the exact logic President Bush explicitly endorsed in April.)
Will the plan prevail? Sharon still has to win over Likud waverers in time for the Cabinet vote on Sunday. A new inducement is the involvement of Egypt. Frantic shuttle diplomacy between Cairo and Tel Aviv is underway this week, with Egypt apparently promising to police a post-withdrawal Gaza. That makes sense for them: They are hardly keen to have Islamist-run “Hamasland” on their doorstep. And it enables Sharon to argue that a pullout won’t just ease the demographics, it will also keep the lid on Gaza-based violence. Which only leaves the Palestinians themselves. It’s hard for them to oppose an Israeli withdrawal from occupied territory; on the other hand, they can hardly welcome a move whose end result could deprive them of the rest of their land. If it’s a precedent for further Israeli withdrawals and dismantling of settlements, that’s all to the good. If this is it, it’s all but worthless.
The former Palestinian Authority security chief, Mohammed Dahlan, told one newspaper that he sees the Gaza withdrawal as “the beginning of hope.”
But Ghassan Khatib, a minister in the PA, told me Monday that it was “a compromise of a compromise” — and not nearly enough. Israel will still control Gaza’s entry and exit points, the airspace and the ports. “Gaza will still be under siege,” he says, and Israeli military incursions are bound to continue. Nothing will really change. And that’s if the plan happens at all, which Khatib doubts.
It is sound logic. And yet, surely Dahlan is also right to say that “without it, we have nothing”.
The Gaza plan is flawed, insufficient and probably quite cynical. But I still cannot hope for its failure on Sunday. Because there is only one thing worse than the Gaza plan — and that is the situation we have right now.
