NETANYA, Israel, 27 March 2006 — When the latest suicide bomber blew himself up on a quiet December morning at the entrance to the crowded shopping mall, Ella Atlan hurried through the chaos to escape. Later, after the windows had been repaired and the blood scrubbed off the wall, she went back to work.
It had become a grim routine. Five months earlier, the Israeli woman had returned to selling jewelry at the mall near the border with the occupied West Bank after a bomber blew himself up in the same spot. Another bomber attacked there in 2001.
Now Atlan, 34, who is raising four young children in a country where the prospect of a peace deal seems dim, takes some hope in an Israeli plan to unilaterally give most of the West Bank to the Palestinians, four decades after the country captured the territory in a 1967 war with its Arab neighbors.
“We have to get out,” Atlan said. “It’s not our area. We built up settlements without thinking of the future. I think for quiet, for the peace of my children, we need to do everything possible to leave.”
The idea, which has become the biggest issue in Israeli national elections to be held tomorrow, would uproot tens of thousands of Israeli settlers who regard the West Bank as a biblical birthright and permanently close Israeli borders from northern areas near Haifa to Be’er Sheba in the south. Like many Israelis, Atlan believes separating her country from the West Bank — and the Palestinians — might ease the violence.
The view is far different 10 miles east along a dusty highway in Tulkarm, a Palestinian city in the West Bank from where many suicide bombers have launched missions. The city is encircled by a concrete wall and barbed wire erected by Israel, and residents pass through an Israeli checkpoint to come or go. Palestinians there said pulling settlers out of the West Bank will make no difference if Israel maintains a military presence, as its leaders say they intend to do.
“We are living inside jail,” Tulkarm Mayor Mahmoud Jallad said in an interview in his office Tuesday. “Each village and neighborhood is a cell ... Unilateral withdrawal is not a problem if they withdraw from all of the land. Will they stay on our stepdoor, guarding us from leaving our house?”
Ehud Olmert, Israel’s acting prime minister and the election front-runner, promises to curb years of government investment in the West Bank, evacuate about 70,000 settlers based on statements he’s made and, by 2010, draw final borders protected by security walls largely in place already — all without negotiating with Palestinian leaders. Israel would annex at least three large settlements with another 180,000 residents, however, and retain a West Bank road network Palestinians could not use.
The Israeli right says Olmert is a leftist intent on handing land to Hamas, a group that has waged attacks and won control of the Palestinian Parliament in January. Moderate Palestinians say that Olmert’s plan falls far short of the independent state they seek in the West Bank, with free travel throughout, and that without mutual agreement there can’t be lasting peace.
In the constantly changing landscape of the conflict, and on the eve of an election, it is hard to know whether a limited West Bank pullout would be the endgame Olmert proclaims or a politically palatable step toward a larger resolution.
For now, Olmert, of the centrist Kadima party, seems to have caught the mood of the Israeli mainstream. In polls, a majority say they favor a West Bank disengagement, as it is called, along the lines of a smaller experiment during the summer in the Gaza Strip, a Palestinian area bordering Egypt.
In an informal survey of a dozen Israelis across the country this week, all but one said they supported giving up the West Bank. They said the occupation had cost too much — in infrastructure and soldiers’ lives — to protect land they don’t believe belongs to Israel. And they said stable borders might make them safer.
More than in the Gaza Strip, a West Bank withdrawal would mark a watershed moment in Israeli history, for the land’s biblical significance, for its scale and because it would reverse decades of national policy.
“It would be a much larger affair,” said David Vital, a retired professor of modern Jewish history at Tel Aviv University. “Larger in concept and very much more painful for many people ... Even nonreligious people recognize that the ancestral home of the Jews is there.”
The Gaza pullout was engineered by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, a military hero and longtime politician who championed the settlement cause for most of his career before forming Kadima, which means “forward.” He denied that the West Bank would come next, but few believed him.
