Little more than a year ago the Israeli Labour opposition offered to join Ariel Sharon’s government if he agreed to dismantle just one settlement, to show that the Jewish towns dotted across the Palestinian territories were not untouchable in the pursuit of peace.
Sharon replied that he would not give up even the most contentious of them, Morag and Netzarim, where a few hundred people huddle behind machine gun posts and barbed wire in the Gaza Strip.
But on Sunday Sharon sealed the fate of Morag and Netzarim by engineering an unprecedented cabinet vote to rid the Gaza Strip of all its Jewish settlements. To make it happen, however, he may have to rely on Labour to support his ”disengagement plan” and his government.
Although the wording of the cabinet declaration aimed to make it acceptable to as many as possible, politicians, analysts and the Israeli press had little doubt about its meaning.
”For the first time since the establishment of the state, a government has decided to evacuate settlements within the land of Israel,” the newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth said.
Ma’ariv agreed: ”The cabinet’s decision on disengagement, with all its verbal acrobatics and internal contradictions, has only one meaning … to evacuate settlements.
”The decision is a historic one. The countdown has begun. Israel is at the starting point of a new era.”
After the vote Sharon repeated that there would be no Jews left in Gaza by the end of next year.
Gerald Steinberg, a political analyst at Bar-Ilan University, said Sharon’s opponents in his Likud party and cabinet, led by Binyamin Netanyahu, had won a tactical victory by insisting that there must be a second vote before any settlers were moved.
But the broader victory was Sharon’s because, with the backing of the public and the US government, he had ensured that withdrawal from Gaza was inevitable.
”It was a significant success,” Steinberg said. ”What we’re seeing now is the playing out of the domestic politics that will take a few months.
”But because it comes from the bottom, because it’s consensus-based, any prime minister would have to do the same thing.”
He said Sharon had hijacked Labour’s policy of unilateral withdrawal from parts of the occupied territories because his own policies had failed and the Israeli public had demanded it.
”Sharon is a reluctant unilateralist. He is driven by public opinion and there is nothing better on the table. Poll after poll shows that evacuating Gaza and some settlements in the West Bank, that is the consensus policy,” he said.
None the less, the domestic political showdown is likely to be rough.
Having thrown the far-right National Union party out of his government to engineer a majority at Sunday’s cabinet meeting, Sharon is now close to losing another coalition partner, the pro-settler National Religious party.
If it goes he will lose his majority in parliament and find himself reliant on Labour to keep his government afloat while he fends off a campaign by Likud’s right wing, led by Mr Netanyahu, to subvert the disengagement plan.
On Monday dissenting Likud MPs met to decide how to fight the withdrawal.
Labour has already said it will provide Sharon with a safety net in parliament to carry through the withdrawal, and may consider joining the government. But the price of its support it will be to press Sharon to begin the Gaza evacuation.
”Perhaps the Likud has time, but the country hasn’t,” the Labour leader, Shimon Peres, said.
But Sharon is in no hurry to cut himself off from a large part of Likud and rush into an alliance with Labour: that is one of the reasons why he made concessions before the vote on Sunday. Although party polls give him the edge over Netanyahu he is not guaranteed of victory if it came to a showdown.
The Israeli political scientist Yaron Ezrahi believes Sharon will eventually have to break with part of Likud and appeal to a broader constituency.
”He’s taking a step which is defined as the historic act of a statesman who ignores the political cost of his acts. At the same time, Sharon can depict Netanyahu as a political opportunist,” he said.
The irony of Sharon adopting the mantle of the statesman above politics is not lost on critics of the man who oversaw the creation of the settlements, undermined previous prime ministers who offered concessions to the Palestinians, and wasaccused of contributing to the incitement on the far right which led to the assassination of the Labour prime minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995.
For that reason many on the left are suspicious of Sharon’s intentions, but there is no agreement yet on what price to exact for cooperating with him. Some want to set conditions, such as renewed negotiations with the Palestinians, and an agreement to dismantle many more settlements in the West Bank.
Sharon faces personal risks in pursuing his strategy, moreover. On Sunday the police arrested members of a banned extreme rightwing Jewish group, Kahane Chai, alleged to have published weblogs offering religious justifications for assassinating senior politicians and army officers who support the dismantling of settlements.
Kahane Chai has called Sharon a traitor and warned that dismantling the settlements will lead to civil war. – Guardian Unlimited Â