They are calling it the war of the colours. On one side, the Jewish settlers facing eviction from Gaza, hoping to stage Israel’s own orange revolution — urging their fellow citizens to wear or wave orange in protest at the upcoming withdrawal. On the other, the settlers’ opponents who, in a classic example of leftist disarray, have failed to agree on a colour scheme and so flutter their approval for the Gaza disengagement in shades of blue, blue-and-white and green.
The battle of T-shirts and ribbons on car aerials is but the most visible sign of what those close up are describing as a culture war, triggered by Ariel Sharon’s decision to pull out of Gaza. It has pitted religious against secular, nationalist against doveish. Those divisions are familiar enough — they have split Israel for decades — but they now have a new, more volatile battleground.
In the coming weeks, Israelis will witness scenes that stir some of the deepest emotions in their national culture. They have had a foretaste already. Yesterday Corporal Avi Bieber was jailed for 56 days for his refusal to participate in the demolition on Sunday of deserted homes in the Gush Katif area of Gaza. That episode brought together two of Israel’s most neuralgic questions. In a citizen army, which conscripts all Jewish 18-year-olds, male and female, refusal of an order constitutes a deep taboo. Similarly, in a society founded on what it regards as the pioneering ethos of settlement building, the destruction of a Jewish community is a severe violation. On Sunday both came at once.
And those images, of disobedience and demolition, were but the warm-up act. Come August 15, there could be hundreds of Corporal Biebers, refusing to raise their hands to their fellow Israelis, and endless TV pictures showing former settlements blown to rubble. If settlers turn on Israeli soldiers who have come to evict them, it will not look like a culture war — but a civil war.
What makes this conflict so strange is the make-up of the two sides. For who has become the chief hate figure of the Israeli right? None other than the man despised by much of the global left: Ariel Sharon.
His unilateral decision to leave Gaza threw Israeli progressives into initial confusion. Surely if he was for it, they had to be against it. More substantially, they suspected a trick, the first step in a neat game of quid pro quo — giving up Gaza in return for American, and therefore global, permission to keep the best chunks of the West Bank. That view remains credible and yet, as August 15 draws near, it becomes harder to remain unmoved by what is about to unfold. For one thing, the pull-back from Gaza is clearly a good and necessary thing in itself. As the veteran Israeli peacenik Yossi Sarid puts it, Israeli withdrawal even from a “chicken coop” would be worth celebrating. And Gaza is more than a chicken coop.
There is the prospect for long-term progress too. The sunniest optimists see Gaza as a crucial precedent, one bearing the imprimatur of Mr Greater Israel himself. Once Sharon has countenanced a withdrawal, the taboo will be broken.
The momentum, say these hopeful types, will be unstoppable. The coalition Sharon has cobbled together for disengagement will break up, leading to new elections, possibly next spring. If he fights those and wins, he could withdraw from the Jordan valley and a few more isolated settlements in the northern West Bank. A successor might well go further.
Better still, say the optimists, the Palestinians might cooperate with the Israeli pull-out – and not greet it with a renewed wave of violence. “That would count as proof that there is a partner after all,” says Dr Gary Sussman, an analyst at Tel Aviv University. After the collapse of the Camp David talks five years ago, it became a matter of Israeli consensus that there was no partner on the Palestinian side. A smooth Gaza handover could undo that received wisdom.
Of course, it is easy to puncture such hopeful talk. The trauma felt by the Israeli right may well serve as a reverse precedent, leaving many Israelis convinced that withdrawal was an experience too painful to be repeated. That argument would be boosted by an upsurge in attacks on Israeli civilians: if the suicide bombers were to return in numbers, motivated by the belief that it was violence which pushed Israel out of Gaza, there would be little Israeli eagerness to hand over yet more land.
But those who fantasise that the Gaza move could set in train a revival of the traditional Middle East peace process may be guilty of a larger mistake. For such a view misses what is really going on here – and how revolutionary a figure Ariel Sharon has turned out to be.
He has made what the experts call a “paradigm shift”, breaking the old peace-making model, in which the two sides negotiated and made compromises, in favour of going it alone — with or without the enemy.
Until now, most advocates of peace, including those on the Israeli left, have regretted this shift, arguing that it seeks to impose a solution favouring Israel and makes the Palestinians passive observers of their own fate.
Those criticisms have bite, but a powerful case for unilateralism exists all the same. I heard it in a recent conversation with Haim Ramon, a Labour minister in Sharon’s government.
Everyone knows the outlines of an eventual two-state solution, he says. The trouble is, the two sides cannot get there. Even if Israel could bring itself to give back most of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, the Palestinians under Abu Mazen could not agree to waive the right of return of Palestinian refugees.
In other words, even when the two sides stretch themselves to breaking point they are still too far apart. The result, says Ramon, is that if you wait for a comprehensive peace deal, you will wait for ever. That suits the extremists on both sides just fine, but it cannot suit those who want progress.
Rather than let the status quo endure, it’s better to end as much of the occupation as possible. Gradual, Sharon-style unilateral withdrawal could see 70% of the West Bank in Palestinian hands within 15 years, says Ramon. At that point, the two sides could at last sit down to bridge their remaining differences — on final borders, refugees and Jerusalem. But the bulk of the occupation would be over.
Slow and not nearly enough, but better than delusions of resolving everything that end up with nothing, says the minister: “All those who dreamed of a shortcut brought only catastrophe.”
It is not very appealing, promising only interim management of the conflict rather than a full resolution of it. Compared to a just, fair accord between the two sides — a handshake, smiles and sunshine — it is unalluring. But compared to what we have now, and the prospect of 38 more years of occupation, it looks like the lesser evil. An end to occupation is best. But a unilateral, partial end to occupation is surely better than nothing.