The bond was forged more than 30 years ago when Israel’s security preoccupation meshed with the visions of a messianic minority to claim the spoils of war as a God-given right.
The rush to establish Jewish settlements on the newly-occupied West Bank hilltops and the edge of the Mediterranean in the Gaza Strip served the interests both of governments that believed they were the first line of defence against hostile Arab countries and those who believed they were a step toward reclaiming all of ancient Israel for the Jewish state.
On Wednesday that bond was broken as the foot soldiers of the settler movement, the families planted as colonisers in the heart of land claimed by other peoples, were dragged from their homes at the behest of the man who was once their patron, Ariel Sharon.
In removing 8 000 of the 400 000-plus Jews living on occupied Palestinian land, Sharon acknowledged that the dream of greater Israel was dead and the country’s security interests were no longer automatically aligned with the settlers whose desires once dominated government decisions.
The ground for the retreat was laid over a decade ago as the Oslo peace accords and evolving Israeli public support for a two-state solution to the conflict with Palestinians dug the grave of the messianic dream of a greater Israel.
Ron Pundak, a member of the Israeli negotiating team at Oslo, said the pullout marked the final burial of the ideology that Sharon and his party embraced as an act of faith until the early 1990s.
”The ideology of the Likud Party at that time was to change the demography … of the West Bank and Gaza by placing [at least] one million Jews in these territories, changing totally the balance within the West Bank in order eventually to reach a situation in which a Palestinian state is not possible and a separation is not possible,” he said. ”And eventually to create a one-state solution with a Jewish majority. That ideology is dead.”
To overseas audiences in particular, Sharon has portrayed what even his critics and the Palestinians say is a historic move as a bold step for peace. But to Israelis his message is mixed.
Infuriated settlers say he launched his disengagement plan to distract public opinion from his personal and political tribulations less than a year after his re-election in January 2003. He was facing three investigations for corruption. The public had also grown disenchanted with his failed election promise to provide ”peace with security”.
There was unrest within the armed forces. The growing number of young refuseniks who ducked national service because they did not want to serve the occupation could be dismissed as lacking moral fibre. But when helicopter pilots and commandos said they would no longer be complicit in ”war crimes”, Sharon could not ignore it.
He was also losing the diplomatic initiative. When he was returned to power he saw no need for peace proposals but his chief negotiator with Washington, Dov Weisglass, warned that if he did not come up with a plan one would be forced on him.
Within months, Israel was confronting the US-led ”road map”, which laid out a path to a Palestinian state within three years as well as a detailed plan for a two-state solution, known as the Geneva Initiative. Both threatened to force Sharon on to a diplomatic track he wanted to avoid because it involved negotiations with the Palestinians and concessions he had no desire to make.
The dramatic announcement of the Gaza withdrawal resolved the problem at a stroke. Sharon said it would be unilateral because there was ”no Palestinian partner for peace”, he paid lip service to the road map but it was effectively pushed aside and the threat from the Initiative, which unnerved the government, was seen off.
As Weisglass later said, unilateral disengagement was not aimed at pushing the peace process forward but suspending it in formaldehyde.
The withdrawal plan represented an about-face by Sharon. He had derided the Labour opposition’s proposal for unilateral withdrawals from a smaller number of settlements. But, as with the West Bank barrier — another Labour initiative rejected by Sharon until he began to see its uses — the prime minister came to realise that pulling out of Gaza held one enormous benefit.
It represented a significant step toward resolving what Israelis call their demographic problem: how to get rid of responsibility for millions of Arabs who threaten Israel’s desire to be both Jewish and democratic.
”Gaza cannot be held on to forever,” said Sharon on Monday. ”Over one million Palestinians live there, and they double their numbers with every generation.”
Yossi Alpher, a former adviser to Ehud Barak, said: ”Demography is the only persuasive rationale for carrying out disengagement unilaterally. Only demography is a sure bet …. It will stem our slide down the slippery slope toward the South Africanisation of our conflict with the Palestinians.”
Avraham Burg, a former speaker of the Israeli Parliament, described the disengagement plan as an act of desperation by a prime minister who had no strategy other than to hang on to Israel’s West Bank colonies.
Olmert denied it. ”The pullout from Gaza is in no way an attempt to trade off Gaza for the West Bank.”
But this week Sharon had a different message for Israelis. ”I think it is important that they [Gaza settlers] know that what they did was not in vain. There are certainly great achievements, with the big [West Bank] settlement blocs that will remain in Israeli hands. They will remain territorially linked to Israel.” — Â