The answer, whether the question is asked of the left or right, militarists or peaceniks, almost always boils down to one word: nothing. Even before Ariel Sharon finished prising 8 000 Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip and a small part of the West Bank earlier this week, the debate in Israel had turned to what happens next.
Israel’s destruction of settlements in territory claimed by the Palestinians for their state is widely seen as an opportunity to break the diplomatic logjam built up since the intifada began five years ago.
Sharon’s public position is that the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza and four isolated settlements in the northern West Bank is a path to the US-led ”road map” to a two-state solution — if the Palestinians first end ”the terror”. But last year, the Israeli prime minister’s closest aide, Dov Weisglass, said the real intent of the pullout was to place the peace process in formaldehyde.
”Withdrawing from Gaza offers real political opportunities for peace,” said Yossi Beilin, a leftwing former Cabinet minister and Israeli negotiator with the Palestinians. ”This political horizon [peace] is something that is good for us and good for the Palestinians. Then the question is whether it’s going to take place. The answer is no, it will not take place as long as it’s up to Sharon. As long as he’s in power he will do his utmost to do nothing.
”How do I know that? He told me that. He said to me: ‘You believe in peace, I don’t believe we can have peace. For sure not in the foreseeable future, so I will go very very slowly’.”
Beilin’s view that Sharon will do nothing is shared by influential figures on the right of the prime minister’s Likud party, including Gideon Saar, the party leader in the Israeli Parliament and a vocal opponent of the Gaza pull-out.
”Sharon will do nothing. He cannot afford to do anything if he is to retain control of the party and stay in power. Anyone who thinks that it is Gaza first is mistaken. It is Gaza only,” he said.
Sharon claims he was forced to act unilaterally because there was no partner for peace on the Palestinian side. That claim is scorned by the Israeli left. It says he has placed obstacles in the way of negotiation, including declaring that the Palestinians must first disarm Hamas and Islamic Jihad, because he wants to avoid any discussion on ”final status” issues such as the division of Jerusalem and borders. Meanwhile, settlement expansion and the West Bank barrier will put those issues beyond negotiation.
”In the past Sharon insisted on a quiet period before he would talk,” said Beilin. ”Now he says a quiet period means nothing. He says he needs war [between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas]. He’s not going to get this war and he will not go back to the road map. He’s got his insurance policy. He goes from one place to another, visiting France and the United States, and says he’s committed to the road map and that if the others will fight Hamas he will immediately jump into the road map. People say that’s reasonable and he gets away with it.”
But doing nothing does not necessarily mean that nothing is happening. The Palestinians fear that disengagement is a cover for Sharon to entrench more than 400 000 Jewish settlers living in the rest of the occupied territories while unilaterally imposing the borders of a rump Palestinian homeland.
Sharon has told Israelis that the withdrawal was intended to allow Israel to hold on to the West Bank settlement blocks, and this week he said he would keep expanding them.
The route of the West Bank barrier — in rural areas a steel and barbed wire fence, but in and around Jerusalem an eight-metre-high slab of concrete — is marking out the border between Israel and a Palestinian state that Sharon has said he has in mind, keeping as many Arabs as possible on the other side while taking as much land as possible for the Israeli state.
With the barrier have come land confiscations, the construction of large de facto border crossings that will control the movement of Arabs, and the increasing isolation of Palestinian East Jerusalem from the West Bank.
But for Sharon to do anything or nothing he has to hang on to power and that is far from given. The immediate challenge comes from Binyamin Netanyahu, who resigned as finance minister over the Gaza pullout and immediately launched a thinly veiled challenge for Likud’s leadership ahead of next year’s general election. Internal party polls give him a sizeable lead over Sharon.
Prominent Israeli politicians such as Haim Ramon are promoting a ”big bang” theory in which Netanyahu wins the leadership race and Sharon launches a new centre-right party drawing supporters from Likud and possibly the right wing of Shimon Peres’ Labour party.
Opinion polls show that a new party with Sharon and Peres would sweep aside Likud led by Netanyahu.
For now, the prime minister is maintaining the position that he ”sees no reason to desert the Likud”. But his advisers are quoted anonymously in the Israeli press as saying he views the creation of a new party as ”a likely possibility”.
A general election does not have to be held until November 2006, giving Sharon time to grind down support for Netanyahu before the Likud’s primaries. But the election could come much earlier if Peres carries through on his threat to take Labour out of the coalition government if there is not a swift return to the road map.
”The only reason I am in the government is the peace process,” Peres said earlier this year. ”If the peace process would be stopped because of Israel we would leave the government.”
However, Peres agrees with Sharon that there should not be a swift start to final status talks. He says the mistake of previous Israeli governments, including his own during the 1990s, was in attempting to achieve too much at once.
”I admit that politically speaking we have to jump. Better to jump at length than at height. Jump at length and you can land after 10 metres. Then you can have a second jump. If you jump at height, you may jump 100 metres and fall down flat with a broken neck,” he said.
Ehud Olmert, Sharon’s closest ally in the Cabinet and deputy prime minister, emerged from a meeting with the US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, in Washington on Wednesday saying the same. ”It is absolutely clear that in the next three to four months, it is difficult to expect any dramatic developments in the peace process,” he said.
Beilin says that lack of political movement carries its own dangers: ”If there is a political horizon then we might see a quiet period. If there is no political horizon, violence will erupt in the West Bank and from the West Bank. The message would be: you left Gaza only because of terrorism. You don’t want to talk with us, now we will terrorise you again from the West Bank. They are saying so, it’s not a prophecy.” – Guardian Unlimited Â