It turns out that Jews do expel Jews after all, and without the descent into anarchy predicted by leaders of Israel’s once indulged settlers. Following dire warnings that the forced removal of 8 000 settlers from the Gaza Strip and northern West Bank would provoke civil war, bring down the government and open an irreversible rift between the army and the people, opponents of the pullout have been left reeling by its speed and relative ease.
The army originally said it would take six weeks to clear the 21 settlements in the Gaza Strip and four smaller ones in the West Bank. As more families signed up to take the money and leave, the military revised its estimate down to three weeks.
In the end it took one week. Kfar Darom, among the most religious and militant of Israel’s Gaza colonies, made a relatively violent stand but it was still emptied in less than a day. Neve Dekalim, the biggest Gaza settlement with about 450 families, was all but cleared out in two days. There was noise, trauma and theatre, but there was only minimal resistance. The retreat was far easier than either the government or its opponents predicted.
It is good news for Ariel Sharon as a battle looms with Binyamin Netanyahu about who will lead the Likud party into next year’s election. The pullout was a critical issue for the party, and the relative ease of the withdrawal will not play well for Netanyahu, who broke ranks with Sharon at the last moment. But it is also dangerous for Sharon, as it undermines any attempt to claim that it was so traumatic that there can be no similar pullout from the West Bank.
Much of the operation’s success can be attributed to planning and numbers. About 55 000 members of the security forces underwent weeks of training. They not only learnt how to deal with large crowds less harshly than the handling of Palestinians, but how to cope with the difficulties of removing families from their homes and how to act with restraint when your fellow Jews are calling you a Nazi. It paid off.
The danger for Sharon in the run-up to the pullout was that public sympathy would swing behind weeping families. The soldiers and police officers forcing them from their homes would be perceived as brutal. But from the first day the settlers eroded sympathy for their cause.
A minority screamed jibes of Nazi at the security forces and teenage girls lectured them on democracy, religion and how ”Jews don’t expel Jews”. The security forces surprised everyone by reacting with dignity, patience and sympathy.
Sharon seemed to speak for most of the country when he said: ”I’ll remember the faces of the men and women soldiers who stood silently and did not react to the curses and insults lashed at them.”
There was plenty of theatre, with soldiers and settlers falling into each others’ arms weeping. The scenes were not unwelcome to a government keen for the world to see the pain the country was going through. Force was only used as a last resort, and generally against people for whom there was diminishing sympathy even within the settle-ments themselves, such as the young men and women who made a last stand in the synagogues.
It was never expected there would be serious violence. The settlers knew if they were seen to be raising a hand to the country’s revered soldiers it would cost them what public sympathy they have.
Attacks on Arabs were different. Two Jewish Israelis murdered eight Arabs in an attempt to upset the pullout. But the threats of mass civil disobedience came to nothing. Perhaps it was because the government’s determination to carry out the withdrawal never wavered that the opposition within the Gaza settlements collapsed so quickly.
Sharon was also lucky with the Palestinians. They did not try to reinforce their claim that Israel was pulling out under fire by raining mortars on to the retreating settlers. With opinion polls showing increased support for the pullout, some Israeli commentators were declaring that the week’s events were a victory for democracy over theocracy. — Â