The saplings of the disengagement from the Gaza Strip
The Hebrew daily Yisrael HaYom reported on Wednesday that the Netanyahu government said no to a demand by the Obama administration that it commit to a mass expulsion of Jews from Judea and Samaria and a ‘Palestinian state’ within two years.
Talk about a situation which is just not going to happen for a variety of reasons. The Israeli government does not have the financial means to absorb the cost of providing for 80,000 plus homeless and potentially jobless Israelis so just what world body will come up with the umpteen billions to finance this move on behalf of the Jews? Nor can the civil infrastructure withstand an immediate influx of 80,000 plus citizens within the green line of the pre-1967 Israel. I highly doubt these people will go willingly after witnessing, up close and personal, the plight of the Gaza Strip Refugees for the last 4 years. What do these Israelis have to lose by not fighting? And just who will evict these Israeli-Jews? There is no Israeli Prime Minister who will risk civil war for the sake of the Palestinians and a dream of statehood which is not their own.
When Ariel Sharon, a retired general of the IDF and Prime Minister of Israel announced to the world the Israelis will adopt the ‘unilateral disengage from the Gaza Strip’ as policy for the Israel government to implement – the world was shocked. In fact, Sharon considered the long-time best political friend of the ’settler’ movement had spent the last election campaign ridiculing and critiquing the Labor party platform of ‘disengagement from the Gaza Strip’.
This wasn’t a simple about-face in the light of new realities but instead a full turn without any objective change in the on the ground realities. The disengagement was a complete denial of reality. As a military general and a soldier of Sharon’s expertise, he knew the disengagement would not bring peace. It doesn’t take a military genius to come to this conclusion. To carry out this plan he had to replace his current IDF Chief Commander and so he reached low into the lower ranks of the IDF command structure and promoted Dan Halutz to be his new IDF Chief of Staff, a commander far below and junior to far more experienced generals. Halutz had one advantage to Sharon; he would simply comply to whatever outrageousness Sharon commanded unquestionably.
Everyone searched high and low for the rationale which would explain Sharon’s abrupt full-turn. Sharon had been a military man since he was 14 years of age when he starting fighting against both the British and the Arabs for Jewish survival in their ancestral homeland. At over seventy years of age he had forgotten more about strategy, planning and military operations than most had learned. Everyone has a theory to explain Sharron’s change of heart and mind. The theories run the full gauntlet of possibilities but the most obvious one. I realize people love the concept of total personality change in one of those ‘lightening strikes on the road to Damascus’ moments which have been glamorized a million times in books and movies, but rarely does life unfold so neat and quickly. Nor does a Lion of Judea suddenly lay down like a lamb.
Sharon is one of Israeli’s more interesting commanders, although he inspired great loyalty among those he commanded and ordered into battle; he was essentially a reckless man who paid little heed to the lives of those he commanded. He took chances and gambled with the lives of others in ways other commanders would simply not even dare to dream of doing. Serving under Sharon, there was not necessarily any reason to believe you would come out of any engagement or battle alive. He thought tactically and strategically with almost no price too high to pay for the success of the mission. As an experienced military man, well versed with the intelligence and analysis, he had to know the unilateral disengagement from the Gaza Strip would not bring peace. He argued eloquently against such a platform in the previous election and nothing, absolutely nothing had occurred to change that reality.
I have always suspected Sharon’s end game was to sacrifice the 9,000 families as an object lesson not only for world but to galvanize the Israelis. He wanted the Gaza Strip refugees to take on the necessary suffering in one wild desperate gamble to ensure no more territorial retreats. So he went about creating the conditions on the ground which would ensure no more territorial retreats would be possible. Sharon knew Israelis, and knew religious Jews better than anyone. He knew what the images and constant suffering of the Gaza Strip refugees would do to the religious psyche of the Israeli people. He knew exactly the religious make-up of combat soldiers and commanders within the IDF. He knew the strength and goals of Hamas. He wanted Hamas to do exactly what they have been doing all along and all he needed was time to allow the seeds of dissent he planted to grow to create this new reality. There is a hint of this from Dov Weisglass a Sharon aide in a Ha’aretz article circa 2004.
“Palestinian terrorism must end before a political process leading to a Palestinian state begins. Otherwise, the result would be a Palestinian state with terrorism. … The Gaza withdrawal would allow Israel to delay negotiations, and a Palestinian state, until such time that their leadership abandons violence. The significance of the disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process, and when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda. And all this with authority and permission. All with a presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress. The disengagement is actually formaldehyde. It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians.”
What we cannot surmise is what Sharon would have done if he had not fallen into a coma in the winter of 2006. With the rockets raining down on Israeli communities tucked allegedly safe inside the Green line he might have been planning a full-out military assault as a response which would destroy the entire Gaza Strip Palestinian community and make the West Bank Palestinians leadership pliant to Sharon’s end game. But the seeds Sharon planted have grown. An act took place this week within the IDF rank and file which is simply unprecedented in IDF history and it took place at the HaKotel in a swearing in ceremony of a battalion.
(IsraelNN.com) An unprecedented mutiny took place at the swearing-in ceremony of Shimshon Battalion soldiers at the Kotel Thursday evening. Immediately after being sworn in, some of the soldiers raised large signs which said “Shimshon Battalion does not carry out evictions at Homesh.”
Parents of soldiers also raised similar signs at the same moment.
The anger and frustration within the ranks of the Shimshon soldiers and their families reached a boiling point after the battalion carried out numerous evictions at Homesh – a Shomron (Samaria) community that was razed in the “Disengagement”.
Just as the Kfir Regiment Commander began his speech at the ceremony, soldiers from the battalion and raised two large signs against the evictions. Similar signs were raised by the soldiers’ relatives in the audience. The “Disengagement” carried out in 2005 by the government of now-comatose Ariel Sharon included the destruction of all Jewish communities in Gaza. It was carried out in the hope of bringing about peace with the Arabs. However, no peace has materialized, and Jewish activists have been persistent in their attempts to return to Homesh. The military, on its side, has been evicting these Jews from the ruins time and time again – sometimes in a violent manner, and often on the Jewish Sabbath.
And unlike the rather small rag-tag bag of undisciplined secular high school students refuseniks; these are young men who were trained to fight and schooled for war. This is merely but the beginning and not an end.
