Approving disengagement

Ariel Sharon may get his disengagement plan through his fractious government but implementation is another matter, reports Graham Usher from Jerusalem

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To read the headlines bannered across last weekend's Israeli papers would be to think that Ariel Sharon's time as Israeli prime minister was coming to a close. "Government in crisis", read one. "The end of Sharon" editorialised another. They were referring to his failure to muster a government majority in favour of his so- called "disengagement plan", in which Israel would withdraw from 21 Jewish settlements in Gaza plus four more in the northern West Bank.

Five days on reports of Sharon's demise have turned out to be greatly exaggerated. The safer bet now is that, by hook or by crook, he will be able to bulldoze the plan through his cabinet, though it may no longer resemble the present one. Whether it will ever be implemented, though, is another question.

Sharon unveiled his "painful concession" last December. He took it to Washington in April. Not only did he receive George Bush's enthusiastic backing for his "bold initiative" but also (in Sharon's estimation) "unprecedented obligations to Israel on the part of the Americans, the likes of which Israel has not seen since the state was created".

Among these was US support for Israel's position that the "right of return" for the five million or so Palestinian refugees does not mean the return of any to their homes, lands and properties in what was Mandate Palestine but is now Israel. It means rather resettlement in an undefined Palestinian state. There was also US acceptance that, in any future peace agreement, Israel would annex five main settlement blocs in the West Banks: their present existence and future expansion will truncate any Palestinian state into three or four disconnected enclaves.

Not surprisingly Sharon received domestic support for the plan, with polls showing as many as 70 per cent of Israelis in favour. Far more surprisingly he drew the grudging acceptance of the Palestinian Authority and other Arab states, with Egypt offering to "smooth the withdrawal" by shoring up its porous border with Gaza, retraining the PA's police forces and (according to Arab press reports) urging Yasser Arafat to give up his executive powers in return for the "freedom" of leaving his besieged Ramallah compound. Arafat, reportedly, has refused.

Then -- inexplicably and, he now concedes, "mistakenly" -- Sharon submitted the plan to a referendum of his Likud Party, vowing to be bound by its results. The Likud membership voted disengagement down by a 60 per cent majority. Suddenly unbound by his party's whip, Sharon took the plan to his government, wrapped in a new dressing. Instead of an all in one withdrawal it would be spread over 18 months and broken into four stages, with each requiring a government majority before proceeding to the next. But the cabinet effectively refused even this version in a marathon but inconclusive session on 30 May.

What are Sharon's options? Should he fail to get a majority at the next cabinet meeting on Sunday he could engineer one, either through sacking recalcitrant ministers and/or appointing new ones. This would probably cause two far-right parties in his coalition to bolt, leaving his government without a majority. The main opposition Labour Party has said it will support the disengagement plan either from without or, perhaps, by joining a National Unity government. But this unofficial position rested on the original plan presented to Bush in April, not the watered down version presented to the cabinet in May.

And therein lies the knot. The more arduous the battle to get the "principle" of disengagement accepted the less likely will it be implemented in anything like its present form. Sharon may, at a pitch, be able to marshal a majority for the dismantlement of three minuscule settlements in Gaza (the first stage of the revised plan). But the likelihood of any Likud-led government evacuating the 15 settlements in Gaza's Gush Qatif settlement bloc is imaginary. The settlers' resistance to this would be formidable, triggering new government crises, perhaps new elections, and pushing the plan way beyond the horizon of its original timeline.

This at least is how it looks from Gaza, especially Rafah, whose denizens last month saw another 2,000 of their kin made homeless through Israel's destruction of 155 of their homes. Under the disengagement plan the Israeli army will still control the border with Egypt, reserving the power to "physically widen the route". According to Israel's Justice Minister Tommy Lapid this could mean the destruction of 700 to 2,000 more Palestinian homes, swelling the 13,000 rendered homeless in Rafah with tens of thousands more.

For these Palestinians disengagement augurs a future ominously similar to the past -- as it does for the vast majority of West Bank Palestinians. They too are being corralled behind walls built around settlements George Bush has now given Israel carte blanch to annex -- on condition, of course, that the disengagement plan is approved "in principle".