Cruel October

Israel's plan to withdraw from Gaza might turn ugly after the Jewish holidays. Emad Gad sees why

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Israeli politics is currently witnessing a sharp debate over Ariel Sharon's unilateral disengagement plan involving a withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. The plan, for which Sharon has tried and failed to garner the support of his Likud Party, has become for Sharon the only way out of the standstill in the peace process and Israel's domestic and foreign dilemma. Sharon has presented his plan as the only alternative, citing the lack of a Palestinian partner for peace, but he is facing fierce opposition within his own party. The broad base of the Likud rejects the plan on the grounds that the party rejects a withdrawal from any part of Palestinian territory occupied in June 1967, territory considered part of the land of Israel by the Israeli right. Sharon however sees the plan as a practical solution to the current crisis, one that would enable him to bury the roadmap once and for all and thwart Egyptian efforts that aim to place the withdrawal from Gaza in the framework of the roadmap.

As time has passed, the situation inside the Likud has quickly developed. More Likud ministers have rejected the plan, along with their allies from more extreme right-wing parties who view the plan as undermining the principles of the right. For them, the dismantling of any Jewish settlement is a betrayal of the ideas of the settlement forefathers, among them Sharon himself. Government ministers have thus begun inciting the Israeli right and settler groups against Sharon, enlisting the aid of settler leaders and rabbis who issued a religious injunction forbidding the evacuation of settlements and threatening soldiers who participate in the evacuation. Accusations of treason and threats have reared their head once more -- the same language Sharon himself employed against Yitzhak Rabin after the signing of the Oslo accords, which ultimately led a right-wing Jewish religious extremist to assassinate Rabin. Sharon is well aware of the threat and has begun speaking of a civil war that Israel may face given the polarisation over the withdrawal from Gaza.

As the debate continues among the various elements of the Israeli right, including the Likud and other right-wing parties, both in and out of the government, the Israeli public has taken a totally different stance. Opinion polls show majority public support for the withdrawal from Gaza and the dismantling of settlements. Nevertheless, the ruling Israeli right continues to debate withdrawal without taking into account the wishes of the majority of the public. A poll conducted for the Second Israeli Broadcasting Network found that 69 per cent of Israelis support Sharon's plan to withdraw from Gaza, dismantle Jewish settlements in the strip, and bring the approximately 8,000 Jewish settlers back inside the Green Line.

The debate is reflected in the Israeli media where commentators are starkly divided between staunch supporters of Sharon and fierce opponents. In this context, Yehuda Litani wrote an article for Yediot Aharonot online, published on 23 September, entitled, "After the Holidays".

"Anyone who listens to Ariel Sharon's many statements about disengagement will be convinced that the experience of the past will not be repeated," Litani wrote. "Sharon is making promises with unlimited persistence, and it seems, at first glance, does not fear the confrontation coming in the next few months. He is the spiritual leader of the settlements, and he will dare to do what no-one has dared before him: to clash with the settlement establishment and its partisans on the extreme right. The past year has not been kind to Sharon inside his own party, and the Israeli army failed in every attempt to evacuate illegal settlement outposts last year. But this was all merely a rehearsal for the real battle to come. In two weeks, the Jewish holiday season will end. Socioeconomic issues will be pushed into the corner, and the spotlight will shine on the Gaza Strip in preparation for disengagement.

"Settlers intend to fill Israeli settlements in the Gaza Strip with tens of thousands of their supporters before the strip is closed. The Shin Bet estimates that there are a few hundred extremists among the opponents of withdrawal -- the hilltop youth and the supporters of Kahane -- who will not hesitate to use weapons against those who come to evacuate the settlements. It's clear to everyone involved that the battle will be fierce and violent. Each side knows that defeat will come to the one who blinks first and both sides know that the withdrawal from Gaza is only the first stage in a plan to evacuate dozens of settlements and settlement outposts in the West Bank. This battle, then, will have a decisive impact on the battle to come.

"Even now, before the implementation of the plan, Sharon is the subject of a vicious propaganda campaign. There have been calls to impose the 'lash of fire' on him; he has been called a traitor; and Jewish soldiers are being asked to resign from the Israeli army. For all practical purposes, the slogan 'Let the army win', invented by the settlers during the current Intifada, has been replaced by 'Don't let the army win'. The state of the settlers is pitted against the state of Israel.

"Opponents of withdrawal are only a minority -- a very small minority at that -- but they are prepared to defend the settlements in the Gaza Strip with their lives. The majority that supports the evacuation of settlements is in a state of quiet apathy. This small, steadfast minority has proven over the last 10 years that it can defeat the majority with the force of its will and persistence. This minority produced the murderers Yigal Amir and Baruch Goldstein, along with the settler underground that does not hesitate to use violence to forestall any steps it sees as a surrender to the Palestinian enemy.

"Shin Bet is preparing for the possibility that extremists in Israel and the settlements may be planning similar operations during the coming battle. All evidence clearly indicates that we will face a sad, violent season after the holidays. The poet T S Eliot wrote that April is the cruelest month, but it seems in our case, it will be October."

Yaron London also wrote an article for Yediot Aharonot online entitled, "Nadia Matar, Holocaust denier", published on 22 September.

"Holocaust deniers raise the ire of every rational Jew, and the Jewish leadership fights such people everywhere," London wrote. "Israel was born from the ashes of the Holocaust to face a wave of opposition. Not everyone accepted the Jewish viewpoint, and many ask -- including non-Zionist Jews -- if this justified stripping the Palestinians of their property and involving the entire world in a dangerous confrontation. The Holocaust was and still is the definitive response used by Jewish and Israeli diplomats to head off such talk. But if the Holocaust had not happened, or if it had not been an exceptional event in the chain of human calamities visited by competing religions and peoples on others, then what kind of justification would this Zionist response provide? In order to prevent any such questions, we have prohibited anyone, Jew or Gentile, from comparing our Holocaust with the holocausts of other people. People learn history, along with everything else, through the process of comparison, but we have attacked anyone who dared to think of the Holocaust in any context not directly related to it. Grossly simplifying things, we can say that those who hold nationalist views oppose this more fervently than those with 'leftist' views.

"But what has been forbidden to the opponents of Israeli policy is permissible to supporters of the occupation, who have transformed the Holocaust from a political tool used in the war abroad into a weapon for domestic use. True, both political camps have made mistakes here -- we are reminded of the term 'Judeo-Nazi' employed by the late Prof Leibowitz -- but there can be no doubt that the nationalist right, in its deviation from the national consensus, is less hesitant about using the Holocaust for the purposes of Zionist propaganda.

"One of the most recent innovations of this camp is the use of the loaded word 'transfer' to describe the forced removal of settlers from their homes, and their labelling of Yonatan Bassi [head of the disengagement authority] as a judenrat. If moving a few thousand Israelis a few kilometres inside their own country is truly like the expulsion of Jews from Berlin, then by what right do we object to those who compare the Israeli army to the Wehrmacht or Israeli prisons to concentration camps? Why do we prevent them from comparing Palestinian fighters in Jenin to fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto? And why do we forbid our opponents, whether anti-Semites or simply ignorant, from making the claim that Israel is exterminating the Palestinian people?"

To follow the controversy over Sharon's plan to withdraw from the Gaza Strip and the political polarisation that has ensued, please visit the website of Arabs Against Discrimination (www.aad- online.org).