Back to basics
The Israeli withdrawal from Gaza is less a victory for peace than a defeat for religious Zionism, writes Graham Usher from Kussufim
At midnight on 17 August the Israeli army activated its largest military operation since the Lebanese war -- against the Jewish settlers in Gaza. Jeeps, trucks, cranes, bulldozers, coaches and motorcyclists drove west into Gaza through the Kussufim crossing, beneath the glare of floodlights and accompanied by the buzz of a hundred walkie-talkies. In the opposite direction -- heading east, into Israel -- was an exodus: cars, vans and trailers, stacked to the limit with fringes, bikes, cupboards, even palm trees. The settlers were leaving. They were no longer pioneers. They had become citizens. And they were lost.
"I'm a mother with seven children," says a woman in an orange T-shirt, at Kussufim, cradling a baby. "I come from Gush Katif and am going to Hadera. I didn't decide to leave. The government decided I would leave. But I didn't want my children to go through the pain of eviction. It's over. We're not going back."
But it's not over yet. On Wednesday morning 15,000 Israeli soldiers and police -- seven full brigades -- moved in a pincer around Neve Dakalim, the largest settlement in Gaza. It is here that the last battle will be fought, between the army and perhaps 2,000 settlers, barricaded in the settlement's Star of David-shaped synagogue. It is a fight between the land of Israel and the state of Israel, the Torah versus the law. It could be long, traumatic and bloody. But there is no longer any question about who will prevail.
In the 48-hour grace period given by the army on 15 August for settlers to leave Gaza "willingly", their resistance to the "expulsion" all but collapsed. By Tuesday most of Gaza's northern, more secular settlements had gone. In the south hardline settlements like Morag quietly reached agreements with the army enabling residents to pack their bags and go. By Wednesday morning Israel's defence minister, Shaul Mofaz, said some 50 per cent of Gaza's settlers had either left or was in the process of doing so.
Barring a miracle, Ariel Sharon has won the struggle over the Gaza disengagement. The national religious settlers, once his children, now his nemesis, have lost.
In a televised address to the nation on Monday night Sharon acknowledged that "the disagreement over the disengagement plan has caused severe wounds, bitter hatred between brothers." He praised the settlers in Gaza "as pioneers, as realisers of a dream, and as those who bore the security and settlement burden for all of us". But he was clear the dream was over.
"Gaza cannot be held onto forever," said Sharon. "Over one million Palestinians live there, and they double their numbers with every generation. They live in incredibly cramped refugee camps, in poverty and squalor, in hotbeds of ever- increasing hatred, with no hope whatsoever on the horizon."
As for providing a horizon by getting back to some kind of meaningful peace process, Sharon said no. On the contrary, "the disengagement plan" is the Israeli answer to "[a] reality where we tried to reach agreements with the Palestinians that would move the two peoples towards the path of peace." But "these were crushed against a wall of hatred and fanaticism."
From now on it will be "the Palestinians [who] bear the burden of proof. They must fight terror organisations, dismantle its infrastructure and show sincere intentions of peace in order to sit with us at the negotiating table. To a hand offered in peace we will respond with an olive branch. But if they choose fire, we will respond with fire, more severe than ever."
In other words, the chief significance of the disengagement plan is not that it may be a step back to a peace process that had long lost its way. It is a domestic imperative.
One of the less heralded accomplishments of Sharon's premiership is that he has made Likud Israel's natural party of government, its new nationalist centre. It is a centre made up of pragmatic Likudniks, most of the Labour Party and the secularist Shinnui movement. And it is supported by the greater mass of Israeli opinion.
But in making this realignment Sharon has been forced to jettison national religious Zionism, one of the pillars of the Israeli right. The schism was described by Yigal Kaminetski, Gaza's chief Rabbi and stalwart of the messianic National Religious Party. "It is between those who believe Israel was created as a haven for Jews, like Herzl, and those, like me, who believe we are in Gaza by God's will, that we are fulfilling a prophetic tradition laid down in the Bible 2,000 years ago."
For months Kaminetski and his followers were convinced that the people of "the land of Israel" would see that light. But the soldiers did not refuse, the people did not rise up, the protests failed ultimately to materialise and the majority of Israeli Jews stood behind the "uprooting". This week or next, Rabbi Kaminetski and his books will be removed from Neve Dakalim and his home will be destroyed. He will resist passively. "I will sit in my home, as I am doing now."
This schism will not necessarily make Israel's conflict with the Palestinians any easier or less bloody. In his televised address, Sharon said the basic purpose of the disengagement is to "redeploy" the army "on defensive lines behind the security fence". In Gaza this means a withdrawal more or less to the 1967 Green Line. In the West Bank it means the annexation of about 10 per cent of Palestinian territory, including Israel's six main settlement blocs and the greater part of East Jerusalem. It is a final settlement that no authentic Palestinian or Arab leadership could possibly accept.
But the disengagement has returned the conflict to its source, which is about land and its division between the two peoples who inhabit Israel-Palestine. It has moved it away from what was becoming its most dangerous mutation -- a struggle about blood and God's sovereignty on earth. It is one of the many ironies of history that it was Ariel Sharon -- due to his aversion to agreement with the Palestinians and because the settler movement he created became a ghoul beyond his control -- who has effected that change.
Caption: DEFIANCE AND DEFEAT: On the sands outside Gaza City, youth look out to Palestinian fishermen sailing in victory and flags flying, as Israel withdraws from the Gaza Strip. Meanwhile, in Neve Dakalim, Tuesday, settlers clash with soldiers charged with evacuating Jewish settlements
C a p t i o n 2: DEFIANCE AND DEFEAT: On the sands outside Gaza City, youth look out to Palestinian fishermen sailing in victory and flags flying, as Israel withdraws from the Gaza Strip. Meanwhile, in Neve Dakalim, Tuesday, settlers clash with soldiers charged with evacuating Jewish settlements
Al-Ahram Weekly Online : Located at: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2005/756/fr2.htm