by David Landau
This unspoken speech was more a parting speech than a staying-and-fighting speech. He took his time writing it, up in his tower above his fields. As things turned out, it was his parting message not just to the Likud but to the nation.
We need to decide if the Likud is going to position itself at the center of the national consensus or at the extremist margin of our national politics … It was I who founded the real Likud, under the leadership of the late Menachem Begin. I served in the coalition he created with the Democratic Movement for Change, with Moshe Dayan … when he signed the peace treaty with Egypt, when he took the painful decision to evacuate and dismantle all the Jewish settlements in Sinai. Responsibility and sagacity—that is the real Likud. A large, centrist, national-liberal movement, not flinching from hard decisions and painful concessions, leading responsibly, sagaciously, in the true national interest.
This was something of an ellipsis of the Likud’s and his own past history, not to say a tendentious, indeed mendacious, rewrite. But its point was not to re-chronicle the past but to chart the future.
Today we have an opportunity we’ve never had before … We need to state the truth, which everyone knows: when we reach peace negotiations, not everything will remain in our hands. We have a dream that is good and just. But there is the reality that is harsh and demanding. We cannot have a Jewish and democratic state and continue to rule over the whole of Eretz Yisrael. If we insist on fulfilling the whole dream, we could end up losing everything. Literally everything. That is where the extremist path leads … Our future efforts must focus on shoring up our hold on Jerusalem, completing the security fence, strengthening the large settlement blocs, the Jordan valley and security areas, the Negev, the Galilee, the Golan Heights.23
There was still obfuscation here. “The Jordan valley” and “security areas” were deliberately vague designations, open to Sharon’s old, expansive designs on the Palestinian territory. But no one was minded to read such machinations into his text. Friend and foe alike assumed he intended a further substantial contraction of the settlement deployment during his next term. No one doubted that he would have a next term, whether at the head of the Likud or, as seemed increasingly likely, at the head of a new, centrist party whose platform, essentially, would have one plank: unilateralism. The word coming into vogue to express this future political thinking was hitkansut, perhaps best translated as “ingathering.” The word conveys a sense of strength, of cohesion, rather than of withdrawal and shrinkage.
The committee of top civil servants set up discreetly by Weissglas after the Gaza disengagementh was instructed explicitly to study options and scenarios for a unilateral withdrawal or series of withdrawals from the West Bank.24 “Where will Sharon go from here?” Aluf Benn asked in Haaretz on November 21, the day Sharon finally announced his decision to leave the Likud and found his own party. “He’s sticking to the road map—that’s the plan for a Palestinian state, for anyone who’s forgotten. He denies there’ll be another disengagement. Despite that, though, it’s clear that the withdrawal from Gaza will not be the last. Instead of disengagement, Israel will evolve a program of hitkansut, rolling up the far-flung settlements on the West Bank and shoring up the big settlement blocs.”25
That same day, November 21, Sharon made his move, announcing on prime-time television that he was leaving the Likud and founding a new party. An early general election had become inevitable. Labor had elected a new leader, Amir Peretz, and was preparing to secede from the government. “The Likud in its present form cannot lead the country to its national goals,” Sharon explained. The new party didn’t have a name yet. Sharon called it the Party of National Responsibility. Later it became Kadima, which means in Hebrew “forward.”
Ehud Olmert, Tzipi Livni, Meir Sheetrit, Roni Bar-On, and other Likud moderates hailed the move and joined up enthusiastically. So did Shimon Peres, recently ousted from the Labor leadership, and other prominent Labor figures like Haim Ramon and Dalia Itzik. Mayors and other elected officials waited hopefully for a call from Sharon or Omri inviting them to join. The Sharons reached out, too, to prominent nonpoliticians in academe and the arts, seeking to broaden the new party’s evolving list of Knesset candidates. Minister of Defense Shaul Mofaz hesitated. At first he announced that he was staying in the Likud and would fight Netanyahu for the leadership. But the polls eventually persuaded him to jump aboard the Kadima bandwagon.
The polls were showing the new party at around forty seats. Sharon’s advisers predicted an even better result. Labor looked like winning twenty-odd. The prospect, therefore, was of a large, homogeneous, and compliant governing party with a sizable, like-minded coalition partner at its side and scant need for additional, smaller allies with their exhausting quibbles and demands. It must have seemed a luxurious vista to Sharon.
He hardly had time to contemplate it. On January 4, 2006, he was felled by a massive stroke. Olmert took over automatically as acting prime minister. Later in the month, Olmert was elected unopposed as leader of Kadima, the new party. He led it to victory in the general election, which took place on March 28, and was sworn in as prime minister on May 4.
Olmert’s embrace of hitkansut was unequivocal, both in the election campaign and in his early policy statements as prime minister. He would try to negotiate with the Palestinians under the road map, he declared, but if there was no progress, he would embark on further unilateral withdrawals on the West Bank with a view to establishing an interim borderline pending eventual peace negotiations.
The civil servants committee submitted its preliminary report in May. The committee pointed out numerous difficulties—diplomatic, military, political, economic, and legal—that the government would inevitably encounter, whichever unilateral option it chose. The committee was not tasked with recommending a particular option. But it emphasized the possibility of dismantling settlements in the outlying areas of the West Bank while leaving the army deployed in those areas, or some of them, for an interim period.
Olmert adopted none of the options. In February 2006, while still the acting prime minister, he sent ten thousand troops and police to dismantle the West Bank “illegal outpost” of Amona, near the large settlement of Ofra. A violent melee ensued in which dozens of policemen and some three hundred protesters were injured, among them three rightist Knesset members. Nine buildings that had been ordered demolished by the high court were duly flattened. But Gush Emunim and its supporters touted the battle of Amona as a victory. They had demonstrated that their spirit, thought broken by the Gaza disengagement, was not broken after all. It was being steadily restored, especially among their cadres of young people.
But no further major confrontations between government forces and settlers took place during the Olmert years (2006–2009). Nor were there any further unilateral withdrawals by Israel. In November 2007, the Bush administration launched a new peace initiative at an international conference in Annapolis, Maryland. The phases of the road map were effectively to be telescoped into a comprehensive negotiation. All the core issues were to be on the table. The declared goal was the two-state solution—a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza living alongside the State of Israel. Sustained, discreet talks between Olmert and Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, during the following year came close to reaching a comprehensive agreement.26 The talks petered out, though, after Olmert’s forced resignation announcement in September 2008, under a welter of financial allegations. Kadima, now led by Tzipi Livni, again emerged the largest party from elections in February 2009. But she failed to form a government. The new rightist-religious government led by the Likud, under Benjamin Netanyahu, refused to pick up the Olmert-Abbas negotiations from where they had left off. Sporadic diplomacy by the United States over the next four years produced no progress.
Would Sharon have done better? Would he have done what he (and Olmert) intended to do, leading Israel out of (most of) the occupied West Bank, by agreement or—more likely—unilaterally? The disappointing electi
on result in 2006 is the first piece in this intriguing, hypothetical puzzle. Kadima under Olmert managed only twenty-nine seats in the election in March.i Two months into the new government, moreover, Israel was at war. In July 2006, Olmert unleashed the air force, and then the army, to attack deep into southern Lebanon in reprisal for the ambush by Hezbollah of a military patrol along the Lebanon border fence. The north of Israel was virtually paralyzed as, day after day, Hezbollah rockets rained down from across the border.
A UN-brokered cease-fire ended this four-week Second Lebanon War without a clear-cut victory for Israel. Sharon loyalists muttered that he would never have ordered war so peremptorily, but once it had been launched, he would never have fought it so hesitantly. Olmert for his part implied privately that Sharon’s reluctance to confront Hezbollah had enabled the Shiite movement’s massive stockpiling of rockets and other hardware over years. There were unflattering off-the-record references within the new government to Sharon’s supposed “Lebanon trauma.”
Whether because of the war and its aftermath—Olmert was censured by a commission of inquiry for the way he ran it—or because he lacked the political strength and courage, Olmert failed to implement anything of his vaunted hitkansut policy. Amona was effectively the last word between him and the settlers. He allowed the game-changing potential of Sharon’s Gaza disengagement to wither. He allowed himself and his government to be cowed by the settlers and their political supporters. He enabled the settlers to recover their confidence and their political clout. The huge domestic victory of the disengagement was frittered away. Three years later, the settlers and their cohorts were effectively back in power, an integral part of Netanyahu’s new, rightist-religious government.
Yet to an important extent the dispiriting aftermath of the Gaza disengagement was Sharon’s fault as much as his successor’s. Sharon left the job half done not only because he was struck down before he could complete it but also because he failed to build strong and lasting foundations that would have made the unilateral disengagement from Gaza the indestructible basis of a two-state solution to the conflict. Sharon’s high-handedness toward the Palestinians sowed the flaws in the disengagement that eroded its historic significance for both peoples.
Even though his basic strategic decision was that Israel must act unilaterally, there was room—and need—for close coordination on a tactical level with the Palestinian Authority. Sharon’s disdain for “the Arabs” meant that he did not sufficiently apply himself to this aspect of the disengagement. There was enough coordination, mainly in the form of dire threats, to ensure that not a shot was fired by any Palestinian militant group in Gaza throughout the period of the actual disengagement. But Israel could have done much more to help ensure that the PA security forces took firm control of the Gaza Strip in the wake of the IDF’s departure. In the event, Hamas and its allies were able to strengthen their deployment, in defiance of the Palestinian Authority. Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants seemed able to resume firing their Qassam rockets and mortar shells over the border almost at will.
Sharon’s high-handedness and insensitivity toward the PA caused or at least contributed to Israel’s failure to implement an elaborate agreement on access, trade, and communications with Gaza in the immediate follow‑up to the disengagement. Condoleezza Rice, the U.S. secretary of state, spent long hours in Israel in mid-November 2005 personally negotiating the clauses. She called the deal “a major step forward” that would allow the Palestinians to “live ordinary lives” and would establish a new “pattern of cooperation” between the two sides. “For the first time since 1967, Palestinians will gain control over entry and exit from their territory,” she said.27
The agreement provided for the implementation, after years of delay, of the “safe passage” between Gaza and the West Bank that Israel had undertaken to establish under the Oslo Accords. A detailed schedule of bus routes and timetables was worked out under Rice’s urging. But it soon fell into disuse as Israel reacted to repeated rocket fire and terror attacks by shutting down or constricting access to Gaza. There was logic in this position, but it bred bitter disillusionment on the other side and played into the hands of the Palestinian opposition, Hamas.
Was it Sharon’s shortsighted disdain for the Palestinian Authority that engendered his relative passivity, too, in the face of Hamas’s determination to run in Palestinian parliamentary elections scheduled for January 2006? He did protest to the Americans. He demanded that Hamas be required to lay down its weapons and amend its charter calling for the elimination of the Jewish state as the preconditions for its eligibility. The Americans’ “passion for democracy is so fervent,” he complained, “some of them believe that the simple fact of holding elections is enough to found a democracy.”28
Had he thrown the full weight of his post-disengagement prestige behind his argument with Washington, the outcome might have been different. As it was, Hamas emerged victorious from the election in January. A year later, after attempts at Fatah-Hamas unity rule, violent clashes broke out in Gaza between the two Palestinian movements. PA-Fatah forces were roundly defeated, and Hamas set up its own Islamic regime in the Strip. Israel in response imposed a partial siege on the Strip, preventing exports and drastically limiting imports in the vain hope of toppling the Hamas government.
Sharon’s ineffective response in the face of the resumed rocket fire from Gaza continues to trouble and mystify his close aides and political supporters to the present day. “I am not prepared for this to continue!” he fumed at cabinet on September 24, slamming his fist down on the table. The cabinet had been convened on a Saturday night after a flurry of Qassam rockets rained down on the township of Sderot, close to Sycamore Ranch. “For three years I’ve been asking you to deploy half a battery and start shooting,” he admonished the military commanders.
But the attorney general ruled—as Sharon knew he would—that artillery fire into a built‑up area would be illegal under the laws of war. “Do something tonight to put a stop to it!” Sharon demanded of the defense minister. “Er … I think it’s going to take longer than that,” Shaul Mofaz replied quietly. Someone suggested a ground incursion. “We didn’t leave Gaza in order to go back in,” Sharon growled.29
He knew the rocket (and mortar) fire was threatening to discredit the disengagement in the Israeli public mind—the arena of its most telling and most significant success. But he had no simple solution. He could only rail and make vague threats. A friend and former adviser recalls talking to him on the car telephone one evening as he drove home to the ranch. “Have you reached Ashkelon?” the friend asked. “Do you see the lights of Gaza?” “Yes, I do,” Sharon replied. “Why do you? Why are the lights still on in Gaza when rockets are falling on Sderot?! It was you who invented the idea of hitting their infrastructure. And it worked in the past!” “It’s going to happen,” Sharon replied. “You’ll see, it is going to happen.”30
But nothing happened as long as Sharon was in office. The sporadic rocket fire and limited IDF responses continued for years, until eventually the Olmert government launched a massive and controversial armored incursion into the Gaza Strip, Operation Cast Lead, in December 2008.j Persistent spinning by the settlers and by Netanyahu largely persuaded the Israeli public over the years that the disengagement had brought on the rocket fire. The fact that rockets had been fired before the disengagement, both at the Jewish settlements inside the Gaza Strip and at towns and villages in sovereign Israel, was blurred. The fact that much higher casualties, civilian and military, were sustained before the disengagement than after was glossed over. It was undeniably true, though, that larger and more deadly rockets were smuggled into Gaza—and fired from Gaza into Israel—in the years after the disengagement. Steadily, their range increased, from Ashkelon to Ashdod to Beersheba and, by 2012, to the outskirts of Tel Aviv.
The fall of Gaza into Hamas’s hands seriously undermined the disengagement in the Israeli public’s mind. “We can’t make the same mistake in Judea a
nd Samaria” became Netanyahu’s watchword. It was catchy and seemed cogent. But it was founded on the tragic rupture of Sharon’s new strategy of unilateralism before it could be consummated.
Why didn’t Sharon encompass more of the West Bank in his first (and as it turned out, sadly, his only) disengagement? Why did he plump for the least ambitious of the alternative proposals presented to him? Weissglas, making the best case for his client, says the chief consideration was security. The Gaza Strip was effectively sealed off from Israel by a fence. The fence around the West Bank was still unfinished.
Unilateral disengagement from Gaza, therefore, was much more easily done. The army’s role in Gaza, moreover, was almost entirely a garrison role: guarding the settlements and protecting their access routes. Unlike in the West Bank, the troops did not enter the Palestinian cities and refugee camps in the Gaza Strip to make arrests and generally enforce the occupation. The withdrawal, therefore, Weissglas argued, did not significantly weaken Israel’s security control of the Palestinians, because the army was not engaged in direct control over the Palestinians of Gaza in the years before the disengagement.
The IDF presence in Judea and Samaria, on the other hand, does not function solely as a garrison guarding the settlements. It is a constant, active, and important component in Israel’s daily security. That’s the difference. And that’s why the process on the West Bank needed to be slower, more deliberate, maybe more coordinated with the Palestinian Authority. We obviously couldn’t just get up and get out like in Gaza. So we began looking for a formula in the West Bank that would not be a replica of the disengagement from Gaza, because of the very different circumstances. We intended to complete the fence in the West Bank as quickly as possible and in that way reduce drastically the suicide-bombing threat.