by David Landau
The Yesha (Hebrew acronym for Judea, Samaria, and Gaza) Council, the settlement umbrella body generously funded by the state, swung into action. The Likud voters registry was “divided up” among the settlers of the Gaza Strip. Every settler family, beefed up by youngsters from the West Bank settlements, “adopted” a cluster of five eligible voters. They would phone them, e‑mail them, visit their homes, befriend their families, inundate them with material about the idyllic, pastoral life in the Gaza communities that Sharon proposed cruelly to eradicate.
Sharon’s strategy of persuasion was three-pronged. First, he argued, the disengagement plan itself was sad but eminently sensible in the long run because there was no prospect in any conceivable peace arrangement of Israelis remaining in Gaza. “What have we got to look for there?” became the slangy, unofficial slogan of the disengagement. (The official slogan, proposed by Reuven Adler, was “The disengagement—good for Israel.”) It was a favorite phrase of Shaul Mofaz, the popular, intifada-fighting chief of staff who now stood alongside Sharon as his defense minister and, significantly, as his outspoken backer in the disengagement venture.
Second, both Sharon and Mofaz made it brutally clear that the army would not be scurrying out of Gaza in disarray, as it had—in their view, at any rate—out of south Lebanon in May 2000. Hamas, unlike Hezbollah in Lebanon, would not be able to claim it had driven Israel out. On March 22, the air force took aim again at Sheikh Yassin, the paraplegic Hamas leader. This time, using rockets, it did not err. The sheikh in his wheelchair and nine others, among them his bodyguards, were killed in a street outside a mosque just after dawn prayers. At the Likud convention on March 30, the first wave of cheering for Sharon broke out when the chairman, Yisrael Katz, thanked him “for the decision to eliminate Sheikh Yassin.”
Less than a month later the rocket-firing helicopters struck again, assassinating Yassin’s successor, Abdel Aziz Rantissi, as he drove through Gaza City. The United States said it was “deeply troubled” by the sheikh’s killing, but its ambassador at the UN, John Negroponte, vetoed a Security Council resolution that sought to condemn Israel for the action but was “silent,” as the U.S. envoy explained, “about terrorist atrocities committed by Hamas.” Between March and May, in addition to the high-profile assassinations, the army mounted penetration raids and sharpshooter ambushes deep inside the Gaza refugee camps, taking a heavy toll of armed militants.9
Sharon’s third line of argument was the significance of his exchange of letters with President Bush. “Not since the State of Israel was created has there been such strong and broad political support as there is in the president’s letter,” Sharon proclaimed in the Knesset on his return from Washington. “The letter is an integral part of the disengagement plan. The president of the United States expresses his overwhelming support for the plan. He sees it as a historic step.”
Significantly, Sharon’s invocation of the president’s commitments was predicated on the Likud voters’ assent, albeit unspoken, to Israel’s eventual withdrawal from most of the West Bank as well as from all of the Gaza Strip. George Bush’s implicit endorsement of the large settlement blocs along the Israel–West Bank border (“new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli population centers”) was meaningful and positive only in the context of the two-state solution, with the envisaged Palestinian state comprising all the West Bank and Gaza apart from those settlement blocs. Sharon had long been advocating the two-state scenario as the ultimate—albeit far-off, vaguely defined—solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But he had never won his party’s approval for it. The pristine Likud ideology of “Greater Israel” still held the hearts of many Likudniks, even if in their heads they knew it was untenable. For the Israeli public at large, however, the message was clear—and broadly applauded.
When Sharon returned from Washington in mid-April, polling of the party members showed him comfortably ahead. But in the fortnight to the vote his lead evaporated. The euphoria in the prime minister’s camp gave way to worry, then to panic. Recriminations began within the team. “We deserved to lose,” Uri Shani said, looking back. “We didn’t really have a campaign at all. No billboards, no meetings, no media, nothing. While the other side, quite rightly, was working flat out.” Shani, the departed bureau chief, had been brought back into the inner coterie to help run the referendum. “We lost because we were perceived as high-handed and condescending, as though it were beneath the dignity of a prime minister to campaign for his policy in his own party. Party voters felt their prime minister didn’t give a damn for them.”10
The weekend before the vote, with the polls now running clearly against him, Sharon’s tone grew dire. “The extreme right wing has brought down governments before, and now it’s trying to bring me down,” he told Maariv. The night before the vote, his prerecorded voice appealed directly to party members over their telephones. “This is a fateful moment in the history of our country,” he warned. “I don’t want to think what will happen if the disengagement plan is rejected. I don’t want to think what will happen in defense, in foreign policy, in economics, on Main Street, in the stock exchange … The Likud must not disengage from the people.”
It was desperate stuff and probably could not have reversed the groundswell now building among the Likud voters against the disengagement plan. In the event, the groundswell became a landslide. A gruesome terror attack in Gaza on polling day, May 2, sealed the prime minister’s defeat. An entire family—a mother, Tali Hatuel, and her four daughters—were murdered in broad daylight as they drove out of the Katif settlement bloc in Gaza on their way to Ashkelon, just across the border, where their husband/father, David, worked as a school headmaster. Islamic Jihad and Fatah’s al-Aqsa Brigades claimed joint responsibility. They said the attack was an act of revenge for the death of Sheikh Yassin and was unconnected to the referendum. Sharon said it was the Palestinian way of trying to destroy the disengagement plan. “That is why I am fighting for my plan.” But even he, the inveterate optimist, knew then that he had lost.
Tali and David Hatuel had intended to spend the afternoon with their kids outside one of the Likud polling stations in Ashkelon, canvassing voters to reject the prime minister’s plan. Their bullet-riddled car still bore a sticker, “A Jewish heart does not disengage.” At the funeral, attended by thousands in Ashkelon that same evening, the National Religious Party leader, Effie Eitam, called on Likud voters to fulfill Tali’s posthumous wish while the polling stations were still open.
More than persuading potential supporters to oppose the plan, the terror attack persuaded many simply to stay at home. The turnout barely topped 50 percent: 99,652 out of 193,190 eligible voters. The margin of Sharon’s defeat among those who did vote was close to 20 percent. It was a rout.
That same night, Sharon snapped back. Neither the defeat nor the accompanying embarrassment, nor indeed his solemn promises to abide by the voters’ decision, were going to sidetrack him. He convened his close aides in his office in Tel Aviv. Within minutes an official announcement went out to the political reporters: he would not resign. The Likud’s attorney, Eitan Haberman, conveniently produced a legal opinion to the effect that the party’s constitution gave no binding authority to the referendum. “The chairman wanted to know what the rank and file thinks. Now he knows what they think.”
Sharon himself issued a statement expressing his “sadness and disappointment” over the way the vote had gone. He knew that “very many members of the Israeli public support my plan and feel the same disappointment I do.” He would consult with his ministers and then decide how to proceed. Unofficially, his aides assured the press that the disengagement would go forward. That was what the country clearly wanted even if the Likud voters didn’t.
Before the week was out, Sharon made his intentions clear in the most poignant manner imaginable: he reiterated them to the bereaved David Hatuel and other mourners at the shiva for the slaughtered family. “I’ve come to be with you in your pain,
” he said, sitting down heavily. “I’ve gone through tragedies in my life. I can understand your pain.” Relatives and neighbors from Gush Katif soon began taxing him with questions about the disengagement. “The disengagement plan has got to be implemented,” Sharon replied, “so that things can be better for all of us in other places.”
This immediately set off a chorus of angry exclamations. “What,” one of Tali’s sisters shouted, “you’ve come here to make political speeches?!” “I didn’t intend to,” Sharon replied. “I was asked, so I answered.” That was probably disingenuous. He doubtless anticipated that he would be asked and came prepared with his unequivocal message: the disengagement would go ahead, regardless of the Likud vote. Perhaps he was being manipulative: visiting the bereaved family in order to point up to the general public the terrible and inexorable price in blood of holding on to the Gaza settlements. Still, the shiva visit took guts. “Why don’t you talk to us?” one settler demanded. “Why don’t you listen to us?” “I will come and talk,” Sharon replied. “I’m not afraid of anyone.”
One haunting remark from Tali’s father, Shlomo Malka, evoked the potent pall of religious ecstasy and fatalism that was already creeping over the nine-thousand-odd Gaza settlers, most of whom were Orthodox, and over their extended families. “Two weeks ago I spoke to Tali about all the talk of evacuating the settlements from Gaza,” the stricken father told Sharon. “I said it looked hopeless. She said leaders can talk but in the end it is Almighty God alone who decides these things.” Fifteen months later, on the eve of the disengagement, with tens of thousands of troops and police massed around the settlements, prominent rabbis were still assuring the settlers that Almighty God would not let it happen.
The fact that it did eventually happen, despite these exhortations cum prophecies, was due above all to the strength of public opinion in general, which never wavered in its support for Sharon’s disengagement. Two disasters that now struck the IDF in Gaza on two consecutive days, taking the lives of eleven soldiers, were horrific confirmation for most Israelis that the alternative to withdrawal was endless, pointless bloodletting. On May 11, an armored personnel carrier hit a mine on the outskirts of Gaza City. Six men died. They had been part of a search-and-destroy operation against homemade-rocket workshops. The next day, on the Philadelphi road running along the Gaza-Sinai border, another APC was blown up. Five more soldiers died, and three were wounded. The nation was horrified and mortified at media footage showing other soldiers crawling along Philadelphi literally on their hands and knees, looking for body parts of their dead comrades to collect in plastic bags for burial.
The following Saturday night, a pro-peace demonstration in Rabin Square, Tel Aviv, turned into a huge outpouring of popular support for the disengagement and, however grudgingly, for Sharon. This was the square where the legendary 400,000 howled for his head twenty-two years earlier, after Sabra and Shatila. There were no 400,000 there this time. But there were 150,000 by conservative estimates, and some among them were peaceniks who had attended that earlier, unforgettable gathering. Naturally perhaps, there was still a lingering reluctance—it would dissipate over the months ahead as the attacks against him from the Right intensified—to demonstrate support for Sharon. But the Labor Party leader, Shimon Peres, struck the popular note, and was noisily applauded, when he declared, “This is not a demonstration of the Left; this is a demonstration of the majority.”
The following week, Sharon gave the army the green light for a major armored sweep through Rafah and the Gaza-Sinai border area nearby, which was honeycombed with tunnels through which arms and explosives were getting into the Strip. Dozens of Palestinian militants were killed during the weeklong operation. But innocents died, too, among them seven Palestinian demonstrators hit by tank fire that the IDF claimed was intended only to warn them away. Many homes close to the border were deliberately demolished by bulldozers or damaged beyond habitation by the tanks and armored personnel carriers. The purpose of this Israeli escalation in southern Gaza, beyond curbing the tunnel traffic, was to hurt Hamas and Islamic Jihad and to pave the way for Palestinian Authority forces under the local strongman Mohammed Dahlan to take control of the Strip when the IDF eventually pulled out.11
In general, at this time, the fight against the intifada seemed at last to be delivering results. The incidence of terrorist attacks inside Israel dropped sharply through 2004. In the first six months of the year, nightly arrest operations by the army and the Shin Bet on the West Bank rounded up some two thousand Palestinian militants and suspected militants. Israel was able to forestall planned suicide attacks through its intelligence dominance—itself the result of IDF control of the territory and the information culled from those detained during Defensive Shield and thereafter, plus the fence, which slowed the infiltrations and gave time to combat them.f
Life inside Israel slowly returned to a sort of normalcy. Terror attacks were down to one every month or two. People seemed able to block out the more frequent attacks involving settler victims in the territories. The economy began to pick up. Growth in 2003 was 1.3 percent; in 2004, 4.3 percent. On the West Bank, too, Israel’s intelligence dominance enabled less massive deployments of troops and firepower. Military operations were more focused instead of the large-scale lashings out that typified the earlier years of the intifada. Palestinian civilian casualties went down. The network of roadblocks that had virtually paralyzed intercity travel was thinned out. Life for the Palestinians was still restricted and hard, but the atmosphere of permanent, ubiquitous war eased.
Fortified by the army’s successes and by the outpouring of popular support for his plan, Sharon made ready to charge back into the political fray. “You know me,” he told a gathering of old comrades from the Alexandroni Brigade, assembled at Latrun in May to inaugurate a memorial site to their suffering and resilience in 1948. “You know that when I fight for something that’s right, I persevere. That is what I intend to do with the disengagement. It is vital for Israel, and I am going to make it happen.”
A week later, on May 30, he presented the cabinet with a “new plan,” ostensibly in response to the Likud vote. It was no different from the old plan—the same evacuation of all of Gaza and four settlements in northern Samaria—except that it was “phased.” The settlements to be abandoned were divided into four groups. The cabinet was to approve the entire plan now, then approve each phase of the evacuation separately when the time came.
“The prime minister pledged to abide by the results of the referendum,” Netanyahu noted tartly at cabinet. “He didn’t say he’d abide by them if he won and throw them in the trash can if he lost. What kind of democratic message is that to the public?” “Don’t preach to me about loyalty to the Likud,” Sharon shot back. “I created the Likud. And I restored it from nineteen seats to thirty-eight. The Likud is no less precious to me than to anyone else.”
As each minister had his say, it grew clear that Sharon was poised to lose. The majority was 12 to 11. Eight of the Likud’s ministers were threatening to vote with the National Union–Yisrael Beiteinu (two ministers) and the National Religious Party (two ministers). Sharon adjourned the meeting without a decision.
The days and nights that followed were a marathon of speeches, negotiations, and ceaseless media spin, most of it demeaning to Sharon. Tzipi Livni, firmly in Sharon’s camp but with ambitions far bigger than her present post of minister of immigrant absorption, came up with a bridging proposal whereby the cabinet would approve the disengagement plan but would explicitly state that this did not, yet, mean it was approving the evacuation of any settlements.
Netanyahu responded by demanding that building and development work, much of it paid for by the state, continue in the Gaza settlements right up to the moment of that second cabinet decision. Sharon balked, ordered Livni to stop negotiating, and ordered his secretaries to send formal letters of dismissal to Benny Elon and Avigdor Lieberman, the ministers of the National Union–Yisrael Beiteinu. With those two out
, the balance at cabinet would swing back in his favor.
On the following Sunday morning, as the cabinet met for what Sharon confidently announced would be a historic session, the High Court of Justice considered urgent applications against the two ministers’ peremptory dismissal. The cabinet adjourned for three hours. Justice Edmond Levy suggested the vote be postponed for a day. Sharon ordered the state attorneys to resist with all vigor this unwarranted interference by the judiciary in the business of the executive. Justice Levy backed off and dismissed the application, though he added an obiter dictum criticizing the autocratic firings.
Netanyahu, accepting that the cabinet arithmetic was about to tilt against him—and recognizing, too, that public opinion was strongly in favor of the disengagement—softened his demands. Sharon embraced Livni’s compromise, and Netanyahu and some others voted for it, too, producing a final result of 14 ministers in favor and 7 against in a now-shrunken cabinet of 21. The official communiqué stated that the cabinet had “approved the amended disengagement plan.” It added that “this is not a decision to evacuate settlements … The cabinet will meet again to hold a separate discussion and decide whether to evacuate settlements or not, if so which settlements and at what pace to evacuate them in accordance with the circumstances then prevailing.”
Within moments of gaveling the meeting closed, Sharon was out in front of the cameras and microphones riding roughshod over these nuances and declaring triumphantly that “the cabinet has accepted my plan; the disengagement has begun.” In a speech some hours later he added, “Israel today has taken a fateful step for her future. The cabinet, by approving my disengagement plan, has sent a clear and unequivocal message to the Israeli nation, to our Palestinian neighbors, and to the whole world: Israel is taking its future into its own hands. The majority of the people of Israel understand the tremendous importance of today’s cabinet decision.”