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Little more than a year ago the Israeli Labour opposition offered to
join Ariel Sharon's government if he agreed to dismantle just one
settlement, to show that the Jewish towns dotted across the
Palestinian territories were not untouchable in the pursuit of
peace.
Mr
Sharon replied that he would not give up even the most contentious
of them, Morag and Netzarim, where a few hundred people huddle
behind machine gun posts and barbed wire in the Gaza Strip.
But
on Sunday Mr Sharon sealed the fate of Morag and Netzarim by
engineering an unprecedented cabinet vote to rid the Gaza Strip of
all its Jewish settlements. To make it happen, however, he may have
to rely on Labour to support his "disengagement plan" and his
government.
Although the wording of the cabinet declaration aimed to make it
acceptable to as many as possible, politicians, analysts and the
Israeli press had little doubt about its meaning.
"For
the first time since the establishment of the state, a government
has decided to evacuate settlements within the land of Israel," the
newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth said.
Ma'ariv agreed: "The cabinet's decision on disengagement, with all
its verbal acrobatics and internal contradictions, has only one
meaning ... to evacuate settlements.
"The
decision is a historic one. The countdown has begun.
Israel
is at the starting point of a new era."
After the vote Mr Sharon repeated that there would be no Jews left
in
Gaza
by the end of next year.
Gerald Steinberg, a political analyst at Bar-Ilan University, said
Mr Sharon's opponents in his Likud party and cabinet, led by
Binyamin Netanyahu, had won a tactical victory by insisting that
there must be a second vote before any settlers were moved.
But
the broader victory was Mr Sharon's because, with the backing of the
public and the
US government, he
had ensured that withdrawal from Gaza
was inevitable.
"It
was a significant success," Mr Steinberg said. "What we're seeing
now is the playing out of the domestic politics that will take a few
months.
"But
because it comes from the bottom, because it's consensus-based, any
prime minister would have to do the same thing."
He
said Mr Sharon had hijacked Labour's policy of unilateral withdrawal
from parts of the occupied territories because his own policies had
failed and the Israeli public had demanded it.
"Sharon
is a reluctant unilateralist. He is driven by public opinion and
there is nothing better on the table. Poll after poll shows that
evacuating Gaza and some settlements in the
West
Bank, that is the consensus policy," he said.
None
the less, the domestic political showdown is likely to be rough.
Having thrown the far-right National Union party out of his
government to engineer a majority at Sunday's cabinet meeting, Mr
Sharon is now close to losing another coalition partner, the
pro-settler National Religious party.
If
it goes he will lose his majority in parliament and find himself
reliant on Labour to keep his government afloat while he fends off a
campaign by Likud's right wing, led by Mr Netanyahu, to subvert the
disengagement plan.
Yesterday dissenting Likud MPs met to decide how to fight the
withdrawal.
Labour has already said it will provide Mr Sharon with a safety net
in parliament to carry through the withdrawal, and may consider
joining the government. But the price of its support it will be to
press Mr Sharon to begin the
Gaza
evacuation.
"Perhaps the Likud has time, but the country hasn't," the Labour
leader, Shimon Peres, said.
But
Mr Sharon is in no hurry to cut himself off from a large part of
Likud and rush into an alliance with Labour: that is one of the
reasons why he made concessions before the vote on Sunday. Although
party polls give him the edge over Mr Netanyahu he is not guaranteed
of victory if it came to a showdown.
The
Israeli political scientist Yaron Ezrahi believes Mr Sharon will
eventually have to break with part of Likud and appeal to a broader
constituency.
"He's taking a step which is defined as the historic act of a
statesman who ignores the political cost of his acts. At the same
time, Sharon can depict Netanyahu as a political opportunist," he
said.
The
irony of Mr Sharon adopting the mantle of the statesman above
politics is not lost on critics of the man who oversaw the creation
of the settlements, undermined previous prime ministers who offered
concessions to the Palestinians, and wasaccused of contributing to
the incitement on the far right which led to the assassination of
the Labour prime minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995.
For
that reason many on the left are suspicious of Mr Sharon's
intentions, but there is no agreement yet on what price to exact for
cooperating with him. Some want to set conditions, such as renewed
negotiations with the Palestinians, and an agreement to dismantle
many more settlements in the West Bank.
Mr
Sharon faces personal risks in pursuing his strategy, moreover. On
Sunday the police arrested members of a banned extreme rightwing
Jewish group, Kahane Chai, alleged to have published weblogs
offering religious justifications for assassinating senior
politicians and army officers who support the dismantling of
settlements.
Kahane Chai has called Mr Sharon a traitor and warned that
dismantling the settlements will lead to civil war.
Source: The
Guardian
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