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The Portland Trust is committed to promoting peace and stability between Palestinians and Israelis through economic development.

Portland Note: August 2005

Israel’s Disengagement: What Next?

Israel’s disengagement from Gaza and from an area in the northern part of the West Bank is underway. The plan, which many considered unrealistic when it was announced in December 2003, has been driven by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s persistence and supported by a majority of Israeli citizens. The extensive preparations made by Israel’s security apparatus – its military, police, and the General Security Service (Shabak) – indicate their determination to carry out the government’s policy in an organized way, and according to schedule.

However, the withdrawal has been characterized by two complicating factors, both of which could have been predicted. First, the glaring asymmetry between the highly motivated, energized, mobilized and committed opponents of the move, and the relatively passive majority favouring disengagement. And second, the Palestinian Authority’s failure to ensure that the evacuation of Israeli settlers would not be conducted “under fire.” Whilst the PA may still prove able to prevent violence accompanying the actual evacuation of Israelis, its failure to prevent missile fire during the weeks leading to the active implementation of the disengagement plan has left Israelis pessimistic regarding the possible emergence of a Palestinian negotiating partner. And further withdrawal of Israeli settlements from the West Bank would carry inherently greater complications.

Thus, significant limitations can be expected regarding the extent to which the implementation of the plan will prove to be a “dynamic changing” event. Whilst there will be significant pressure on Israel to evacuate further settlements in the West Bank, progress will be very difficult. An even greater level of planning will be required, and delays and setbacks should be expected. Expectations that the parties may soon be able to return to a fully negotiated process as envisaged in the Quartet’s Road Map are probably unrealistic.

ANALYSIS

There are at least three important reasons to expect Israel to continue the process of separating itself from the large Palestinian population residing in the West Bank beyond its government’s current disengagement plan. The most important of these is that the demographic logic which stipulates that, in order to preserve itself as a Jewish and democratic state, Israel needs to end its control of the Palestinians. With the majority of the large West Bank population still under its control, this reasoning will continue to apply after the current disengagement plan is completed.

Second, Israel’s disengagement plan may indeed represent a paradigm shift within the Israeli political discourse. For the first time, settlers and settlements are being evacuated, reversing three decades of ever-expanding Israeli settlement activity in the territories. This is an important precedent. The very partial – some say, symbolic – withdrawal in the northern part of the West Bank, is particularly important in this context. Once it is implemented, no longer will it be possible to argue that removing settlements from the West Bank is impossible.

And third, stabilizing the situation following the implementation of Israel’s present plan is likely to prove very difficult if not impossible. Israel will be perceived as being “on its way out” whilst simultaneously attempting to defend dozens of settlements inside the West Bank and the access routes connecting them. This anomaly will be accentuated by the continued erection of the security barrier. Paradoxically, the more effective the barrier becomes in protecting Israel’s large metropolitan areas from suicide bombers, the more difficult will be the attempts to justify Israel’s continued military and civilian presence deep inside the West Bank.

Yet, carrying the momentum of the current disengagement plan into further rounds of evacuation is likely to be extremely difficult.

First, while the opponents of disengagement failed to prevent the implementation of the present plan, they have demonstrated their commitment, energy, and organisational capacity. In the months to come, they can be expected to point out that their commitment to prevent further withdrawals in the West Bank – given the area’s religious and historical meaning – will be far greater than was the case with Gaza. Even if their protests again prove ineffective, they will set a high price for any Israeli leader who might contemplate continuing what Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has begun.

Second, implementing meaningful disengagement in the West Bank is inherently more complicated that in Gaza. Withdrawal from Gaza – even if some issues remain unresolved – is being carried out in one dramatic step and will be much more complete than anything that can be achieved in the West Bank. Gaza’s border with Israel is fully fenced and was never seriously disputed. On completion of its withdrawal, Israel can achieve a high level of “finality” with regard to ending its control of the area.

y contrast, since no one suggests that the next step will be a complete withdrawal to the 1967 line, further disengagement in the West Bank will still be only partial and tentative. As such, it will result in a far more ambiguous division of responsibilities between the Israeli and Palestinian authorities. To prevent such ambiguity ending in chaos, a high degree of coordination between Israel and the PA would be required.

But how likely is it that such coordination will be achieved? If the performance of the PA thus far is any indication of what can be expected in the future, the prospects of a unified Palestinian partner emerging seem dim. The failure of the PA to impose a monopoly of force – by either disarming the armed militias or by subjecting them to the PA’s will and complete control – allows the militias to continue the terror campaign against Israel, preventing the restoration of security. This problem has gained international recognition with the recent publication of the report by the Strategic Assessments Initiative in Washington, DC on the state of the Palestinian security services. With little expectations of greater security, support among Israelis for continuing the process of disengagement is likely to be low.

Moreover, this Palestinian failure to insure security has induced Israel to be very cautious – some would say, overly cautious – with regard to the redeployment of its forces, the lifting of roadblocks, and the release of Palestinian prisoners, and to continue implementing tough counter-insurgency measures. Inevitably, these measures are to the detriment of the Palestinian population. Consequently, Palestinians’ support for creating the conditions that will allow further disengagement to take place will also remain low.

The cycle of Palestinian attacks and Israeli countermeasures will also reinforce the negative investment climate, dimming hopes for economic reconstruction in the territories. As a result, Israelis and Palestinians will again observe that no meaningful positive change in their daily life had occurred.

Finally, at least in the short term, continued Israeli disengagement from the territories will likely be hampered by the Israeli electoral calendar. The implementation of the current plan will probably be followed by general elections, in late 2005 or in early 2006. If he were to seek his party’s nomination as candidate for prime minister, Ariel Sharon would be compelled to move to the right, where he will find most of Likud activists. If this were the case, he could be expected to promise no further disengagements, at least not of the unilateral variety. Even if the resulting halt in the process were no more than temporary, it could seriously dampen the prospects that the implementation of Israel’s current disengagement plan will prove a “dynamic changing” event.

The Israeli Internal Balance

The struggle between the supporters and opponents of disengagement is an important indicator of the prospects for further progress. The failure of the Israeli anti-disengagement camp to halt the implementation of the current plan resulted, at least in part, from a number of tactical and strategic mistakes. These mistakes resulted in alienating the centre of Israel’s political map, seriously damaging its chances of winning the battle over the ‘hearts and minds’ of the Israeli public.

The first of these mistakes was the refusal of the settler leadership to disassociate itself clearly from the call – issued by certain religious leaders – for soldiers to disobey orders to evacuate the settlers, and for settlers to do everything possible to resist the evacuating soldiers. Given the broad consensus that the IDF is the most important guarantor of the country’s independence and sovereignty, it is not surprising that many Israelis were enraged by the call to confront their sons and daughters who were sent by Israel’s elected government to implement its decisions.

In addition, most Israelis are persuaded that Israeli sovereignty is seriously compromised by any attempt to ignore the principle of ‘unity of command’. Thus, suggestions that soldiers should obey a ‘higher calling’ instead of their superior officers and refuse orders to evacuate the settlers were viewed as a challenge to Israeli democracy.

Secondly, the decision of the opponents to extract a high toll for the implementation of disengagement by attempting to disrupt normal life in Israel was a big mistake. Israelis traveling home after a long day at work were not amused by the traffic jams created by the opponents’ spreading oil and nails on the roads. Instead of eliciting sympathy from the average Israeli, the protests had the opposite effect. After almost five years of coping with Palestinian efforts to disrupt their lives, Israelis had no patience for the campaign.

Another mistake was to equate the evacuation of settlers with the atrocities of Nazi Germany with settlers wearing a yellow badge – a reminder of the tags that Jews were forced to wear. Later, some settlers provided their identification numbers to inquiring soldiers and policemen by marking their numbers on their arms, echoing the Nazi numbering of Jewish prisoners in concentration camps. This analogy was viewed with revulsion by the vast majority of Israelis who reject it as entirely unjustified and, more important, as a reprehensible devaluation of the holocaust.

The failure to prevent the disengagement plan will likely lead the settler leadership and other opponents of disengagement to reassess their strategy and tactics and to amend them. Were the Israeli government to consider continuing the disengagement process, it will likely find the opposition less inclined to repeat the aforementioned mistakes.

But anti-disengagement leaders will face a dilemma. How are they to demonstrate their determination to prevent further withdrawals without the average Israeli being alienated, if not angered, by the measures they take? Might not further protests have the opposite effect and energise and activate the currently ‘silent’ majority which favours a more complete and final disengagement from the Palestinians?

CONCLUSIONS

Much of the logic lying behind Prime Minister Sharon’s original conception of the disengagement plan has now been superseded. The current plan was conceived in a time when Yasser Arafat was still alive and when violence was rampant. Its logic argued that the lack of a Palestinian partner made a coordinated, much less a negotiated, process for ending the Israeli-Palestinian dispute extremely unlikely.

Despite the emergence of a new Palestinian leadership, and the ‘calming’ of attacks on Israel agreed by the major Palestinian factions, this is unlikely to result in the disengagement plan carrying forward to further stages of Israeli withdrawal, or to the revival of a genuinely coordinated and negotiated Israeli-Palestinian peace process as envisaged in the Road Map.

Indeed, there are a number of additional problems which suggest that further withdrawal is unlikely - the inherent problems associated with implementing broad disengagement in the West Bank; the commitment and determination of the anti-disengagement campaign to oppose further withdrawal; the failure of the Palestinian Authority to establish a monopoly of force and to streamline its security services into a unified command, thereby increasing the prospects of restoring security; and finally the likelihood that the prospect of further disengagement will be halted by the Israeli electoral calendar.

Any meaningful continuation of the process of disengaging the Israeli and Palestinian communities therefore invites greater involvement of outside powers to address the greater complications involved in further Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank. While such involvement is already considerable – and in the case of Egypt, unprecedented – even greater involvement by the U.S., the EU, and additional Arab states will be needed to overcome the difficulties ahead. Secondly, Israel will undoubtedly demand that the Palestinian Authority establish a monopoly of force, streamline its security services, and that Israeli withdrawal from Gaza does not expose its citizens to increased attack. Finally, the proponents of disengagement will need to demonstrate greater activtity, energy and organisation if they are to balance the commitment and determination shown thus far by the opponents of the move.

But, given the difficulties entailed in continued disengagement, any attempt at this time to embark upon a far more demanding task of renewing Palestinian-Israeli permanent status negotiations at this point is unlikely to succeed. While keeping the Palestinians on board will require a commitment to an eventual return to such negotiations, any attempt to return to permanent status talks prematurely will only lead to added disappointment and will doom any prospects of enabling the two communities to divorce and of channeling them toward a less violent path.

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