Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon (90 page)

The most successful evacuees from Sinai were those who resolved to stick together as communities and, with the state’s help, were able to move collectively to new farming villages inside Israel. But they were the minority. Academic studies of this Israeli experience and of comparable episodes elsewhere concluded that money alone is not enough. People whose lives are dislocated in this way need help to recover. They need close support and counsel in their personal lives and their work or business. And they make the transition far better if they can keep together and reconstitute their communities in new locations.

“That was the way we wanted to go,” says
Yonatan Bassi, who in August 2004 was appointed the head of an ad hoc government authority called Sela
^b
whose purpose would be to supervise a compensation and resettlement program. “We knew it would be better for the people and cheaper for the state.”

Bassi was a man whom Sharon felt comfortable with. A kibbutznik-farmer from the Beit She’an valley and a colonel in the reserves, he had served in the 1980s as director general of the Ministry of Agriculture (under a Labor Party minister). Efficient, decisive, and discreet, he had had to deal as director general with
Sycamore Ranch’s various problems with milk and mutton and the like,
^c
and he managed to emerge respected all around. He was, moreover, one of that shrinking breed: a religious Zionist who favored peace and compromise and saw the settlements in the occupied territories as an albatross around Israel’s neck.

It was a hard and thankless job right from the start. Bassi was boycotted and excoriated within his own national-religious milieu. Hundreds demonstrated against “Yonatan the hangman” (it rhymes better
in Hebrew). Eventually, he had to move out of his kibbutz, where he had lived for decades, to a smaller but less dictatorial one nearby.

He and his handful of staffers did not really know what the bulk of the settlers wanted, because the bulk of the settlers refused to talk to Sela. There were exceptions. The people in the four north Samaria settlements were more pragmatic. But in
Gush Katif and most of the other Gaza Strip settlements the dominant spirit was of rejection, resistance, and denial. “Hayo lo tihye”—“It will not come to pass”—was the watchword, rehearsed by leading nationalist rabbis and fervently believed, in the most literal sense, by many of the settlers. The disengagement was a nightmare or an ordeal sent to try them. God would intervene to stop it somehow.

That was not so far-fetched a prognosis in the summer of 2004 as it seems in hindsight. The political battle was not yet decided, nor was the fight for the hearts and minds of the public. On July 25, in their first major demonstration against the disengagement, the settlers and their supporters deployed 130,000 people (this was the official police figure; the organizers claimed it was higher) in a human chain that extended for fifty-six miles—from Gush Katif to the
Western Wall in Jerusalem. Men and women, students, schoolchildren, babies in strollers, all turned out along the highways and the streets of Jerusalem. At 6:45 as the sun went down, they all held hands, from Yitzhak and
Shlomit Shamir, settlers in the original
Kfar Darom, near Gaza, before 1948, to
David Hatuel, the bereaved husband and father, who stood at the Wall and declared, “We have the willpower to continue to pursue our lives in all parts of the Land of Israel.”
⁵

It was an impressive show of strength and discipline. But beneath the atmosphere of civilized, even good-natured mass protest, there was an undercurrent of talk of eventual violence and even bloodshed if Sharon did not back down. “Why don’t you talk to the settlers?”
Ruby Rivlin asked Sharon privately a couple weeks later. Instead of replying, the prime minister asked a secretary to bring in a copy of a recent article from
The New York Times
. “I asked [a nineteen-year-old U.S.-born woman settler] if she would use the M-16 only against
Arabs,” the reporter wrote, “or against Jews who came to tear down her outpost.”

Such talk was taken seriously. That was inevitable, given the guilt-laden memory of Rabin’s murder only nine years before. Sharon’s security, already tight, was tightened still more.
⁷

More troubling, because more feasible, were various forms of violence that the authorities feared would be launched in order to foil the disengagement. They feared a
Jewish terror attack on the Haram al-Sharif (Temple Mount) in Jerusalem, intended to trigger a massive military conflagration in Palestine and in the wider region and in that way prevent the disengagement. They feared random Jewish terror attacks on Palestinians, also designed to cause widespread unrest and thus divert troops from the disengagement.

They feared that small groups of diehards would take up arms against the evacuating forces (or against themselves: there were threats of suicide as the deadline approached). They expected mass resistance by thousands of young people, from the West Bank settlements and from Israel proper, whose religious and political leaders proclaimed openly that they intended to “invade” the Gaza Strip ahead of the army and thwart the disengagement. They feared that violent confrontations between the soldiers and these “infiltrators” would protract the evacuation process and heighten the risk of attacks on both soldiers and settlers by Palestinian militants.

In addition, the government feared large-scale mutiny
^d
among the troops—that is, refusal on religious grounds to obey orders connected to the disengagement. Some of the nationalist rabbis unequivocally ordered the soldiers to disobey. Some were equally unequivocal in forbidding and condemning such mutiny. But many, like a good number of politicians on the right, wrapped themselves in convenient obfuscation. Hanging over the various scenarios of violence was a fog of deliberate doublespeak that condoned, legitimized, even encouraged some of the violent scenarios while purporting to disapprove of violence. As they broadcast their own mixed messages, some rightist leaders accused Sharon and the army of deliberately hyping the fear of violence as a Soviet-style provocation against the settlers. The settler leaders insisted, moreover, that their planned acts of passive resistance, even if technically illegal, were within the accepted parameters of extra-parliamentary protest. But, as with their determination that Sharon’s behavior was antidemocratic, they determined arbitrarily what the accepted parameters were.

The army was especially anxious about possible widespread mutiny
in reserve battalions. The plans called for units of the border police and of the regular army to perform the actual evacuation, but fairly large reserve forces would have to be called up to take over the deployments of these regular units along the borders and in the West Bank. “We must keep the army out of this ugly contest,” Sharon urged at cabinet in September. “The talk we’ve been hearing is actually intended to foment civil war. I regard with the utmost gravity the threats that have been made against army officers and security personnel.”
⁸

Benzy Lieberman, chairman of the Yesha Council and a master of the doublespeak, compiled the “Ten Commandments for the Struggle Against the Disengagement.” It contained an ostensibly stern prohibition against “verbal or physical violence against the soldiers who will be sent, God forbid, to illicitly uproot the settlers.” But it immediately continued, “Advancement of the plan by trampling the norms of democracy lays the responsibility on the prime minister for the nation being torn asunder, God forbid.”
⁹

Lieberman hewed to this zigzag line throughout the months ahead. “We shall do everything in order to cast the ‘expulsion law’ onto the trash heap of history,” he declared. “There are still plenty of actions that can be undertaken, and we believe with unshakable confidence that this law will not be implemented.” If the “day of disaster” came around nevertheless, “thousands of people opposed to the disengagement will flock to
Gush Katif and be there with the inhabitants.”

What would those thousands do there? Lieberman left that vague. Plainly, though, throughout this period the settlers and their supporters were not thinking in terms of protesting a policy that would ultimately, inexorably, be implemented; they fully intended to prevent its implementation. Extremists and moderates “are united by one common denominator,” the
Haaretz
defense correspondent wrote in October. “They share a profound conviction that they have it in their power still to prevent the prime minister’s plan from being fulfilled.”

Yoel Marcus, the leading columnist, bared the heart of the problem:

Marcus’s powerful defense was perfectly timed; three days later Sharon was to seek the Knesset’s approval for the disengagement plan. The government submitted to the house a package that included the cabinet decision (the “Livni compromise”) on phased withdrawal, details of the withdrawal and compensation plans, and—a key point for Sharon—a copy of President Bush’s letter of April 14.

The Gaza settlements were divided into four groups, and there would be a separate cabinet decision before withdrawal began from each one of them. The IDF would maintain its deployment, at least initially, along the
Philadelphi road, the border zone between Gaza and Egypt. Later, Israel might withdraw from there, too (it did), and might facilitate the building of an airport and a seaport in the Gaza Strip (it did not). Israel would “aspire to” leaving all civilian buildings intact (that was subsequently reversed, and the settlers’ homes were all demolished) and leaving intact, too, all water, electricity, and sewerage infrastructure. Military installations would be dismantled and removed.

The government pledged to continue building the separation fence on the West Bank in accordance with “humanitarian considerations” as determined by the high court. The proposed removal of the four
settlements in northern Samaria would provide territorial contiguity for the Palestinians in that area, the government statement said, and Israel undertook to ease
roadblocks and travel restrictions elsewhere in the West Bank.

As for the Gaza Strip, after the disengagement “there will no longer be any basis to contend that it is occupied territory.” Nevertheless, Israel would continue “to supervise and guard” Gaza’s land borders; it would exercise exclusive control over Gaza’s airspace; and it would “continue to conduct military operations in Gaza’s coastal waters. Israel also reserves the right to self-defense and to the use of force
against threats emanating from Gaza.” These provisos did in fact furnish a basis in the years ahead for contentions, by the Palestinians and by much of the international community, that Gaza remained occupied despite the withdrawal of the army and the settlers from its territory.

It was, in the opening words of Speaker
Ruby Rivlin, to a packed house on October 25, “the moment of truth for the nation, and we here in the Knesset carry the responsibility, for better or worse. Each of us must answer to his conscience.”

“This decision is unbearably hard for me,” Sharon began his speech. “In all my years as a military commander, as a politician, as a minister, and now as prime minister I have never had to take such a hard decision.”

“So why are you doing it?!” A barrage of catcalls opened up from the Right. Speaker Rivlin gaveled furiously. Sharon let the storm subside and continued:

By this time, the heckling from the Right had become a constant and raucous cacophony. Whenever the row subsided a little, Sharon read on doggedly from his text, which he had spent the whole of the previous day at the ranch writing and meticulously rewriting.