Tested by Zion (21 page)

In what he said and what he did not say, Sharon was in fact hinting at a great deal that became clear to Israelis only later. For one thing, he did not speak of “Gaza disengagement,” and the principles he outlined applied to the West Bank settlements as well as the few in Gaza. But Sharon was not committing to disengagement at all; instead, he was “threatening” to take that route if there were no change on the Palestinian side. He declared his commitment to the Roadmap and to direct negotiations, but then said he would move unilaterally if the Palestinians, in his words, continued to disregard their obligations. With domestic politics in mind, he presented disengagement to the Israeli audience as a way of fighting terror and as an act of defiance. But he was saying something that had to be music to the ears of American and European statesmen: He was prepared to remove settlements.

Sharon also added one line about the settlement agreement he had reached with the United States, simply spelling out its terms: “Israel will meet all its obligations with regard to construction in the settlements. There will be no construction beyond the existing construction line, no expropriation of land for construction, no special economic incentives and no construction of new settlements.”

As 2003 ended, Ariel Sharon was the center of action. This had certainly not been predictable when he became prime minister in 2001 during the intifada, nor even after 9/11; it seemed then that he would fight terror and repeat over and over that Israel needed security. He seemed to be immovable and ideologically motivated, a view his closest advisors always thought to be a misreading of the pragmatic leader they saw. They were right: Sharon had watched carefully as Bush's thinking evolved after the terrorist attacks on the United States and had understood that Bush's changed view of Arafat created a new situation. He had not fought the United States when we formally endorsed Palestinian statehood but had rolled with that punch. His own thinking evolved toward separation from the Palestinians, and he came to agree that once Arafat was out of power, progress toward Palestinian statehood was desirable. In 2003 he won reelection in January, soon after came to Washington in February to cement relations with Bush, accepted the Roadmap in May, and then appeared at Aqaba in June to deliver the words Bush wanted to hear. He met with Abbas in July and appeared ready to give American- and Quartet-backed negotiations a chance, but meanwhile began building the security barrier to prevent the plague of suicide bombings. When Arafat's tenacious grip on power proved unbreakable and the Americans were stumped, Sharon moved: He would act unilaterally to break the deadlock, prevent the adoption of other plans that involved too many concessions or abandoned the struggle against Arafat, and begin to move Israel in the direction he wanted. Indeed, Sharon was abandoning the idea of a “Greater Israel,” an Israel of which many on its right wing had long dreamed. The idea of disengagement fit perfectly with the security fence itself because roughly 90% of the West Bank was beyond that fence. Sharon was tacitly acknowledging that while he intended the major settlement blocks to become part of Israel, those beyond the fence were expendable; he was dividing settlers between the vast majority who would be rescued by his plans and the small minority, perhaps 15%, who would be abandoned politically and forced to move back westward.

And Sharon was guaranteeing continued, strong American support for Israel and for himself. He had not used the Palestinians’ troubles and Bush's clear demands that Arafat be sidelined to abandon the two-state solution. In Herzliya, he stated flatly that direct negotiations were the preferred route, and nothing he was doing – not the fence and not disengagement – contradicted or undermined the Roadmap. He was in a sense being faithful to his promises to Bush and at the same time rescuing the Americans from a predicament we could not solve. Nothing could move while Arafat remained in charge, we had said,
but there he still was. We were stuck. At Herzliya, Sharon showed us a way forward.

If Ariel Sharon had been vague in his Herzliya speech of December 2003, he did not wait long to spell out his intentions to Israelis and to the world. On February 2, 2004, he told an interviewer from the Israeli newspaper
Haaretz
that he would remove all 17 settlements and every Israeli (there were roughly 7,500) from Gaza. “It is my intention to carry out an evacuation – sorry, a relocation – of settlements that cause us problems and of places that we will not hold onto anyway in a final settlement, like the Gaza settlements,” Sharon said, though he gave no timetable. “I am working on the assumption that in the future there will be no Jews in Gaza.”
¹

Sharon met with Likud members of the Knesset in the days after his
Haaretz
interview, and reactions from many on Israel's right were loud: Sharon was abandoning a lifetime of commitment to settlements, was betraying his party, and was rewarding terror. A few weeks before the interview, on January 12, 2004, the Settlers’ Council had organized an anti-disengagement mass rally in Tel Aviv that attracted 120,000 people. In the days and weeks after the interview, Gaza settlers picketed at Sharon's ranch in the Negev, angrily denouncing him. A council of rabbis declared a day of fasting to “annul the evil decree.” The National Religious Party said it would pull out of the government coalition if he moved forward, though Sharon's majority of 73 in the 120-seat Knesset gave him a cushion against such threats from outside Likud; his real problem would prove to be the party itself, where opposition was quickly building: “The turmoil in the Likud turned into an uprising,”
²
according to a biography of Sharon. A criticism repeated often by the Israeli media was that Sharon was trying to distract the public's attention from a serious police investigation of the funding of his most recent campaign. There had already been one indictment, and it was unclear whether the scandal would touch Sharon himself.
³
One Knesset member from the National Union Party, himself a settler, told reporters that “the prime minister's sole motivation now is the police investigations. The progress of the investigation will determine the extent of
uprooting” of settlers and settlements in Gaza; “the more investigations, the more evacuations.”
⁴

Sharon himself was sympathetic to the settlers. He told
Haaretz
that “there are people who are third generation there. The first thing is to ask their agreement, to reach an agreement with the residents.” In later conversations, I found that his determination to carry out his plan and defeat his political enemies never translated into resentment of the settlers themselves. His mistake was that he never told them clearly what he told me and other American officials: that he viewed the settlers as people sent by the State of Israel and motivated by the best Zionist principles – they were people to be appreciated and thanked, and to be persuaded that just as they had made sacrifices to build their settlements, so now the state required further sacrifices of them. Instead, what the government of Israel conveyed was annoyance at the settlers’ resistance and a sense that they were fanatics who had to be pushed out of the way. This made Sharon's political battle even harder than it needed to be.

The initial American reaction to the plan had been cold. The State Department at first refused comment and then reiterated over and over that it wanted progress on the Roadmap – period. “To get progress, we need to see the parties carry out their obligations of the roadmap,” the State Department spokesman said on February 3; “we're not looking for any steps by the parties to prejudge final status issues.…[T]here are certainly unilateral actions that we would be opposed to that do attempt to prejudge final status issues.” The following day the spokesman said, “We're looking for action on settlements that moves us in the direction of the President's vision” and “the kind of negotiated settlement that the parties have committed to.” Unilateral steps were not welcome: “[R]emoving settlements…can help us move down the road towards the vision, but it can't be seen in isolation…from other steps on settlements and other steps…that both parties need to take to achieve a negotiated solution.” The tune did not change immediately: On February 13, State was still saying that the Gaza disengagement
“needs to be placed in the context of reaching a negotiated solution.…[Y]ou can't really resolve the fundamental issue without a negotiation.” Four days later, the spokesman said discussions with Israel were aimed at “how to get going on the Roadmap.”

This was nonsense. There was no negotiation, and there was not going to be one with Yasser Arafat, who had frozen the Roadmap by pushing out Abbas and
stopping reforms. Journalists who spoke with NSC officials had a better insight than those who simply listened to official State Department pronouncements. By the end of February, the
Washington Post
was reporting that the Bush administration would “embrace Israel's proposal” as a “fresh approach…an acknowledgment that productive talks between Israel and Palestinian leaders are not possible at this moment and that unilateral steps proposed by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon…could provide an interim step that presents the best
hope of progress toward ultimate success.”
⁵
The story noted that Sharon appeared willing to consider adjustments in the fence route and the delay or abandonment of some sections of the security fence as well.

Although the entire Gaza plan had been Sharon's alone, the White House did in fact come to view it as a very positive move: It was shaking things up in the way Rice had hoped. However, we were reluctant to offer military advice, with some of us backing complete removal of the IDF from Gaza and others in favor of partial withdrawal. Yet our hopes were clear enough: We told Sharon and
his team that we advised a clean break, a complete departure, from Gaza, if that were militarily possible. And we had strong advice on another point: Do something in the West Bank as well. Getting out of Gaza did not necessarily imply that progress in the West Bank was possible; some Palestinians thought it implied the opposite. Sharon had been suggestively vague at Herzliya, but if he then did nothing in the West Bank, conclusions would be drawn: that Israel would keep every square inch, every settlement was permanent, and no negotiated peace was possible. So we urged that something be done, indeed as much as he could do politically, to counter those claims. As Sharon's son later described our efforts, “[W]hat had become clear from those talks was that if the Disengagement Plan did not include any parts of Judea and Samaria, the Americans would not offer any type of reward for the initiative, nor would it receive their backing.”
⁶
Sharon set teams to work on both issues: the withdrawal of the IDF from Gaza and particularly the Philadelphi Strip, and the West Bank issue. We also told Sharon to take another look at the fence route, so that it encircled as few Palestinians as possible and kept as few as possible from roads and lands they needed to reach. Finally, we urged the Israelis to work with the Palestinians to the extent possible on the Gaza pullout, for obvious pragmatic reasons as well as equally obvious political ones.

Sallai Meridor, Israel's ambassador to the United States from 2006 to 2009, years later gave a thoughtful comment on Bush's possible calculations about disengagement
:

I’ve tried to think about Bush. He's inheriting broken negotiations, terrible terror; he has to make a judgment on how he is dealing the matter. He is struggling whether he should continue with Arafat, should decide that Arafat is a terrorist and just ignore him, to what extent he feels he wants to support Israel in its efforts to put an end to terror. September 11 is in the background, America's engagement in Afghanistan and Iraq is dealing with the same issues.…He makes a decision, from 2002 onward – that on the one hand he is accepting the endgame, at the same time he is loyal to his principles that you fight terror and you fight terror and you fight terror, and you cannot build a state with no democracy or it's not worth supporting and it cannot go along with terror. So – for me – he's doing two things: on the one hand, he is articulating the notion of two states and [at] the same time, it cannot be phony, it cannot be corrupt, it cannot be based on terror so there is a Roadmap to get there. Then there is terror and Israel is fighting terror and you have to support Israel in its fight against terror. And you have Arafat there and there is nobody to talk to. Then you have Sharon with the idea of disengagement. And he [Bush] has to make a call whether to support it or not, and he
made a call to support it because there is no alternative with Arafat and
because this is something which may change the equation in some ways.
⁷

I agreed. As I saw it, Arafat had crushed the hopes of 2002 and 2003; obviously, there would be no significant reform while he was in charge – and we had failed to push him aside. After the Abbas visit to the White House, Arafat had gotten rid of Abbas. There would be no negotiations between Israel and Arafat, nor did we seek any. Progress on the Roadmap was impossible because it was evident that Arafat would not fight terror; he was a master terrorist, and at least since the
Karine A
incident, it had been clear to us that he viewed terror as he viewed speeches or monetary payments: just one tool in his kit. Indeed, the terrorism, by groups related to Arafat and by other Palestinian terrorist organizations, had continued in the fall of 2003 and into 2004. In addition to smaller attacks every week, larger and even more deadly acts occurred. On October 4, 2003, 21 Israelis were killed when a beachfront restaurant was blown up in Haifa. The totals were 30 dead in October, 5 in November, and 6 in December; on Christmas Day, a suicide bombing at a bus stop east of Tel Aviv killed 4 and injured 15. And then it started again: There were attacks on January 13 and 14, 2004, and on January 29, 11 Israelis were killed and more than 50 injured in the suicide bombing of a bus in Jerusalem by the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade
s, a part of Yasser Arafat's Fatah party.

So Sharon's new initiative was the only game in town. The president sent Steve Hadley and
me off to see Sharon on February 18 and 19 to assess exactly what he had in mind. During our preliminary talks, Weissglas explained that Sharon's intentions for Gaza were clear: The plan was to get out totally. As for the West Bank, that was under discussion: Sharon's long-term goal was to remove the minimum number of settlements while allowing the Palestinians maximum contiguity, and he would move the IDF westward toward the fence. How and when this could be achieved was not certain, but it was, of course, reassuring to us that Sharon was thinking so seriously about the West Bank. But Weissglas also recounted Sharon's political problems: For example, on February 2, he had won a no-confidence vote in the Knesset by the slim margin of 41 to 40. Sharon's own foreign minister, Silvan Shalom, vocally opposed withdrawing from Gaza.

We then met with Sharon, who had a message for the president. Sharon explained that he felt negotiations were impossible now: Abu Ala'a did not control the Palestinian security forces, Arafat did, which meant there would be no Palestinian actions against terrorism. That situation is what led to this new plan, he said. The steps he planned were very complicated internally, he told us: At Aqaba and elsewhere, he had talked of painful compromises in exchange for peace, but this would be disengagement without peace. Menachem Begin
had pulled out of Sinai to secure peace with Egypt, but this would be the first time a prime minister dared to withdraw without a peace agreement. It looks like a kind of civil war here, he said of Israeli politics. It doesn't stop me, but it's very complicated. Sharon commented that he had been defending Jews all his life, but now the security services had to surround him to protect him from Jews.

The real problem is in Likud, he went on. He was not so worried about small parties leaving the coalition, so long as Likud was steady – but would it be, if other right-wing parties left? Those are my problems, he said. It's very complicated and difficult, and there's only one way I’ll be able to carry out the withdrawal – if Israel gets political backing. I’ve got to persuade people here, he continued, that though we are giving up land, we are getting support, political support. You want me to make some moves in the West Bank? That depends on U.S. support, so that I can show we are getting something for disengagement. We're not getting peace, after all. I am not doing this for you or for the Palestinians, but for Israel, and I would not have entered this minefield unless I were fully decided to do it. Sharon repeated this thought two or three times: I decided to do it, and I will. But, he concluded, how far I can go depends on you. That was the message we were to take back to the president, plus a request to visit Washington soon.

We did take the message back, and discussions continued in both Jerusalem and Washington. The concept Hadley and
I developed was “more for more,” which simply meant that the more Sharon could do, the more President Bush could offer support. Weissglas, of course, saw it the other way: The more public support from Bush, the more Sharon could do. We very clearly wanted Sharon to make a clean break with Gaza and to include the West Bank in his withdrawal plans; he very clearly sought some American help to get there. We knew that Sharon's NSC had drawn up a variety of plans, including withdrawal from zero West Bank settlements, one or two, three or four, or more and larger ones. Our assessment of the political situation was that he was not bluffing: Resistance to his proposals on the Israeli right, and especially within Likud, appeared to be growing.

Meanwhile, the terror continued, which weakened his hand further: Opponents said Israel should never withdraw under fire and that by disengaging, Sharon was giving in to terror. On March 14, a double-suicide bombing killed 10 and wounded 16 more in an attack on the port of Ashdod; Hamas and Fatah claimed “credit” for the bombing.