Israel’s Paradox Ensnares Sharon

Israel has fallen into its worst domestic crisis in almost a decade as the country angrily debates Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s plan to evacuate Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip and the northern West Bank.

On Tuesday, the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, will vote on the “disengagement” plan against a backdrop of civil war threats and warnings of possible attempts on Sharon’s life. At the same time, several prominent rabbis have called on their followers in the military to refuse orders to evacuate settlers. Nine years after the murder of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by a right-wing assassin under similar circumstances, such threats cannot be taken lightly.

Sharon is expected to win Tuesday’s vote because, even though almost half of the members of his own party oppose the plan, he will win the votes of his traditional enemies in the left-wing opposition parties. Nevertheless, the plan’s ultimate implementation, as well as Sharon’s political survival, is under increasing doubt. Likud, Sharon’s ruling party, has been torn apart by the disengagement dispute. He is facing growing pressure to hold an unprecedented national referendum on the settlement issue, but he has sought to avoid such a vote for fear it would delay the pullout -- and because it is possible that he would lose.

There’s a huge paradox here: Most of the Israeli public wants the settlers (and the army) out of the Gaza Strip. Opinion polls show that 60% to 65% of Israeli Jews support Sharon’s plan. The problem is that this majority has been unable to impose its will on the well-organized and generously funded minority, which seeks to keep all the settlements in place. Whether for spiritual, ideological or security reasons, the Israeli right -- religious and secular -- is united against Sharon, whose supporters, by contrast, are a fractured alliance of Likud moderates and left-wingers. And both these groups fall way short of being enthusiastic about the Gaza plan, viewing it, at best, as a lesser evil than the current stalemate with the Palestinians.

Since 1982, when Israel removed all its settlements from the Sinai under the peace treaty with Egypt, the right has deterred successive governments from further evacuations. When Rabin signed the Oslo deal with Yasser Arafat in 1993, he hesitated, then decided to keep all the settlements until the “final status” agreement (which never arrived). Meanwhile, the settler population almost doubled from 1993 to 2000, complicating an eventual partition of the land between Israelis and Palestinians. Ultimately, the Oslo process collapsed; the settlements remained.

Now Sharon, once the “architect” of the settlements, wants to remove several of them unilaterally -- something that even the most leftist governments have been unable to do. In return for the Gaza exodus, he pledges to strengthen Israel’s hold over the West Bank. Sharon believes that by giving away Gaza, he can get American consent to keep the territorial status quo in the West Bank until the Palestinians somehow are reformed and become peaceful, and thus entitled to their independent state. Even Sharon does not argue that his plan would significantly reduce terrorism, but it could strengthen international legitimacy for Israel’s counter-terrorism operations.

Critics of the plan fear a domino effect, in which most leftists would use the Sharon precedent to accelerate withdrawal from the rest of the territories, and West Bank settlements would promptly disappear on the heels of the Gaza settlements.

Sharon is trapped in the same predicament that four of his predecessors faced. Like Yitzhak Shamir, Rabin, Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak, he has reached the point where he wants to break left from his hard-line election pledges.

Sharon’s change of heart -- and his decision to evacuate from Gaza -- has led to a rebellion within his coalition. He believed, wrongly, that his party, which he led to a landslide election victory last year, would stand behind him. Known in the past as a political magician, the white-haired leader now appears to have lost his clout. He was defeated twice in key party votes and was forced to dilute his settlement evacuation plan to gain Cabinet approval.

The disengagement debate serves as a reminder that Likud is a strongly ideological group, with many members willing to risk the party’s hold on power rather than hand back territory. And they are likely to select an even more hawkish set of Knesset candidates before the next election.

Even a popular prime minister like Sharon is falling victim to the Israeli paradox of the majority’s inability to implement its goals. For Sharon, fighting uphill to keep his plan on track, Tuesday’s vote is just the beginning; this will continue until the pullout itself, scheduled for the summer of 2005.

Throughout his long military and political career, Sharon has shown a remarkable ability to rise from the ashes of failure and defeat to a better position. But even for a man with many scars, the disengagement debate is the battle of a lifetime.