Pullout Shifts Political Terrain

Over the last nine days, the almost biblical spectacle of the exodus of thousands of Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip and a tiny crescent of the West Bank not only literally changed the physical landscape here.

Besides remapping the contours of an ancient and longdisputed terrain, the settlers’ forced departure, the first initiated by Israel from established communities built on land the Palestinians claim for their future state, also has caused deep though subtle shifts within Israeli and Palestinian societies.

The Israeli pullout, perhaps the first dramatic gesture by either side in years not involving the infliction of heavy fatalities on the other, has shaken up the interplay between two peoples and their respective leaders. For once, neither side can be altogether certain that the conventional wisdom regarding the other is valid.

For Palestinians, the withdrawal demonstrated that Israel could, if it wished, summon the will to negotiate the fate of disputed territory, and perhaps even cede ground held sacred. For Israelis, the episode was a newfound glimpse of a Palestinian leader determined to move beyond the violence of the past five years and uphold his end of a bargain.

Each side now will probably need time to take in the full import of the other’s behavior.

“What happens now,” said Shlomo Avineri, a former director-general of the Foreign Ministry who teaches political science at Hebrew University, “is that everyone stops and takes a deep, deep breath.”

For both sides, the withdrawal of settlers, which wrapped up Tuesday, lent urgent new impetus to some of the larger questions that underpin the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: whether the two sides would now return to the bargaining table and set terms for Palestinian statehood, whether this relinquishing of war-won territory by Israel signaled a willingness to do so again, and whether Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas’ administration could assert a meaningful degree of civil control in heretofore ungovernable Gaza.

“It’s too early for these things to be known,” said Avishai Margalit, a prominent Israeli social and cultural critic. “Much might have changed profoundly in ways we can’t yet see; sometimes you have an earthquake that cracks the wall of a building, but no one sees this, and a year later all comes tumbling down.”

Clues to the course of both sides’ conduct in coming weeks and months can be read in how each behaved as the withdrawal drew near. Palestinians initially worried the pullout was little more than some devious Israeli plot. Israelis wondered whether Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was sincere in hatching the plan, and whether Palestinians would wage devastating strikes, whenever the opportunity presented itself, on settlers made temporarily vulnerable.

In the course of the pullout, its cast of leading characters -- the equally wary Sharon and Abbas, the stalwart young soldiers and weeping settlers, the masked Hamas militants and rooftop Jewish ideologues -- all played roles that at times seemed scripted to the point of artifice. But all demonstrated the capacity to confound expectations as well.

Almost no one expected the removal of nearly 9,000 Jewish settlers and several thousand outside protesters to proceed so quickly, or with so little real violence. Though the struggle had its tense and ugly moments, most of them fueled by confrontations between troops and ultranationalist Jewish youths, the majority of the settlers ultimately left their homes peacefully if tearfully.

And Palestinian militant groups, almost without exception, held their fire throughout, allowing the logistically complex operation of evacuating 21 Gaza settlements and four more in the northern West Bank to proceed without a chaotic parallel battle erupting between Israeli forces and Palestinian gunmen.

That might have been because Sharon had warned beforehand that any serious attack by groups such as Hamas or Islamic Jihad would trigger a harsh Israeli military response, or because Hamas, with plans to contest the coming Palestinian parliamentary elections, had its own pragmatic internal reasons for keeping the calm.

But Abbas and his top lieutenants also worked exceptionally hard to avoid an outbreak of fighting, a feat that won praise even from some hard-nosed Israeli military strategists. The Palestinian leader also made a much-needed overture to Sharon, telephoning the Israeli leader Monday for the first time in two months as the pullout wound down, telling him it had been a brave and historic step.

Though the 77-year-old Sharon is being showered with plaudits by the international community for successfully carrying through the pullout, he also ran considerable political risk. Right-wing rivals at home, his onetime close allies, have made plain their wish to see him suffer for it.

“We will take political revenge on you,” a former Cabinet minister, Effi Eitam, all but spat at the prime minister during a heated session of a parliamentary panel Monday, according to Israeli news reports. “We will send you in disgrace back to your ranch, back to your Muqata” -- a biting reference to the ruined West Bank compound where the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat spent his final years.

The Jewish settler movement, which for decades has wielded disproportionate clout in Israeli politics, was left badly bruised by this battle, most observers agreed, and not simply because it wound up on the losing side.

Many of those considered to be mainstream leaders of the quarter-million settlers in the West Bank veered close to open rebellion against the state as the pullout approached, dismissing the authority of such government bodies as the Supreme Court and the Knesset, or parliament, and actively encouraging followers to break the law.

Their greatest vitriol was reserved for Sharon, their onetime godfather.

“It’s clear they were shattered,” said Margalit, the writer and critic. “I believe they truly thought the evacuation would not take place. They were genuinely shocked.”

A weakened settler movement could still try to spearhead a backlash against further territorial concessions, or find itself relegated to a political role more commensurate with its reduced standing with the Israeli public.

The settler leadership also has come under sharp criticism for exacerbating the hardships of settler families by urging them to refuse any dealings with the government agency set up months ago to find them housing and jobs. As a result, hundreds of those families are rootless and dispossessed, getting only a belated start on building new lives.

During the pullout, even many Israelis who ardently wanted the settlers out of Gaza found themselves genuinely moved by the sight of weeping men and women being led from homes and synagogues. But the settlers also alienated the general public with crude use of Holocaust imagery to try to dramatize their plight, and horrified onlookers by thrusting the smallest of children into the center of confrontations with troops.

For its sensitive dealings with the settlers, the Israeli army received near-universal high marks. Commanders came in for a share of praise, but the public’s real admiration was reserved for the young soldiers who withstood both blows and sobs from the settlers, even when they were driven to tears themselves. And worries that large numbers of troops might refuse orders proved unfounded.

Sharon’s prime motivation in the Gaza pullout, by his own account and those of people close to him, was to take a dramatic first step toward drawing defensible borders for the Jewish state. But whether his strategy is ultimately deemed a success will largely hinge on whether Gaza becomes a source of continued attacks against Israel.

“The process here is long and gradual,” Amos Gilad, a senior advisor in the Defense Ministry, told Israel Radio. The Israeli military, he said, “is not leaving in order to be immediately followed by rockets into Israel -- everyone, including Hamas, understands this is not the way things work. So it is certainly possible the calm will go on.”

But in giving up Gaza, Sharon rejects the dream of “Greater Israel,” long nurtured by those who believe that Israel should remain sovereign over all the land it captured in the 1967 Middle East War and continues to hold.

For most of his adult life, Sharon the military man believed this too, but arrived at the view that for Israel to seek to rule more than 4 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza would amount to demographic suicide for the Jewish state.

“I think what we are seeing is a very deep and painful debate in the context of historical Zionism, the settlers’ maximalist vision of that being confronted with an entirely new reality,” Avineri said.

“And it’s an argument that will continue. It doesn’t end here.”