Sharon’s Budget Passes, Clearing Way for Gaza Plan

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon won parliamentary approval for his annual budget Tuesday by a wide margin, steamrollering opponents who had tried to use the issue to topple his government and block this summer’s planned withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.

Jewish settlers and their supporters, having exhausted their last legislative hope of derailing the Gaza pullout plan, vowed a massive campaign of civil disobedience and disruptive street protests. The more extremist among them made thinly veiled threats of violence.

“This is legitimate war,” Gaza settler Arieh Yitzhaki told Israel Radio. “We’ll stop the [evacuation of settlements] with our bodies.”

Had Sharon failed to push the $61-billion budget through the Knesset, or parliament, by Thursday midnight, he would have been forced to dissolve his government and call early elections, to be held within 90 days. That would have made it nearly impossible to adhere to the scheduled July 20 start of the Gaza evacuation.

But after weeks of backroom haggling, the conservative prime minister secured the necessary budget votes in a weekend accord with the secular Shinui Party.

The approval of the spending plan by a vote of 58 to 36 with one abstention came a day after the prime minister and his allies overcame another Knesset challenge by opponents of the planned withdrawal: a bid to put the issue to a nationwide referendum. That was defeated nearly 2 to 1.

Stung by the dual defeats, settlers declared they would mobilize tens of thousands of supporters to paralyze the country in advance of the pullout. Opponents of the withdrawal plan have blockaded highways during rush hour several times in recent weeks, causing huge traffic jams.

“We’ll light such a fire in the streets that in the end it will be decided ... to stop the move,” said lawmaker Zvi Hendel, who lives in a Gaza settlement.

But senior aides to Sharon predicted that settlers’ efforts to disrupt daily life would backfire, making their cause even more unpopular.

“There will be no fire in the streets; we won’t let this happen,” said Vice Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, a key confidant of Sharon. “We understand this fervor, but they know too that this fervor has its limits.”

For months, polls have indicated that about two-thirds of Israelis are in favor of the Gaza withdrawal plan, seeing the coastal territory where more than 1.2 million Palestinians reside as a strategic liability and a financial drain. About 8,500 settlers live in heavily fortified enclaves guarded around the clock by Israeli troops.

Settlers signaled their intention to defy government orders against outsiders moving into the 21 Gaza settlements slated for evacuation along with four in the northern West Bank.

In anticipation of the army declaring Gaza a closed military zone well before the start of the pullout, settlers have indicated that they will use the Passover holiday, in the last week of April, to pack the territory’s main settlement bloc with supporters. Israeli authorities have said they believe that the resisters are stockpiling supplies and that they will set up tent cities to house a hoped-for influx.

“If these areas close after Passover, we’ll prepare for their arrival nonetheless,” said Pinchas Wallerstein, the head of the Yesha Council, the settlers’ umbrella group.

The mainstream leadership of the settlers insists that resistance to the pullout will be nonviolent. But the security establishment is worried about the escalating volley of threats against Sharon.

Far-right rhetoric often refers explicitly to the 1995 assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who was gunned down by an ultranationalist Jew. “Arik, Rabin is waiting for you,” read one sticker, using Sharon’s nickname, which appeared recently on walls in Jerusalem.

The 77-year-old Israeli leader has shrugged off the threats, saying he does not fear for his life.

Israel’s public security minister, Gideon Ezra, said Tuesday that he was considering collecting the weapons of Gaza settlers prior to the pullout. For years, Jewish settlers in Gaza and the West Bank have been able to easily obtain gun permits and weapons to defend against attacks by Palestinian militants.

Opponents to the withdrawal plan have not yet exhausted legal avenues; Israel’s Supreme Court has agreed to hear an appeal April 8. But legal analysts say there is little likelihood the court will overturn the law on which the withdrawal plan is based. Under the law, the settlers who are evacuated are to be paid compensation on a sliding scale, averaging several hundred thousand dollars per family.

As Sharon struggled in recent weeks to scrape together the votes he needed to win the budget battle, long-simmering animosity between the prime minister and Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu flared anew. Netanyahu, a rival to Sharon for leadership of the fractured Likud Party, campaigned openly in favor of Monday’s referendum measure.

Commentators pointed out that though Sharon prevailed in the end, the political infighting left him beholden to many competing political factions.

“Sharon is now dealing with the truly big challenge: the actual implementation [of the withdrawal] on the ground,” political columnist Nahum Barnea wrote in the Yediot Aharonot daily. “There he will be facing off against hard and desperate people.... The question is not only who will win, but at what price in human life, property and national trauma.”