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A picture engraved in memory: Ariel Sharon in the Knesset. Around him the
storm is raging. The Members rush about, shouts ring out from all sides. The
Member on the podium waves his arms, denounces and curses him. Sharon
sitting at the government table. Alone. Immovable. Massive and passive. No
muscle in his face is moving. Not even the nervous tic of his nose, that was
once his trade-mark (and that many people considered a kind of
lie-detector). A rock in the raging sea.
This is the man who decided alone to withdraw from Gaza and dismantle the
settlements. The man who is implementing this practically alone. The man who
will stand this coming week facing a hurricane that has no equal in the
history of Israel.
A believer in God might say: this is a miracle from heaven. Mysterious are
the ways of the Almighty. The patron of the settlements, the man who planned
most of them, put them where they are and helped them to strike root and
expand - he is the man who is now setting the fateful precedent of
dismantling settlements in this country.
The dimensions of the "miracle" can be grasped only by posing some
hypothetical questions: What would be happening if the Labor Party were in
power, if Shimon Peres were in charge, if Ariel Sharon were leading the
opposition and commanding the orange-shirts? The very thought is a
nightmare.
If this were the only miracle that is happening to us - that would be
plenty. But it is accompanied by a second miracle: the Israeli army is
conducting the fight against the settlers. That is a miracle so wondrous
that it could make the most secular pork-eater run to his rabbi.
For 37 years, the Israeli army has been the Settlers Defense Army. It has
planned, openly and in secret, the placement of the settlements, including
the "illegal" settlement outposts all over the West Bank. It has devoted
most of its forces and resources to their defense. That has reached
grotesque dimensions: for example, the Netzarim settlement, in the middle of
the Gaza Strip, was defended by three whole battalions. Seventeen male and
female soldiers lost their lives in the defense of Netzarim, about which
Ariel Sharon said some years ago: "Netzarim's fate is the same as
Tel-Aviv's!" The story about the settlers' children going to music classes
escorted by armored troop carriers has become a part of Israeli folklore.
Between the army and the settlers, a real symbiosis has come into being. The
boundary between them is now blurred: many settlers are army officers, the
army has heavily armed the settlements in the guise of "territorial
defense". In recent years, a sustained effort has been made by the
national-religious camp to infiltrate the junior, middle and senior ranks of
the officers' corps, and fill the gap left by the kibbbutzniks, who have all
but disappeared from the ranks. The creation of the "arrangement yeshivot",
homogeneous units who obey their national-religious rabbis, was a betrayal
of the core values of the national army - even more than the release from
compulsory army duty of tens of thousands of Orthodox seminar pupils.
In hundreds of demonstrations of peace activists against the establishment
of settlements, they were faced by soldiers who lobbed tear gas grenades at
them and shot rubber-coated bullets, and sometimes live ammunition. When the
settlers drove Palestinian villagers from their olive groves, stole their
olives and uprooted their trees, the soldiers generally defended the robbers
and evicted the robbed.
And lo and behold, the same officers and soldiers are about to uproot
settlements and evict settlers, to defend the Israeli democracy and fight
its enemies. Well, with kid gloves and sweet talk, but still.
We must not be deterred from calling things by their names: the present
struggle is a kind of civil war, even if - miraculously, again - no blood
will be spilled. The Yesha people are a revolutionary movement. Their real
aim is to overturn the democratic system and impose the reign of their
rabbis. Anyone who has studied the history of revolutions knows that the
role of the army is the decisive factor. As long as the army stands united
behind the regime, the revolution is condemned to failure. Only when the
army is disintegrating or joins the rebels, the revolution can win.
Therefore, the settlers cannot win this battle.
Thirty two years ago, the senior army officers blocked General Sharon's path
to the Chief-of-Staff's office. Now they stand united behind Prime Minister
Sharon. If that is not a miracle, what is?
Of course, all these only look like miracles. They have quite natural
causes.
The foreign journalists who are besieging Gaza at this moment are asking
again and again: Why did he do it? What caused him to devise the
disengagement plan?
This question has several answers. Like every historic event, the withdrawal
has more than one motive.
The plan was not the result of consultations. Prior to it, there was no
orderly staff-work, neither military nor civil. Sharon just drew it from his
sleeve, so to speak, when he threw it into the air a year and a half ago. It
answered several immediate requirements.
When he was one of the prominent army generals, Sharon was known as a
"tactical" general, in the style of Erwin Rommel and George Patton, rather
than a "strategic" general, like Dwight Eisenhower and Georgi Zhukov. He had
an intuitive grasp of the battlefield, but not the ability to think several
moves ahead. He brought with him the same attributes to political life. This
explains the circumstances of the birth of the "disengagement".
As will be remembered, the Americans demanded that he come up with some
peace initiative. President Bush needed this in order to demonstrate his
promotion of peace and democracy in the Middle East. For Sharon, the
American connection in general, and the Bush connection in particular, is a
central pillar of our national security. The unilateral disengagement plan
looks somewhat like a peace plan, and therefore it delivers the goods.
Yesterday Sharon reiterated in a press interview: "I prefer to reach an
agreement with the Americans rather than to reach an agreement with the
Arabs."
He also wanted to preempt other peace plans that were hovering around. The
"Geneva Initiative" was gathering momentum throughout the world, foreign
dignitaries were lending it their support. Sharon's Disengagement Plan swept
it from the table. Later, it did the same for the Road Map, which required
Sharon to freeze the settlements and remove the "outposts". When the
disengagement started on its road, the Road Map became an empty vessel. The
Americans pay it, for the time being, only lip service. (That may change
after the disengagement, as President Bush hinted this week in a special
interview with Israeli TV).
Of course, Sharon did not remotely expect a life-and-death struggle with the
settlers, his protégées and house-guests. He was sure that he would be able
to convince them that his was a wise and farsighted move.
Then there were the mortar shells and Qassam missiles, which played an
important role. The Israeli army had no ready answer to these weapons, and
the price of holding the Gaza Strip was becoming too great a strain on the
army's resources.
The enemies of the disengagement are (literally) shouting from the roof-tops
that Sharon's real motive was to divert attention from the corruption
affairs in which he and his two sons are involved. That is certainly a wild
exaggeration. If this had been the only reason, another initiative could
have been started, such as a little war. But it may have been a contributory
factor.
However, behind all these motives there stand, more importantly, the
personality and world-view of Sharon himself.
More than once it has been said that he is a megalomaniac, a man of brute
force, a man who despises everybody, a man who steamrolls over any
opposition. All this is true, but there is more to it than that.
Already dozens of years ago, Sharon reached the conclusion that he was the
only person capable of leading the nation. That fate chose him to save the
people of Israel and set their course for the coming generations. That all
the other people around, politicians and generals, are midgets whose coming
to power would bring untold disaster on Israel. The conclusion: anyone who
blocks his way is committing a crime against the state and the people. That
is, of course, true also for anyone who hinders the disengagement, which is
- for him - the first chapter of his Grand Design.
Sharon's world-view is simple, not to say primitive. The vision of Vladimir
Jabotinsky, the ideologue-poet from Odessa (and spiritual father of the
present-day Likud), is quite foreign to the boy born in the cooperative
village of Kfar Malal. Menachem Begin, with his Polish ideas of honor, was
also foreign to him, and in his heart he despised him. His real mentor was
David Ben-Gurion.
Sharon's is a classic Zionist ideology, consistent and pragmatic: to enlarge
the borders of the Jewish State as much as possible, in a continuing
process, without including in it a non-Jewish population. To settle
everywhere possible, using every possible trick. To do much and talk little
about it. To make declarations about the desire for peace, but not to make a
peace that would hinder expansion and settlement.
Moshe Dayan, another pupil of Ben-Gurion's, in one of his more revealing
speeches, preached to the country's youth that this is a continuous
enterprise. "You have not started it, and you will not finish it!" he said.
In another important speech, Dayan said that the Arabs are looking on while
we turn the land of their forefathers into our land, and they will never
reconcile themselves to that. The conflict is a permanent situation.
That is also Sharon's outlook. He wants to expand Israel's borders as much
as possible, and minimize the number of Arabs within them. Therefore it
makes sense to him to give up the tiny Gaza strip with the million and half
Palestinians living there, and also the centers of Palestinian population in
the West Bank. He wants to annex the settlement blocs and the sparsely
populated areas, where new settlement blocs can be set up. He is content to
leave to future generations the problem of the Palestinian enclaves.
Ben-Gurion laid down a basic principle: the State of Israel has no borders.
Borders freeze the existing situation, and to this Israel cannot agree.
Therefore, all his successors, including Yitzhak Rabin, were ready to reach
interim agreements, but never a final agreement that would fix permanent
borders. That's why Sharon insists that all his steps are unilateral, and
that, after the disengagement, new interim agreements may be reached - but
under no circumstances a final peace agreement.
This approach may necessitate the dismantling of more settlements in the
West Bank - small, isolated settlements in areas where no new settlement
blocs can be established because of the density of the Palestinian
population. This idea makes it practically certain that there will be more
clashes with the settlers, whose hard core did not grow up on the teachings
of Ben-Gurion but on the vision of the messianic rabbis, who think about the
border of the Land Promised by God. Sharon's pragmatism does not impress
them.
In order to put the state firmly on his tracks and to make sure that it will
move forward on them for the coming decades, Sharon needs another term of
office. Binyamin Netanyahu, whom Sharon considers a little politician with a
big mouth, is endangering his design. For him, that is a crime against
Israel.
Many oppose the disengagement because of Sharon's long-term intentions.
But history shows that intentions are not necessarily important. Those who
set in motion historical processes do not control the results. What counts
are the results, not the intentions. The fathers of the French Revolution
did not intend to give birth to Napoleon, Karl Marx certainly did not intend
to set up Stalin's Gulag-empire.
This week, a great event will take place: for the first time, settlements in
Palestine are being removed. The Settlement enterprise, which has always
moved forward, is for the first time moving backwards.
And that is more important that the intentions - good or bad - of Ariel
Sharon.
Uri Avnery is 81 or 82 years old, an Israeli activist with a group called Gush Shalom. He was in the Israeli Parliament (the Knesset). Before that, he was in the Israeli militias, some of the elite units that did ethnic cleansing of historic Palestine in 1948 to prepare for the state of Israel. He's a very complex person with a very long political and writing career. His cause is peace and a two-state solution. He was a friend and supporter of Arafat until his death and had a very moving interview in Ha'aretz after his death. A Jewish Israeli, an avowed Zionist, a supporter of a two-state solution to the Israel/Palestine conflict, does not make parallels between Israel and WWI Germany easily. For some, such comparisons do come easily. But for someone like Avnery, I don't think they do. So Avnery's piece, 'The March of the Orange Shirts', which explicitly compares the settler movement in Israel to the Nazis, is even more alarming.
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