Tested by Zion (20 page)

Now, the various initiatives and the fact that you cannot stand still, the Roadmap which is not being implemented, convinced the prime minister [Sharon] that we need to do something. The only thing that we should do is separation. And the only way to separate is to prepare a plan, and to decide we are separating from the Palestinians unilaterally, and doing it without them because we felt then that we don't have a partner when Abu Ala'a was prime minister. I’m not sure that this would have been the case if Abu Mazen would have continued.
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Weissglas, who was more intimate than Tourgeman with Sharon and
his family, added that Sharon's sons were involved with disengagement from the beginning: “The first four people who spoke about disengagement were me, him, and his two children – his two sons.” But for Weissglas as well, the departure of Abu Mazen as prime minister was the turning point.

In a later discussion, he reminded me of the timetable. At the end of August or early September, we had two suicide attacks in Jerusalem, he said, one after the other: 40 people killed in 2 weeks. Then Abu Mazen left, he quit, angrily accusing Arafat of preventing him any access to his security forces. Abu Ala'a took over and made it clear to us that he will not deal with security; control over security again was shifted to Arafat and
everyone understood that nothing would come out, he said. Everything was deadlocked.

And then Condi said that she didn't know how or when or what, but something must be done to rock the boat – that is the term she used, Weissglas continued. So when I came back home from Washington, he said, I discussed it with Sharon for the first time. I said to him, Listen, this whole structure, the whole Roadmap – that he was so proud of, that he generally considered his most important political asset – was in jeopardy. Gaza cost us over 100 casualties that could not be explained, in the sense that he knew that in the long term we will not stay in Gaza. However the final status negotiations start or end, there will be no Israelis in Gaza. So, what are the casualties for? And as to the internal situation, public support and public opinion regarding the government, we were in the very worst shape we had ever been. He understood that if you want somehow to rock reality, Gaza is almost a natural address. You actually were the first U.S. official that he shared it with, Weissglas said to me. Before then it was discussed only in his kitchen. Then in December, Weissglas concluded, in the famous Herzliya speech, he made it public.
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The basic idea behind disengagement was to make a virtue out of the sad fact that there was, in Israeli eyes, no negotiating partner so long as Arafat led the Palestinians. That had been clear since Camp David and it precluded any negotiated settlement. This gave the Israelis an opportunity to attempt to
shape their future unilaterally, which had other advantages: While negotiations with the Palestinians could always be (and often were) blown up by terrorist acts, unilateral Israeli action need not be. Continuing with unilateral actions, such as disengagement from Gaza, could be explained as something undertaken for Israeli interests that the government of Israel would therefore not permit Hamas to stop or slow.

Eival Giladi, an IDF general who then directed the IDF Strategic Planning Division, worked hard to develop alternatives to the apparently frozen Roadmap. Unless Israel acted, the situation would remain “a low level of terror,” he later explained, and this could not be the best Israel could achieve and offer its people. It was clear to him that a final status agreement was not then possible. He and his staff did a good deal of the analysis and planning that surrounded disengagement. As he recalled,

I came to Sharon, I said, “OK, we understand that we cannot achieve final status agreement. But are we in the best possible point? OK, we move to something which is not perfect, but it's much better; politically, security, economically. You know, instead of complaining all the time there is no partner,” which is true, I truly believe that we have no partner, “why don't we take advantage of the fact that there is no partner and shape the future unilaterally.” You can do whatever you want if you're strong. But if you do something which is right, which is morally right, legally right, the Israeli public accepts it and the international community accepts it, it will work. And I thought instead of negotiating with them, let's think ourselves. What would we like to achieve had we had a partner to discuss with? And if this is what we think is right and balanced and fair and honest, let's do it unilaterally. And at some point the other side will mature the leadership that we can negotiate with; then we'll finalize it.

At the very initial stage I’m not talking about the West Bank; I’m talking about pulling out of Gaza and I suggest one settlement in the West Bank to send a signal. I was trying to find the right balance because I understood Sharon that he didn't want to move to a final status agreement.
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Giladi's explanation clarifies several points about the disengagement policy. The timing of the initiative certainly reflected the resignation of Abbas as PA prime minister and the reassertion of control by Arafat. This is what made Rice as well as the Israelis believe that the Roadmap was blocked; there could no longer be progress toward final-status negotiations. And the timing reflected as well Sharon's desire to head off other plans being developed to fill the now-empty space. But for the Israelis, disengagement from Gaza was more than an effort to fill the vacuum; it was also part of a new attitude toward the Palestinians on the part of Sharon and the Israeli right. As Giladi put it, “For me the disengagement is the first step in a much larger concept. How would we like to see the region? What is Israel at the end of the day?”
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The intifada and the collapse of what had been decent, even intimate, relations with the Palestinians had caused a sea change in Israeli attitudes. The visions of peace and integration that Shimon Peres and much of the Israeli left had entertained – the “new Middle East” of Peres's speeches – were dying fast, killed off by the
terrorism. The security fence that prevented terror also prevented economic and social integration; no longer did hundreds of thousands of Palestinians cross the Green Line each day to work in Israel. And separation was motivated by more than security. Even if there were perfect peace, did Israel want to advance toward integration into the Arab world? Did it not prefer that Palestinians shop in Amman, rather than Tel Aviv? My own view was that Israelis had decided that the Arab hostility was so fierce that a Palestinian state was desirable for Israel because separation from the Palestinians was desirable; the security barrier was the temporary physical manifestation of what would eventually be a deeper and more permanent division.

Demography must have played a role in Sharon's decision: With the Palestinian population growing fast in the West Bank and even faster in Gaza, it was not sensible to think of uniting those territories permanently with Israel – not if one wanted to maintain Israel as a democracy and as a Jewish State. The Muslim population west of the Jordan River would sooner or later be nearly as large as or larger than the Jewish population, which suggested separation – moving settlers out of Gaza, building the separation fence, and moving West Bank settlers back into the major settlement blocks that would someday be annexed by Israel. To this demographic argument could be added a military one. Sharon, the 75-year-old general who had fought all over Israel's terrain, knew that holding the small Gaza settlements was a thankless, endless strain on the IDF, as was holding small settlements spread out all over the West Bank. His strategic goals had long included holding the hills – for example, those overlooking Israel's only international airport – as well as the Jordan Valley but did not include taxing the IDF to protect every small settlement and outpost placed in the middle of Judea and Samaria, far from Israel's cities and amidst the towns and villages of millions of Palestinians. Sharon the general was looking for defensible borders.

He was also looking for defensible policies. Dubi Weissglas defended the disengagement policy, then under wide attack on the Israeli right, in a lengthy interview in
Haaretz
in October 2004:

When Arafat undermined Abu Mazen at the end of the summer of 2003, we reached the sad conclusion that there is no one to talk to, no one to negotiate with. Hence the disengagement plan. Because in the fall of 2003 we understood that everything is stuck. And even though according to the Americans’ reading of the situation, the blame fell on the Palestinians and not on us, Arik grasped that this state of affairs would not last. That they wouldn't leave us alone, wouldn't get off our case. Time was not on our side.

The concern was the fact that President Bush's formula was stuck and this would lead to its ruin. That the international community would say: You wanted the president's formula and you got it; you wanted to try Abu Mazen and you tried. It didn't work. And when a formula doesn't work in reality, you don't change reality, you change the formula. Therefore, Arik's realistic viewpoint said that it was possible that the principle that was our historic policy achievement would be annulled – the principle that eradication of terrorism precedes a political process. And with the annulment of that principle, Israel would find itself negotiating with terrorism. And because once such
negotiations start it's very difficult to stop them, the result would be a Palestinian state with terrorism.

[Disengagement] places the Palestinians under tremendous pressure. It forces them into a corner that they hate to be in. It thrusts them into a situation in which they have to prove their seriousness. There are no more excuses. There are no more Israeli soldiers spoiling their day. And for the first time they have a slice of land with total continuity on which they can race from one end to the other.…And the whole world is watching them – them, not us. The whole world is asking what they intend to do with this slice of land.
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This was the view in Sharon's camp, but to many Israelis, Sharon's new plan seemed like a betrayal of everything he had stood for and they still believed in: the right of Israelis to live wherever they pleased in the West Bank and Gaza and the strategic necessity of placing settlements everywhere. Palestinian reactions were equally unhappy: Sharon was acting unilaterally, and there were fears that he would follow up the departure from Gaza by annexing parts of the West Bank. Arafat's reaction was said to be “Seventeen trailers? What, so they can replace them with another one hundred and seventy?” As another high Fatah official put it, “Sharon's plan is dangerous…He is trying to sidestep…the Roadmap.…He is sending the message that the Palestinians are a people who do not deserve a state. These steps would abort the chances of creating a Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.”
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In fact, Sharon's disengagement plans remained incomplete. Removing settlers and settlements did not necessarily mean removing the IDF and
its bases. Patrolling the thin “Philadelphi Strip” that separated Gaza from Egypt would allow Israel to block illegal movement of people and arms, but leaving Gaza while keeping that thin road would be a significant military challenge. On one side was Egypt, which Israeli troops could not enter; on the other was not a barren area easy to patrol but rather jumbles of houses where thousands of Gazans lived. Those who favored total removal of the IDF – all bases and personnel – argued that Israel could achieve anything it wanted there militarily by air strikes and by lighting, in-and-out ground attacks. After all, Gaza was not the West Bank, where the IDF presence had been constant and ubiquitous, even in the cities; Israeli troops were not present in Gaza's cities. Moreover, maintaining an IDF presence would undermine the achievement of “getting out of Gaza.” On the West Bank, whether Sharon would remove any settlements was also uncertain, as was the route of the fence: There were many disputes over its twists and turns around Palestinian villages and towns and Israeli settlements.

The goal agreed in the Roadmap, Palestinian statehood, remained the same, though the path would now change: Israel would withdraw from Gaza and
perhaps a few token locations in the West Bank. In his initial public remarks about disengagement, at the Herzliya Conference on December 18, Sharon spoke carefully:

We wish to speedily advance implementation of the Roadmap towards quiet and a genuine peace. We hope that the Palestinian Authority will carry out its part. However, if in a few months the Palestinians still continue to disregard their part in implementing the Roadmap – then Israel will initiate the unilateral security step of disengagement from the Palestinians.

We are interested in conducting direct negotiations, but do not intend to hold Israeli society hostage in the hands of the Palestinians. I have already said – we will not wait for them indefinitely.

The “Disengagement Plan” will include the redeployment of IDF forces along new security lines and a change in the deployment of settlements, which will reduce as much as possible the number of Israelis located in the heart of the Palestinian population. We will draw provisional security lines and the IDF will be deployed along them. Security will be provided by IDF deployment, the security fence and other physical obstacles. The “Disengagement Plan” will reduce friction between us and the Palestinians.

This reduction of friction will require the extremely difficult step of changing the deployment of some of the settlements. I would like to repeat what I have said in the past: In the framework of a future agreement, Israel will not remain in all the places where it is today. The relocation of settlements will be made, first and foremost, in order to draw the most efficient security line possible, thereby creating this disengagement between Israel and the Palestinians. This security line will not constitute the permanent border of the State of Israel, however; as long as implementation of the Roadmap is not resumed, the IDF will be deployed along that line. Settlements which will be relocated are those which will not be included in the territory of the State of Israel in the framework of any possible future permanent agreement. At the same time, in the framework of the “Disengagement Plan,” Israel will strengthen its control over those same areas in the Land of Israel which will constitute an inseparable part of the State of Israel in any future agreement. I know you would like to hear names, but we should leave something for later.
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