Disengagement from Reality
by Aharon HaCohen

On December 18, 2003 Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon highly-decorated IDF general and father' of the settlement movement shocked the world with his announcement of a plan for Israel to unilaterally withdraw from the Gaza Strip . The plan involved the withdrawal of all Israeli forces from Gaza, and the destruction of dozens of Jewish communities. The Disengagement Plan as it came to be known had two main purposes, Sharon explained: "enhancing Israel's security by reducing terrorism and boosting Israel's economy by improving the quality of life" .The plan was also supposed to provide Israel with increased international legitimacy, and ward off a "demographic threat to its national identity" . However, critics of the plan quickly tore it apart. They said that Sharon was withdrawing under fire', and encouraging the Palestinians to use violence to achieve their national aspirations . Furthermore, he was only encouraging international pressure on Israel for further concessions, and making it more difficult for the military to operate against Gazaterrorists . At the same time, Sharon was creating internal strife by using the military to expel thousands of Jews from their homes and acting against the will of his own Likud party . His advisers and political allies tried to justify the plan in strategic terms, but Sharon's sudden political transformation suggests other factors which had little to do with peace or national security. It appears that Sharon hatched the Disengagement as a diversion, in order to avoid being indicted in a criminal investigation, and once he committed to the plan there was no going back.

On June 6, 2004 the Israeli Cabinet approved the Disengagement Plan. The stated purpose of the plan was "to lead to a better security, political, economic, and demographic situation" . The main elements of the plan involved the evacuation of 21 Jewish communities in Gaza and an additional four communities in Northern Samaria (in the West Bank); and a redeployment of Israeli military forces outside of the Strip, so there would be no "permanent presence of Israeli security forces in the area" . Backers of the plan included many members of the rival Labor party, as well as a powerful minority within Sharon's own Likud. They explained that this was Israel's best option, since there was no partner for peace on the Palestinian side, and Israel needed to act unilaterally to break the stalemate .

Sharon and his supporters explained that Israel needed to change its international perception as an occupying force, by terminating any legal responsibility for the territory and its residents .Completion of the plan would "negate any claims on Israel regarding its responsibility for the Palestinian population of the Gaza Strip" .This would ease the international pressure on Israel to make concessions , and force the Palestinians to do their part in fighting terrorism and implementing the reforms laid out in the Road Map .According to this logic, the Palestinians would no longer be able to blame the Israeli "occupation" as the source of their aggression , and the Palestinian Authority would begin to do its part in preventing terrorist attacks against Israel. "Consulting assistance and training will be provided to Palestinian security forces for the purpose of fighting terrorism" and the Egyptians would be entrusted with securing the border between Gaza and Egypt .

For years Sharon had been criticizing previous Israeli governments for agreeing to entrust the security of Israel's citizens in the hands of the Arabs, but now he was arguing that pulling the military out of Gaza would in fact reduce terror against Israel. "The purpose of the disengagement plan is to reduce terror as much as possible", Sharon explained in December 2003 .Sharon appeared to be accepting the argument made by the left-wing peace movement that Israel's occupation' of the Palestinian territories' was the main motivation for violence against Israel, and therefore a territorial withdrawal would reduce Arab terrorism . However, it was Sharon himself who in 1996 had declared the Oslo Accords a "recipe for national suicide" because they called for Israel to hand "territory to the Palestinian Authority without establishing full Israeli responsibility for security." In 2001 Sharon had declared that there would "be no concessions under fire" and as recently as September 2002 he had said that "the problem is more fundamental than terrorism. It stems from the Arab and Palestinian refusal to recognize the Jewish people's right to exist." A year later Sharon was suggesting the opposite - that terrorism would in fact be reduced, if only Israel would end the occupation' of Gaza and put its citizens' security in Palestinian hands.

The theory was that a military withdrawal could in fact increase Israel's security because it would reduce the friction between the IDF and the Arab population, but Israel's military leaders told Sharon that this plan would make it much more difficult for them to prevent terrorism from Gaza. Former IDF chief of general staff Moshe Yaalon, who was released from his position due to his opposition to the Disengagement, explained the security problems which would be created by the withdrawal: "'High intensity' operations can be meaningful only if their effects are constantly maintained with low intensity' warfareThe success of low intensity' warfare rests on a network of informants and collaborators that direct the army towards the suspectsHowever, for such a network to function it is essential that the informants have direct access to their operativesAll of this would not be possible if the Israeli army were to leave Gaza"
Yaalon thought that it was nave to believe that the IDF could sit outside of Gaza behind a security fence and use high-tech devices to track terrorists and thwart attacks without having a presence inside the Strip. Sharon spent decades as an IDF officer commanding the exact type of anti-terrorist operations that Yaalon was referring to and he was well-aware of the dynamics of low-intensity warfare. Sharon's military resume makes his assertions about the security benefits of the withdrawal even more puzzling.

Of course, it was not only the military leadership which was critical of Sharon's plan. One op-ed piece in the Jerusalem Post expressed the outrage of a large portion of the Israeli public. "Sharon's speech [announcing the disengagement] can be summarized in a few words: withdrawal under fire with nothing in return", Evelyn Gordon wrote . Atalia Ben Meir, a political science professor, writes that the plan proved to the international community and to the Palestinians that with enough pressure Israel would give up on all of its red lines . She also sees the plan as a blatant violation of the Camp David accords, since it calls for bringing Egyptian forces into the Sinai buffer zone' to monitor the Gaza border- "essentially returning the situation in the South to pre-1967 " . This was extremely dangerous for Israel due to the high levels of support for the Palestinians among the Egyptian military, who would have no motivation to prevent the smuggling of terrorists and advanced weapons into the Strip.

David Makovsky, of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, predicted that after the disengagement Israel would also not be able to prevent Palestinian rockets from being fired at Jewish communities, and they would also be able to hit the Israeli oil refinery in Ashkelon and other strategic assets from their newly acquired bases in Gaza and Northern Samaria . Sharon responded to predictions like these by proclaiming that "if the mortar and rocket attacks continueafter the execution of the planwe will bomb them back" . But Sharon knew how unrealistic an idea that was. Prof. Ben Meir asks the obvious question: "How will it be possible to bomb terror centerswithout civilian casualties" ? After all, one of the reasons the military needs ground forces in anti-terror operations is because of the inevitability of accidentally killing innocent civilians when bombing a target from the air. This is why the terrorists hide out in heavily-populated areas, where it is impossible to strike them from the air without hitting others in the vicinity. Such strikes are sometimes necessary, but relying on them exclusively plays right into the Palestinians' hands, as they can portray Israel as the bad guy' and use civilian deaths to their advantage. This would then defeat one of the main purposes of the Disengagement creating international legitimacy for Israel.

The plan was also going to create thousands of Jewish refugees from the very communities that Sharon had helped build whose lives were going to be destroyed by this plan. Sharon claimed that the Disengagement would help rehabilitate the residents of the Palestinian refugee camps by providing them with land for new housing developments , but it did not provide any real solutions for thousands of Jewish families who would become homeless and jobless as a result. After the Disengagement's approval by the cabinet, some of the Gaza settlers many of whom were farmers who had used innovative technology to turn barren sand dunes into a booming agricultural center - began inquiring how and when they might be compensated for the loss of their homes and their sources of livelihood. The government established committees and made promises in an attempt to induce the settlers to voluntary abandon their homes, but "by March 2005 [4 months before the planned withdrawal] it had become clear that no concrete plans had been in place for the [civilian] evacuation" . The father' of the settlement movement appeared to be abandoning the people who he had once seen as pioneers when he had encouraged them to settle throughout the Land of Israel. Now he didn't even have a plan to compensate them for the destruction of their communities and resettle them.

As for the Palestinians who were supposed to take over the abandoned communities, critics doubted they would become housing developments for poor refugees: "Historically, Palestinian leaders have opposed Israeli suggestions that they build new housing in Gaza, despite the extraordinary need for it. [They]calculated that it was preferable to leave dispossessed Palestinians in refugee camps in order to sustain their anti-Israel resentment" . Poor living conditions only add more fuel to the fire of hatred for Israel, and encourage the populace not to give up on their right of return' to their pre-1948 villages. The Palestinian leadership would probably not allow the refugees to benefit from the Israeli withdrawal.

So why did a security-hawk' like Sharon who was surely aware of the strategic dangers of such a move still push forward with the Disengagement? Some argue that it was the demographic threat posed by the Arabs that convinced Sharon that the move was necessary, despite the security concerns created by it. Prof. Yaakov Bar-Siman-Tov of The Jerusalem Institute says that "the disengagement is a clear testimony that Sharon internalized the concept of two states for two nations' out of demographic concerns".
The fear was that with the comparatively high rate of population growth among the Arabs, they would soon become a majority between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea and undermine the democratic-Jewish nature of the state. However, a recent study by Zimmerman, Seid, and Wise shows that the likeliness of this doomsday scenario occurring in the near future has been greatly exaggerated. The study points to several statistical errors in previous calculations, and estimates that in the year 2025 "the Jewish population will form a 63 percent majority in Israel" . This is based on current Jewish fertility and immigration rates combined with downward trend in Arab fertility and increased Arab emigration. The study also notes that "in a high case scenario - greater Jewish immigration and fertility boosted by rising Orthodox birth rates Jews would grow to 71 percent of the total population from today's 67 percent majority" . In any case, it is pretty unlikely that the Arabs will become a majority anytime soon, and therefore the demographic time bomb' theory does not provide a solid rationale for the Disengagement.

Sharon has been comatose for the last two years, and we can therefore only speculate whether he truly believed in the security benefits of disengagement or whether he was really frightened by the demographic time-bomb', but I would like to suggest that his true raison d'tre was not on the state level at all. According to a book written by veteran Israeli journalists Raviv Drucker and Ofer Shelach, the Gaza withdrawal plan was hatched in an attempt to divert public attention from criminal investigations against Sharon, and thus thwart an impending indictment. At the time of the plan's announcement Sharon was under investigation for involvement in the Greek Island Scandal' "an investigation into the transfer to Sharon's family of $580,000 by developer David Appel, who was accused of soliciting Sharon's help with business deals" . Sharon was convinced that State Prosecutor Edna Arbel was going to indict him in the scandal, and if he was charged he would be forced to resign his post as prime minister. The purpose of the disengagement plan was "to create a situation that would make an indictment politically difficult" .Drucker and Shelach write that Sharon's advisor Dov Weisglass formulated the plan without any input from the Israeli defense establishment or other members of the government, and he convinced Sharon to go along with it by reminding him of his legal troubles - telling him that "he would end up leaving the political arena as an 'insignificant old man'". Some of Sharon's confidants later admitted that "if it wasn't for those police interrogations, this decision [to quit Gaza] would not have been made" .

Once Sharon committed to the plan as a means for his political survival he was determined not to let anyone get in his way. He was ultimately never indicted by Arbel - despite heavy evidence of corruption, bribery and fraud (although his son Omri was later convicted on related charges). The allegations were that he had abused his political power for personal gain, but in order to avoid indictment on these charges he took abuse of power to another level. Not only did he refuse to consult with military and political leaders before committing to the plan, but he used all means at his power to eliminate political obstacles to its implementation. He fired four government ministers who vocally opposed the plan in order to ensure a majority would vote in support of it , and he ignored a constitutionally-binding Likud party referendum in which 60% of the members voted against the withdrawal . He also ignored the hundreds of thousands of protestors in the streets in the months prior to the plan's implantation, and refused to engage in dialogue with the settlers whose lives he was about to destroy.

Whether you see Sharon as a courageous visionary who in his latter years chose to sacrifice the land he loved in the hope of peace and security for his country, or as a corrupt politician who used a grandiose political plan which he did not believe in as a diversion from his legal troubles, the results of his decision remain the same. Two years after the Disengagement, thousands of Jewish refugees are still living in hotels, trailers or tent-cities' waiting for the government to provide them with a place to live. Many of them are jobless especially farmers who lost the means of their livelihood, and their children still don't have schools to go to . The beautiful communities they were expelled from are now being used as terrorists training camps and launching pads for the constant barrage of mortars and rockets at Israeli towns in the South and on the coast. The Palestinians learned the lesson of the Disengagement, and in the election that followed even secular Palestinians voted in droves for the radically religious Hamas a party that would not waste their time negotiating, but was committed to attacking Israel until it conceded to all of their demands . Israel's high-tech security fence around the Gaza Strip proved ineffective during the June 2006 kidnapping of soldier Gilad Shalit, and the Egyptians have failed to prevent the endless smuggling of terrorists and weapons into Gaza. As a result, the Israeli army has had to return to Gaza for conduct anti-terror operations, and Israel's international legitimacy is just as low as before. The Iranians and Syrians interpreted the Disengagement as a sign of Israeli weakness, and Hezbollah used the plan as motivation for their kidnapping of Israeli soldiers in July 2006 and the subsequent war with Israel .Furthermore, some analysts like former IDF chief Yaalon would argue that the plan has even hurt US efforts in the War on Terror elsewhere in the Middle East, as the Israeli withdrawal emboldened terrorists worldwide .

When Sharon stood on the podium and announced his plan to the world, he could not have known the exactly what would follow. However, he was clearly aware of the dangers of the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza and Northern Samaria. He decided on the plan to extricate himself from legal problems, but he must have had serious doubts during the 21 months leading up to its implementation. Nevertheless, once Sharon had committed to the plan he convinced himself that it was the right thing to do. As one Brandeis politics professor recently explained, "Sometimes when leaders are forced to resort to drastic measures, they ultimately come to believe in them". Sharon resorted to a drastic measure when he decided on the Disengagement, and whether he really believed in it or not, an entire country and region will have to deal with the consequences. Sharon disengaged from Gaza, but in the process he also tried to disengage from reality. His legal problems may have vanished, but the reality of the Arab-Israeli conflict has not gone away.