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| Volume XI, Winter 2004, Number 4 |
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| EXCERPT: The Israeli Disengagement Initiative |
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| Galia Golan |
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Dr. Golan is professor, emerita, in the department of political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and professor of government at the Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya.
The disengagement initiative of
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel
Sharon may prove to be the most
significant step yet in the tortuous and so-called "peace process" (a process which in fact drew to a tragic close some four years ago). The reason is not that the initiative itself will bring about peace and an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict -- that certainly will not be the case. The disengagement initiative is but one step, and in the eyes of many, perhaps the last, in an effort to make some change in the situation on the ground, however limited. Indeed, the idea may well be to offer up this step as a "concession" sufficient to justify (or relieve pressure against) the strengthening of Israeli control over the West Bank. Why it may nonetheless prove to be a critical turning point is connected with the main obstacle to the implementation of the initiative: the existence of the Jewish settlements.
The evacuation of fewer than a dozen settlements and relocation of no more than 7,500 residents (roughly 1,500 families) is hardly a difficult matter, at least logistically, for a country like Israel that has handled massive immigrations in the tens and hundreds of thousands of persons over short periods of time. Nor will the dismantling of a limited number of settlements in the Gaza Strip and four small isolated ones in the northern part of the West Bank necessarily constitute a precedent for an irreversible process. Jewish settlements in the Sinai were dismantled in the context of the peace accords with Egypt at the initiative of the man largely responsible for putting them there, Ariel Sharon.1 The settler leadership itself, however, has decided to make this move its critical battle. It is not the value of these particular settlements or of the territory involved (the Gaza Strip); rather, in the eyes of the settler leadership and much of the settler community and their supporters, it is the principle that will determine today the future of Israel's control over the territories conquered in 1967. Regardless of whatever was done over 20 years ago with the Sinai settlements, and regardless of future intentions, the settler movement has made disengagement the critical test: Can Israel in fact leave the territories or not?
1 During the Camp David negotiation in 1978, when then-Prime Minister Begin balked at the Egyptian demand to evacuate the settlements, then-Agriculture Minister Sharon, who earlier in the peace process had actually begun the building of new settlements in the Sinai, telephoned Begin and told him to agree (Ezer Weizman, The Battle for Peace [Bantam Books], p. 370).
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