Dr. Aaron Lerner is co-founder of IMRA, Independent Media Review and Analysis, an Israel-based news organization which provides an extensive digest of media, polls and significant interviews and events relating to the Israeli-Arab conflict. imra@netvision.net.il
Will disengagement really take place?
By Dr. Aaron Lerner
June 10, 2005
"The disengagement won't take place," he insisted. "I've been thinking this for a while" she replied.
No. This wasn't the conversation of two Israeli diehard right wingers.
It was Army Radio's Razi Barkai and Israel Television Channel Two Political Correspondent Rina Matzliach talking live on Channel Two's early evening "News Room" program this Wednesday.
Their remarks were sparked by a dramatic decline in support for disengagement by the general public and a series of recent negative assessments by leading security men of the consequences of retreat.
In truth public support for retreat has been soft all along. Go beyond the hard core retreat supporters from the Left and some self serving politicians that are ostensibly from the Right and you have a lot of people who haven't put much thought to the question before they told pollsters that they support retreat.
Most Israelis don't even realize that the IDF brass oppose retreat. The 25 May "Brain Base" poll found that only 21% of Israelis thought the IDF brass oppose retreat.
The "soft" retreat supporters have taken the lead from the leadership in not devoting much thought to the subject. A leadership that proudly concedes it is clueless about the morning after the retreat.
Will the poll numbers continue to shift?
On the one hand, the media certainly has given the story coverage, so there is the possibility of a snowball effect bolstered by recent highly publicized remarks by defense experts against retreat and a barrage of remarks by Leftists politicians that this is just the first of many retreats to come.
On the other hand, if the Israeli media becomes convinced that public opposition to retreat can actually stop implementation of Sharon's disengagement plan this August they may pull all the stops in an effort to restore public support for retreat.
Even if the polls continue to decline it is far from clear that this will stop the retreat.
That would take a vote of either the Israeli Cabinet or the Knesset. In both forums stopping retreat would mean politicians having to risk their day-jobs today in the hopes that voters would reward them in the future -- a trade-off that many Likud politicians repeatedly declined to take over this past year.
Then again, with some Labor Party leaders indicating they are going to precipitate an election immediately after the retreat anyway, Likud politicians may start worrying more about what the anti-retreat dominated Central Committee thinks (they decide on the party list) than what Sharon does.
One thing is certain. It won't be boring here.
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