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M.J. Rosenberg is Director of Policy Analysis for , a long time Capitol Hill staffer and former editor of AIPAC's Near East Report.
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By M.J. Rosenberg
August 21, 2005
He did it.
Ariel Sharon said that he would disengage from Gaza and he has. All but a few Israeli settlers are out of Gaza; the rest will be gone shortly. TS Eliot's phrase comes to mind: "not with a bang but a whimper."
But that isn't exactly right. Eight Palestinians were killed by anti-withdrawal protesters who, realizing that they were unable to assassinate the Prime Minister or blow up Al Aksa, settled for killing innocent and powerless civilians as terrorists almost always do.
Their crime was not only against their victims and the Palestinians but also against the Jewish people, in Israel and out, who have to live with the shame.
With the exception of these terrible murders -- and the criminal physical attacks on soldiers and police -- disengagement has been almost flawless. Israeli soldiers and police did not, as some had been predicted, refuse to follow the orders to evacuate the settlers. Despite being splattered with acid [this claim was later rejected by medical experts-ii editor], cursed, hit, and spat upon, they did their job.
The American media focused on the distraught. Soldiers weeping on the settlers' shoulders make for better photographs than images of soldiers behaving with the professionalism and lack of sentimentality one associates with the Israel Defense Forces.
And then there is Ariel Sharon.
He is undeniably the right man at the right time.
The militants of the extreme right thought that they could make Sharon back down by issuing threats and calling names. They promised to tie up the entire country by stopping traffic everywhere. They said a quarter million Israelis would march on Gaza to join the resistance. They said that they would make the State grind to a halt. They raised the specter of mass suicide and even tried to provoke the Palestinians into launching terror attacks against the withdrawing Israeli forces.
In the end, it all came down to shouting and weeping. If the anti-withdrawal activists wanted to demonstrate that they could make Gaza withdrawal so difficult that Sharon would be unable to contemplate similar moves on the West Bank, they demonstrated quite the opposite.
Sharon withstood all the pressure and he did it with some grace, too. It is not hard to imagine how he must have felt when he heard, after 60 years in the service of his country, former allies call him a traitor and liken him to Hitler and Stalin.
He just stuck to his course. The "bulldozer" of Israel's wars did some serious bulldozing for peace.
It is hard to imagine any other living Israeli who could have withstood the pressure. Yitzhak Rabin did. Like Sharon he was labeled a traitor for having signed the Oslo agreement. And then an assassin, inspired and egged on by the same rabbis who excoriated Sharon this time, killed him. [Attorney-General Menachem Mazuz last week rejected a direct link between "incitement" and the Rabin murder. A substantial portion of Israelis believe that The Israeli Shin Bet secret service, backed by political interests, was behind the Rabin assassination. -editor]
Sharon did not underestimate the forces arrayed against him, not after witnessing what the fanatics did to his old comrade in arms.
He never backed down, never came close to backing down.
How to explain it?
There can be only one explanation. He believes that he is doing the right thing for Israel. And for Israel, he was prepared to do even that most rare of actions for politicians in this day and age: admitting that he had been wrong.
In his speech to the nation, as disengagement began, he said that "I had believed and hoped we could forever hold onto Netzarim and Kfar Darom."
But now he knows better. "We could not hold onto Gaza forever. More than a million Palestinians live there and double their number with each generation. They live in uniquely crowded conditions in refugee camps, in poverty and despair, in hotbeds of rising hatred with no hope on the horizon."
And then he admitted that the settlement enterprise had diverted resources from Israel. "The disengagement will allow us to look inward. Our national agenda will change. In our economic policy we will be free to turn to closing social gaps and to waging a real fight on poverty. We will advance education and increase the personal security of every citizen in the country."
He held out an olive branch to the Palestinians, asserting that Gaza withdrawal will be followed by similar moves on the West Bank if they continue to combat the terrorists, which they did with such competence during the runup to disengagement and during the withdrawal itself.
Ariel Sharon deserves the credit that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice seemed all too happy to offer him in her interview with the New York Times. Rice also made clear, and rightly, that Gaza withdrawal must be followed by progress on the Roadmap. If the Palestinians do what they have committed themselves to -- stop the terror once and for all -- Israel must implement a settlement freeze and begin negotiations with the Palestinians over the West Bank.
I believe it will happen. The success of Gaza withdrawal demonstrates how much can be achieved by a prime minister -- and an Israeli people -- determined to break out of the deadly status quo. Mahmoud Abbas, who successfully thwarted terror during disengagement, must be able to continue to do so and he needs the United States, Israel, and Egypt to help him succeed.
But, above all, there is good reason to believe in Sharon. The Gaza withdrawal has earned him his place as one of Israel's greatest prime ministers. He must not be permitted to retire to his farm until he finishes the job he has begun.
Views expressed by the author do not
necessarily reflect those of israelinsider.
 
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