A Miracle Of
Rare Device
By Uri Avnery
16 August, 2005
Gush Shalom
This
is the man who decided alone to withdraw from Gaza and dismantle the
settlements. The man who is implementing this practically alone. The
man who will stand this coming week facing a hurricane that has no equal
in the history of Israel.
A believer in God
might say: this is a miracle from heaven. Mysterious are the ways of
the Almighty. The patron of the settlements, the man who planned most
of them, put them where they are and helped them to strike root and
expand - he is the man who is now setting the fateful precedent of dismantling
settlements in this country.
The dimensions of
the "miracle" can be grasped only by posing some hypothetical
questions: What would be happening if the Labor Party were in power,
if Shimon Peres were in charge, if Ariel Sharon were leading the opposition
and commanding the orange-shirts? The very thought is a nightmare.
If this were the
only miracle that is happening to us - that would be plenty. But it
is accompanied by a second miracle: the Israeli army is conducting the
fight against the settlers. That is a miracle so wondrous that it could
make the most secular pork-eater run to his rabbi.
For 37 years, the
Israeli army has been the Settlers Defense Army. It has planned, openly
and in secret, the placement of the settlements, including the "illegal"
settlement outposts all over the West Bank. It has devoted most of its
forces and resources to their defense. That has reached grotesque dimensions:
for example, the Netzarim settlement, in the middle of the Gaza Strip,
was defended by three whole battalions. Seventeen male and female soldiers
lost their lives in the defense of Netzarim, about which Ariel Sharon
said some years ago: "Netzarim's fate is the same as Tel-Aviv's!"
The story about the settlers' children going to music classes escorted
by armored troop carriers has become a part of Israeli folklore.
Between the army
and the settlers, a real symbiosis has come into being. The boundary
between them is now blurred: many settlers are army officers, the army
has heavily armed the settlements in the guise of "territorial
defense". In recent years, a sustained effort has been made by
the national-religious camp to infiltrate the junior, middle and senior
ranks of the officers' corps, and fill the gap left by the kibbbutzniks,
who have all but disappeared from the ranks. The creation of the "arrangement
yeshivot", homogeneous units who obey their national-religious
rabbis, was a betrayal of the core values of the national army - even
more than the release from compulsory army duty of tens of thousands
of Orthodox seminar pupils.
In hundreds of demonstrations
of peace activists against the establishment of settlements, they were
faced by soldiers who lobbed tear gas grenades at them and shot rubber-coated
bullets, and sometimes live ammunition. When the settlers drove Palestinian
villagers from their olive groves, stole their olives and uprooted their
trees, the soldiers generally defended the robbers and evicted the robbed.
And lo and behold,
the same officers and soldiers are about to uproot settlements and evict
settlers, to defend the Israeli democracy and fight its enemies. Well,
with kid gloves and sweet talk, but still.
We must not be deterred
from calling things by their names: the present struggle is a kind of
civil war, even if - miraculously, again - no blood will be spilled.
The Yesha people are a revolutionary movement. Their real aim is to
overturn the democratic system and impose the reign of their rabbis.
Anyone who has studied the history of revolutions knows that the role
of the army is the decisive factor. As long as the army stands united
behind the regime, the revolution is condemned to failure. Only when
the army is disintegrating or joins the rebels, the revolution can win.
Therefore, the settlers cannot win this battle.
Thirty two years
ago, the senior army officers blocked General Sharon's path to the Chief-of-Staff's
office. Now they stand united behind Prime Minister Sharon. If that
is not a miracle, what is?
Of course, all these
only look like miracles. They have quite natural causes.
The foreign journalists
who are besieging Gaza at this moment are asking again and again: Why
did he do it? What caused him to devise the disengagement plan?
This question has
several answers. Like every historic event, the withdrawal has more
than one motive.
The plan was not
the result of consultations. Prior to it, there was no orderly staff-work,
neither military nor civil. Sharon just drew it from his sleeve, so
to speak, when he threw it into the air a year and a half ago. It answered
several immediate requirements.
When he was one
of the prominent army generals, Sharon was known as a "tactical"
general, in the style of Erwin Rommel and George Patton, rather than
a "strategic" general, like Dwight Eisenhower and Georgi Zhukov.
He had an intuitive grasp of the battlefield, but not the ability to
think several moves ahead. He brought with him the same attributes to
political life. This explains the circumstances of the birth of the
"disengagement".
As will be remembered,
the Americans demanded that he come up with some peace initiative. President
Bush needed this in order to demonstrate his promotion of peace and
democracy in the Middle East. For Sharon, the American connection in
general, and the Bush connection in particular, is a central pillar
of our national security. The unilateral disengagement plan looks somewhat
like a peace plan, and therefore it delivers the goods. Yesterday Sharon
reiterated in a press interview: "I prefer to reach an agreement
with the Americans rather than to reach an agreement with the Arabs."
He also wanted to
preempt other peace plans that were hovering around. The "Geneva
Initiative" was gathering momentum throughout the world, foreign
dignitaries were lending it their support. Sharon's Disengagement Plan
swept it from the table. Later, it did the same for the Road Map, which
required Sharon to freeze the settlements and remove the "outposts".
When the disengagement started on its road, the Road Map became an empty
vessel. The Americans pay it, for the time being, only lip service.
(That may change after the disengagement, as President Bush hinted this
week in a special interview with Israeli TV).
Of course, Sharon
did not remotely expect a life-and-death struggle with the settlers,
his protégées and house-guests. He was sure that he would
be able to convince them that his was a wise and farsighted move.
Then there were
the mortar shells and Qassam missiles, which played an important role.
The Israeli army had no ready answer to these weapons, and the price
of holding the Gaza Strip was becoming too great a strain on the army's
resources.
The enemies of the
disengagement are (literally) shouting from the roof-tops that Sharon's
real motive was to divert attention from the corruption affairs in which
he and his two sons are involved. That is certainly a wild exaggeration.
If this had been the only reason, another initiative could have been
started, such as a little war. But it may have been a contributory factor.
However, behind
all these motives there stand, more importantly, the personality and
world-view of Sharon himself.
More than once it
has been said that he is a megalomaniac, a man of brute force, a man
who despises everybody, a man who steamrolls over any opposition. All
this is true, but there is more to it than that.
Already dozens of
years ago, Sharon reached the conclusion that he was the only person
capable of leading the nation. That fate chose him to save the people
of Israel and set their course for the coming generations. That all
the other people around, politicians and generals, are midgets whose
coming to power would bring untold disaster on Israel. The conclusion:
anyone who blocks his way is committing a crime against the state and
the people. That is, of course, true also for anyone who hinders the
disengagement, which is - for him - the first chapter of his Grand Design.
Sharon's world-view
is simple, not to say primitive. The vision of Vladimir Jabotinsky,
the ideologue-poet from Odessa (and spiritual father of the present-day
Likud), is quite foreign to the boy born in the cooperative village
of Kfar Malal. Menachem Begin, with his Polish ideas of honor, was also
foreign to him, and in his heart he despised him. His real mentor was
David Ben-Gurion.
Sharon's is a classic
Zionist ideology, consistent and pragmatic: to enlarge the borders of
the Jewish State as much as possible, in a continuing process, without
including in it a non-Jewish population. To settle everywhere possible,
using every possible trick. To do much and talk little about it. To
make declarations about the desire for peace, but not to make a peace
that would hinder expansion and settlement.
Moshe Dayan, another
pupil of Ben-Gurion's, in one of his more revealing speeches, preached
to the country's youth that this is a continuous enterprise. "You
have not started it, and you will not finish it!" he said. In another
important speech, Dayan said that the Arabs are looking on while we
turn the land of their forefathers into our land, and they will never
reconcile themselves to that. The conflict is a permanent situation.
That is also Sharon's
outlook. He wants to expand Israel's borders as much as possible, and
minimize the number of Arabs within them. Therefore it makes sense to
him to give up the tiny Gaza strip with the million and half Palestinians
living there, and also the centers of Palestinian population in the
West Bank. He wants to annex the settlement blocs and the sparsely populated
areas, where new settlement blocs can be set up. He is content to leave
to future generations the problem of the Palestinian enclaves.
Ben-Gurion laid
down a basic principle: the State of Israel has no borders. Borders
freeze the existing situation, and to this Israel cannot agree. Therefore,
all his successors, including Yitzhak Rabin, were ready to reach interim
agreements, but never a final agreement that would fix permanent borders.
That's why Sharon insists that all his steps are unilateral, and that,
after the disengagement, new interim agreements may be reached - but
under no circumstances a final peace agreement.
This approach may
necessitate the dismantling of more settlements in the West Bank - small,
isolated settlements in areas where no new settlement blocs can be established
because of the density of the Palestinian population. This idea makes
it practically certain that there will be more clashes with the settlers,
whose hard core did not grow up on the teachings of Ben-Gurion but on
the vision of the messianic rabbis, who think about the border of the
Land Promised by God. Sharon's pragmatism does not impress them.
In order to put
the state firmly on his tracks and to make sure that it will move forward
on them for the coming decades, Sharon needs another term of office.
Binyamin Netanyahu, whom Sharon considers a little politician with a
big mouth, is endangering his design. For him, that is a crime against
Israel.
Many oppose the
disengagement because of Sharon's long-term intentions.
But history shows
that intentions are not necessarily important. Those who set in motion
historical processes do not control the results. What counts are the
results, not the intentions. The fathers of the French Revolution did
not intend to give birth to Napoleon, Karl Marx certainly did not intend
to set up Stalin's Gulag-empire.
This week, a great
event will take place: for the first time, settlements in Palestine
are being removed. The Settlement enterprise, which has always moved
forward, is for the first time moving backwards.
And that is more
important that the intentions - good or bad - of Ariel Sharon.
© 2005 Gush
Shalom