I get the impression that among the two-thirds of Israelis who support disengagement, the assumption is that Israel’s future in the West Bank and Gaza will be determined, one way or the other, by the end of this year.
The feeling among the majority seems to be that either the settlers in Gaza and northern Samaria will be moved out, or they won’t; that either Prime Minister Ariel Sharon will be assassinated, or he won’t. And that’ll be it.
If the settlers win, nobody will ever dare challenge them again. If Sharon wins, the settlers will throw in the towel for good and the occupation will be on its way out.
Either way, by the end of the year, maybe even by the end of the summer, the battle will be over and we’ll know where we stand. Finally.
But it’s also my impression that the 100,000-plus Israelis pledged to stop the army in Gush Katif, and most of all the hardest of the hard-core — the thousands of fanatics in Yitzhar, the West Bank’s illegal hilltop outposts, Hebron, Jerusalem and elsewhere — read the map very differently.
They’re gearing up for the long haul. And since they’re the ones who will be doing the fighting, not the pro-disengagement majority, those millions of complacent Israelis in the majority may want to look beyond 2005 and start gearing up for the long haul, too.
The settlers figure – correctly, I think — that if they succeed in thwarting the pull-out and overpowering such a powerhouse as Sharon, then it will all be over this year. The occupation will be cast in stone.
But if the evacuation of Gaza and northern Samaria goes through, they know that it’s just the beginning. Even if the large settlement blocs inside the West Bank security fence are safe – and I think they are — the 93 percent of the West Bank on the other side of the fence will be up for grabs.
That means scores of settlements, including all of the most radical ones, that now house about 50,000 Jews.
If the settler movement loses Gush Katif and northern Samaria this year, what do you think those 50,000 Jews, and the masses of other Jews who identify with them, are going to do? Sit around and wait for Condoleezza Rice, Abu Mazen, Sharon and the people of Greater Tel Aviv to decide when they should hand over their homes to the Palestinians?
I do not see all those Baruch Goldstein admirers in Hebron, Kiryat Arba, Tappuach and such places taking a wait-and-see attitude if 8,500 settlers in Gaza and Samaria are forced out this year.
The fanatics will be on something like a war footing for at least a few years, or however long the future of the interior of the West Bank is in play. And the West Bank’s interior will be in play until either the world and most Israelis stop trying to get the settlers out of there, or they succeed.
‘Waves of anarchy’
This means that the same sort of nightmare scenarios being laid out for this year — assassinations, gun battles, Jewish terror attacks (not to mention Palestinian terror attacks) — also have to be laid out for the years to come.
The one that seems to me so realistic as to be almost inevitable is the one we’re hearing a lot about lately — the possibility of another Goldstein-style massacre in a crowd of Palestinians, the purpose being to provoke the Palestinians, tie down Israeli security forces, and thereby bollix up the disengagement.
Can anybody doubt that there are willing candidates out there for the job? I don’t remember a time when radical settlers were attacking Palestinian civilians as regularly as they have in the last few weeks — and I don’t remember when the Israeli army seemed so intimidated by them.
It only took one guy to kill 29 Palestinians in a crowded mosque. I don’t know that a major terror attack on Palestinians would cancel out the evacuation of settlements this summer, but it plainly would throw a heavy wrench into the works. And what effect would multiple attacks have?
My guess is that nobody will succeed in assassinating Sharon, or in blowing up the mosques on the Temple Mount. These targets are too well-guarded, touch wood.
But how do you stop one or two or three ultra-religious, Arab-hating crazies, Jewish shaheeds like Goldstein, from shooting up or blowing up a gathering of Palestinians?
How exactly does Internal Security Minister Gideon Ezra plan to collect their weapons?
My point here is not to scare off supporters of the disengagement plan, but to steel them for what’s likely to be in store. When the Yesha Council and other right-wing leaders warn of civil war while vowing to flood Gush Katif with non-violent resisters, knowing full well that a whole lot of these resisters plan to be violent, their warnings of civil war should be taken not as warnings, but as threats.
And the extremists we really have to worry about, of course, are not the familiar faces making their declarations in the media, but the anonymous ones who are keeping their thoughts to themselves.
I think it’s going to be a very long, hot summer, with something like waves of anarchy rolling across the country. Israel will not uproot settlements without blood being spilled. And the work of uprooting settlements only starts this summer; it will take years to finish, if it ever does.
At some point, the Israeli majority will have to decide whether ending the occupation is worth the price. Until then, we’re at a disadvantage, because the Israeli minority that wants to keep the occupation has already made its decision.
Larry Derfner writes about Israeli society for U.S. Jewish newspapers and The Jerusalem Post.
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