By Larry Derfner
Since Israel is now obviously in a transition period after the upheaval of the Gaza disengagement, I’ll try to predict what the new, post-disengagement era is going to be like.
On the surface, it seems like we’re heading for lively times — Binyamin Netanyahu vs. Ariel Sharon for leadership of the Likud Party and the country, a shake-up of the political alignment, a lot of bangs going off.
But while there will be a great deal of turbulence in Israeli politics, Israeli government policy is going to be static. Nothing big is going to change for the next two years or so.
There will be no struggle over the direction of the country as there has been for the last 20 months or so. The only struggle will be over which current Likudnik gets to hold the steering wheel steady.
Israel is faced with two major issues in its national life: The settlements and occupation in the West Bank; and the mitosis of society into two halves, one prosperous, one poor.
It won’t matter if the next prime minister is Netanyahu or Sharon, or if Sharon remains in Likud or forms a new party, or if a dark horse like Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz, Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom or Likud rebel Uzi Landau gets elected instead. The basic facts of Israeli national life will be not only unchanged, but unchallenged for the next couple of years.
Nobody who could get elected prime minister next year is going to try to uproot West Bank settlements. It’s a political impossibility for the near future.
Forget the ‘Road Map’
As for Sharon, he’s said he would uproot some settlements in the West Bank interior only at the end of negotiations with the Palestinian Authority; and that those negotiations won’t happen until the P.A. has dismantled terror organizations, stopped incitement and generally done what the “Road Map” says it must do.
He should be taken at his word. Even if Sharon was prepared to break his word a second time and make further unilateral withdrawals, he couldn’t do it because he wouldn’t have the support he had for disengagement.
As for the chance of withdrawing from settlements via the “Road Map,” the Bush administration’s peace plan remains what it has been since its kick-off in Aqaba over two years ago — a hopeless non-starter.
P.A. President Mahmoud Abbas would never dream of trying to disarm and dismantle Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades and the other terror groups as the road map requires. It would mean civil war. So forget about the Palestinians living up to the “Road Map.”
People can forget about Israel living up to it, for that matter. According to the road map, Israel has to dismantle 24 West Bank outposts where many hundreds of settlers live.
Before Gush Katif in Gaza was destroyed, it was possible to hope that Israel would make good on this pledge. Not any more, at any rate not for the near future. At most, maybe a few of the more negligible outposts will be removed.
The only “player” that could theoretically force the issue and shove Israel into making further settlement evacuations in the next couple of years, is the U.S. But in reality this isn’t going to happen, not until 2009 at the earliest.
The Bush administration is going down the tubes in Iraq. It no longer has the power to force an Israeli leader into doing something he really doesn’t want to do.
On the security front, my expectation is that Palestinians in Gaza will no longer be killing Israelis, while the West Bank will carry on as it has been for the last two years or get maybe a little worse, with somewhat more frequent ripples of terror.
But I do not see Intifada III breaking out. Israel has too strong a military hold on the West Bank, the security barrier is being completed, and the Palestinians are still reeling from Intifada II, no matter what their boasts are these days.
And if all hell does break loose, it won’t matter who is prime minister. The response will be the same: Let the army win.
Economically, I think the overall situation will continue to improve as it has since Israeli security and the international high-tech industry recovered; and it will get an additional boost from post-disengagement optimism. The average Israeli will go on making steadily more money.
The problem is that there are very few economically average Israelis. Most are either well above average or well below.
That isn’t going to change whether the economy gets bigger, stays the same, or contracts. Israel will remain a society of haves and have-nots, and whoever gets elected prime minister next year won’t make a dent in that arrangement.
Sharon talks about undoing the damage to the poor that Netanyahu did as finance minister, but he went along with it enthusiastically for two years. He won’t make more than cosmetic changes at best.
And if Netanyahu becomes prime minister again, he probably wouldn’t be able to shred the social safety net much more than he already has, whatever his wish.
So for the next couple of years, whoever runs the government, the ranks of the Israeli poor, as well as the gap between rich and poor, will continue to expand; Israel’s military policy toward Palestinian terror will be harsh; settlements in the West Bank will go untouched.
But after a couple of years, if Israelis living near Gaza have reason to feel safe, as I think they will, the status quo will be broken again.
Pressure will build in this country to extend disengagement to the interior of the West Bank, and to use the billions of dollars saved to fight Israel’s war on poverty, to turn Israel back into one society instead of two.
Then there will be another struggle over this country’s direction, only a much greater struggle than there was over Gush Katif and northern Samaria.
Until then, though, Israeli politics is just sport. Enjoy.
Larry Derfner writes about Israeli society for U.S. Jewish newspapers and the Jerusalem Post.
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