Kim Bullimore
Once hailed as the father of the Israeli settler movement in occupied Palestine, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is now regarded by the settlers as their enemy. With August 15 expected to be the date on which Israel begins to implement its "unilateral disengagement" from the Gaza Strip, settlers are planning a mass convergence to stop the removal of 9000 illegal settlers from Gush Katif in Gaza.
Led by the Yesha council for Israeli settler colonies, opponents of the Gaza pull-out have branded disengagement as "immoral" and "undemocratic". Yesha, an acronym for Judea, Samaria and Gaza — the Israeli names for the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) — has accused Sharon of dragging Israel into "a civil war". Wearing the colour of Gush Katif flags, the settlers have donned orange ribbons and Stars of David and adopted the slogan "Jews don't expel Jews".
On July 27, a march of 20,000 settlers aimed at reaching Gush Katif was stalled when some 12,000 Israeli troops and police blocked the marchers' path and surrounded them in an encampment in the agricultural village of Kfar Maimon.
The standoff ended in an agreement between police and Yesha council officials, under which most of the protesters left the site and returned home. However, up to 2000 demonstrators evaded police and army cordons and reached Gush Katif.
Over the past few weeks, the settlers' aggressive behaviour toward Israel troops and police has alienated much of Israeli society, which had previously tolerated such behaviour when directed against Palestinians.
Settler colonies such as Gush Katif in Gaza are illegal under international law. Since illegally occupying East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in June 1967, Israel has been recognised by the UN as a "belligerent occupation force".
Under the fourth Geneva Convention, it is illegal for an occupation force to transfer sections of its civilian population into an occupied territory, to transfer the resident civilian population from the territory, or to destroy the property of and execute members of the resident population. Israel, however, has continually breached all these obligations.
Between 1967 and 1976, Israel constructed 20 illegal colonies in the OPT. The number was quadrupled between 1977 and 1981 under the patronage of Sharon, then Israel's agriculture minister. Sharon worked in tandem with the Yesha Council's forerunner, Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful), a right-wing, ultra-Zionist religious movement.
Throughout the 1990s, Israel continued to construct new settlements in violation of the 1993 Oslo Accord with the Palestine Liberation Organisation and another 50 colonies have been constructed since 2001, when Sharon became Israeli prime minister.
Despite the settlers' accusations, Sharon hasn't changed his spots. As Neve Gordon, an Israeli academic at Ben-Gurion University, notes in an article carried on the Middle East Report website on July 8, Sharon's past support for the settler movement was motivated by militarism, not the messianic beliefs held by Gush Emunim.
While Gush Emunim believed in the restoration of a "biblical Israel" including all of Palestine, the Sinai, Syria and Lebanon, Sharon sought to establish a militarily strong Israel within the old British-rule League of Nations mandated territory of Palestine.
While the two ideologies have overlapped for 30 years, there is now a disengagement between them. Gordon notes that Sharon has "finally admitted that the Gaza Strip is not a military asset" as he knows that "the Palestinians will always have the demographic advantage".
By advocating a withdrawal from the Gaza and constructing the apartheid wall, Sharon is recognising this and concentrating instead on Israel annexation of more territory in the West Bank.
Sharon has used the Gaza disengagement to relieve international pressure on Israel and to reach a peace settlement with the Palestinian Authority after the death of Yasser Arafat. The Gaza plan also allows for the indefinite postponement of "final status" negotiations with the PA regarding settlements, borders and East Jerusalem, as outlined under the Oslo Accord and the US-sponsored Road Map to Peace.
In an October 2004 interview with Israel's Haaretz newspaper, Sharon's chief adviser, Dov Weisglass, described the Gaza disengagement plan as "formaldehyde" that would ensure "there will not be a political process with the Palestinians".
The disengagement plan has enabled Israel to get agreement for the first time from Washington to annex to Israel large settlement blocs in the West Bank. As a result, Weisglass told Haaretz, the "whole package that is called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed from our agenda indefinitely", thus preventing "a discussion about refugees, the borders and Jerusalem", with "[US] presidential blessing".
Rather than celebrating Sharon's strategic victory, the settlers have responded with fury to what they see as a dangerous precedent. Although the Gaza settlers will be resettled in illegal Israeli colonies in the West Bank and offered massive compensation (between US$400,000 and $1 million per family), disengagement is regarded by them as "counter to the will of God".
While the Yesha council has been the leader of the anti-disengagement mobilisations, it has lost control of the movement several times to ultra-orthodox Judaic messianic sects, such as Chabad and the banned Kach and Kahane Chai movements.
In June, Chabad members were responsible for sabotaging Israel's highways with nails, oil and burning tyres, while youth from Kach and Kahane Chai tried to murder an unconscious Palestinian teenager. All three groups are ultra-Zionist, however, Kach and Kahane Chai are recognised as terrorist organisations by Israel and the US and openly espouse racist attitudes toward Palestinians and Arabs in general.
In 1994, Baruch Goldstein, a member of Kach, massacred 29 Palestinians praying in the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron.
All three organisations regard Yigal Amir, the assassin of Israeli PM Yitzhak Rabin, as a hero.
Kach has carried out numerous deadly attacks on Palestinians and repeatedly threatened to harm international peace activists. In 2003, two of its members were jailed for attempting to detonate a bomb at a Palestinian school in East Jerusalem.
The Yesha council, has tried to regain control and exploit what Haaretz calls "the fire that has been started" in the messianic youth in order to fight "the real disengagement" of the separation "of Israeli policy from its religious fuel".
The Israeli left is divided on the issue of disengagement. While some groups such as Peace Now recognise, as the settlers do, that the dismantling of colonial blocs in Gaza sets a precedent, they have not demanded a real end to Israel's apartheid system in the OPT. As Meron Benvenisti, the former deputy-mayor of Jerusalem, noted in an article in the April 24, 2004, British Guardian, the "tacit agreement" between some sections of the Israeli left with Sharon will result in "the confinement of one and half million people in a huge holding pen". It also allows Sharon, under the cover of "peace" to carry out his real agenda of annexing the West Bank with little opposition.
While Sharon makes a pretext of negotiating peace, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has revealed that the PA is "in the dark on crucial issues". Abbas, who is trying to rein in Hamas and Islamic Jihad, is also fighting to retain control of Gaza after disengagement.
Many Palestinians in Gaza see the PA as being corrupt and more interested in its own interests than the needs of the population, and as a result, Hamas, which runs a network of social programs in Gaza, won 76 of the 188 seats in January's Gaza municipal elections.
Abbas needs to prove that he's able to win tangible concessions from Israel, something he so far hasn't been able to do. Under the disengagement plan adopted by the Knesset, Israel will still be able to control Gaza's land, sea and air borders and will retain the right to send its troops into Gaza in "self-defence" against threats "emanating from Gaza".
Even if Abbas is able to gain limited or full sovereignty for the Gaza Strip, Sharon's plan to annex large swaths of the West Bank is something that won't be tolerated by Palestinians.
The illusion among wide sections of the Israeli left that disengagement will be the beginning of the "end of occupation" is a fantasy. Instead, Israel will continue to ethnically cleanse the West Bank of its indigenous inhabitants, annex more land and continue to construct the apartheid wall.
Sharon, the master strategist, in the future will use the "pain of the settlers" to present disengagement from the West Bank as too traumatic for Israeli society.
In the weeks that follow disengagement, it will be necessary, both in Israel and internationally, to renew the solidarity campaign to end Israeli apartheid, win real justice for the Palestinian people and end the occupation.
[Kim Bullimore lived in the West Bank of the Occupied Palestinian Territories in 2004, where she worked with the human rights group, the International Women's Peace Service.]
From Green Left Weekly, August 3, 2005.
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