A majority of Israelis give ‘unilateral steps’ thumbs-up

Hardly anybody likes Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's disengagement plan — not the settlers, not the Palestinians, not the loudest voices in the Likud, not Labor, not Meretz, not The New York Times, not the Bush administration.

About the only political body that approves of the idea is the overwhelming majority of the Israeli people, who have been telling pollsters for years that they want out of the settlements in Gaza and the interior of the West Bank.

Myself, I'm with the majority. Sharon is about to go where none of Labor's Oslo-era prime ministers dared. Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres talked about removing settlements at the end of the process, Ehud Barak proposed it at Camp David, but Sharon is saying that within the next few months, he's going to actually do it.

The skeptics who think this is just more of Sharon's hot air about "painful concessions" don't notice, or don't want to notice, all the evidence that this time he's serious.

After years of mumbling absently about painful concessions before changing the subject, Sharon, in the last few months, has begun speaking of something new — "unilateral steps" — in a very careful, calculated way.

Each time he's raised the subject he's become more specific, gone further out on a limb. Starting with hints at the possibility of unilateral steps without mentioning the word "settlements," earlier last month he'd prepared the world for his Dec. 18 speech in Herzliya where he promised "a change in the deployment of settlements, which will reduce as much as possible the number of Israelis located in the heart of the Palestinian population."

This isn't how a tactician like Sharon makes idle chatter; this is how he lays the groundwork for action.

He's surprised me. Until a month or two ago I would have bet that he would finish his tenure as prime minister without having uprooted a single one of the 150 established settlements. After all, he loathes the idea — as a Jewish nationalist, a Jewish warrior and a Jewish rancher he identifies with the settlers, with the land, with the spirit there.

Also, of course, he is the master builder of that mini-state within a state; of all people he would seem the last one to start tearing it down.

Finally, Sharon is an Israeli politician. Why on earth would he want to go to war with the most powerful political force in this country, that destroyer of Likud governments, the settler movement?

Yet today I would no longer make the bet that he won't dismantle any settlements before he's through. He seems beset by a specter that disturbs him even more than that of taking apart some of his handiwork in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, or of being called a traitor by the people who are, in a sense, his children and grandchildren.

What bothers Sharon above all is the idea of doing nothing during the coming years while the country he was twice elected to lead continues to sink.

After nearly three years in office, he not only has no accomplishments, but everything — security, the chance for a negotiated peace, the economy, Israel's international standing, people's hopes for the future — has deteriorated.

After a very long, eventful career, Sharon, at 75, does not relish the prospect of entering history as the most abject, comprehensive failure of a prime minister Israel has ever known.

This, I think, is why he intends to remove some isolated settlements and rationalize, to some degree, Israel's borders with the West Bank and Gaza. He wants to leave Israel safer and freer from the Palestinians than it was when he took over. He'd obviously prefer to do this from a position of strength, to force the Palestinians militarily into negotiating on his terms without giving them any "prizes for terror." But after nearly three years of trying, he's found this to be hopeless, so he is left with two choices: more years of deadly stagnation, or unilateral withdrawal.

From Sharon's point of view, he's choosing the lesser of two evils.

Another reason to believe that he means it this time is to imagine where he will be if he fails — if he backs off the disengagement plan, if the Bush administration stops his hand, if the settlers make it impossible for the Israel Defense Force to follow his orders.

If he doesn't make good on this, the dramatic, historic initiative of his premiership, he will be revealed as an impotent leader, a "chick without feathers," as he once dismissed Mahmoud Abbas.

That is not the destiny Sharon has in mind for himself. Nope, he's got his eye on history now. After a half-century of spectacular victories and spectacular defeats, he's not about to go out quietly as a loser. He's headed for his climactic battle, and we are headed for lively times.




Larry Derfner is a staff writer at The Jerusalem Post.