by David Landau
The idea of withdrawing to the fence was in fact one of four proposals originally considered within Sharon’s close circle and discussed with the Americans.18 It was the most ambitious. In the event, Sharon decided on the least ambitious of the proposals under review: withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and from just three (later four) settlements in the northern West Bank. Still, it was a momentous decision, an entirely new departure. He announced it on February 2, through the veteran Haaretz columnist Yoel Marcus.
Sharon had invited Marcus to his residence in Jerusalem for a long, leisurely breakfast. He had scheduled a session with the Likud Knesset faction in the afternoon and may have intended to publicize his dramatic announcement there first, with Marcus following up with their interview in the newspaper the next morning. That was how things used to work before the age of the Internet. Marcus, too, may have been planning his next day’s article as he drove back to Tel Aviv at midday. He briefed the Haaretz editor, Hanoch Marmari, on what he had heard and was sent posthaste to write a story for the paper’s Web site. An hour later the country was in uproar.
“Of course there’ll be uproar in the country,” Sharon had predicted in the interview. “It won’t be easy. I’ll have trouble in the Likud … If there’s no choice, I’ll change the composition of the government. I take the protests inside the Likud seriously, but I mustn’t let them change what I think is the right thing to do in the national interest. People have got to understand that there’s a difference between pristine ideology and practical reality. [My plan] will sustain Israel into the future with the maximum possible security.”
The wave of outraged reaction flooded from the divided Likud faction across the rightist and religious spectrum. The Judea, Samaria, and Gaza Settlement Council warned ominously that if Sharon presented his plan in Washington the following week, “he will lose his moral right to remain in power.” The transport minister, Avigdor Lieberman, leader of the National Union–Yisrael Beiteinu faction, said the plan was “a road accident involving the entire nation.” Shaul Yahalom of the National Religious Party, another coalition partner now likely to leave, said Sharon was “undergoing a mutation into a leftist; his moral duty is to resign.”
An intensive dialogue now took place between Jerusalem and Washington over the intended dimensions of Sharon’s disengagement. The Americans tried to nudge Israel toward a more sweeping withdrawal on the West Bank. But the Americans were arguing among themselves, too, about how hard to push Sharon and how much to offer him by way of a U.S. quid pro quo, which Israel was asking for in return for the disengagement. Sharon and Weissglas were angling for a major statement by the administration shifting U.S. policy significantly toward Israel. “Sharon’s position,” says Dan Kurtzer, “was, I want as much as I can get for the minimum I have to give. The U.S. position was, We’re prepared to support this [disengagement], but there’s a minimum we need.”
The American-Israeli diplomacy culminated in a hugely significant exchange of letters between Bush and Sharon in April 2004.g In his letter, Sharon committed to carry out the disengagement. In his response, President Bush committed to back Israel on two vital issues: the Palestinian refugees would not return en masse to the State of Israel; and—by clear implication—the large settlement blocs on the West Bank, close to the 1967 line, would remain part of Israel in a final status agreement. Sharon regarded the exchange of letters as his most salient achievement as prime minister. He was probably right.
The key word in Bush’s text is “realistic.” On the refugees he wrote:
The United States is strongly committed to Israel’s security and well-being as a Jewish state. It seems clear that an agreed, just, fair and realistic framework for a solution to the Palestinian refugee issue as part of any final status agreement will need to be found through the establishment of a Palestinian state, and the settling of Palestinian refugees there, rather than in Israel.
And on the issue of borders the president wrote:
As part of a final peace settlement, Israel must have secure and recognized borders, which should emerge from negotiations between the parties in accordance with UNSC Resolutions 242 and 338. In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli populations centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949, and all previous efforts to negotiate a two-state solution have reached the same conclusion. It is realistic to expect that any final status agreement will only be achieved on the basis of mutually agreed changes that reflect these realities.
Dov Weissglas explained:
As Sharon saw it, the quid pro quo had to come from the U.S. because the disengagement was to be unilateral. The Palestinians were not a party to anything. We said to the Americans: We are in effect delivering part of the permanent solution, therefore your quid pro quo should also be something that affects the permanent solution. That was the basic rationale beneath our understandings with the administration. And they knew full well that this was the first time since 1967 that something was happening on the ground in Palestine.
“Permanent solution” means refugees, borders, and Jerusalem, the three “permanent status issues” [as defined in the Camp David Accords of 1993]. On Jerusalem, the American position was a categorical Not Now. But they were prepared to talk about the other two, and their position was: boldness for boldness. They made it clear from the outset that for Gaza alone we get nothing. Much approbation and praise, of course, because, after all, they wanted us to get out of the territories. But that’s it. They said withdrawal from Gaza alone would not be a sufficiently dramatic move to require the U.S. to prejudge at this stage the permanent solution of the conflict. That’s what we were asking for, in essence: a statement from the U.S. that would take positions favorable to Israel on the permanent status issues.
Weissglas uses the word “prejudge” advisedly. Formally, as the Americans were stressing to angry and anxious Arab leaders, the United States would not prejudge the outcome of the eventual Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations. The United States was only a third party; the parties to the conflict themselves would ultimately have to make the decisions. Weissglas: “The Americans kept stressing that as a matter of legal logic they couldn’t undertake in the name of the Palestinians that the large blocs would be part of Israel or that the refugees would not return to Israel. They said, ‘We can only say what our opinion will be if we’re asked about these matters.’ To which my response was ‘Good enough!’ We could hardly have dreamed for more.”
Basically, though neither Bush nor Sharon would have stated it in these terms, the April 14 exchange of letters was a re-enshrinement in American policy of the Clinton Parameters that Bill Clinton and Ehud Barak had agreed to. The vast difference was that Sharon proposed actually to do something, unilaterally, that would begin to turn the policy into a reality. The Clinton Parameters had become (and continue to be) the near-universal recipe for the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Arafat’s recalcitrance and Israeli right-wing, settler-led rejectionism were together destroying the hope of a two-state solution ever being realized. Sharon’s disengagement plan suddenly reversed that tragic process. He single-handedly—unilaterally—restored the prospect of the two-state solution, which is the only hope of peace.
Sharon’s gradual, reluctant change of attitude toward the fence, from flat rejection to vigorous endorsement, was an integral part of his steady shift from dogmatism to realism that led to the disengagement from Gaza and a small part of the West Bank and would have led, had he remained healthy, to sweeping withdrawals from the West Bank, too. “We’re watching a film in which there was a power outage halfway through,” Weissglas says.
This was the firm assessment, too, of Brigadier General (res.) Eival Gilady, deputy head of the IDF’s planning branch at the time, who was involved both in the discussions within Israel and in the negotiations with the Americans. Withdrawal to the fence always
remained the overall concept behind the disengagement, Gilady says; Sharon embraced it in principle—and presumably would have implemented it in practice, had he not “gone to sleep two years too soon”—as Israel’s middle-term strategy pending eventual peace negotiations with the (reformed and security-effective) Palestinian Authority. In those eventual negotiations, Gilady says, the fence “was to become the reference point” for mutually agreed border adjustments.
The fence as it eventually emerged from all the various legal, diplomatic, and political challenges, says Gilady, was to encompass some 7–8 percent of the West Bank. It would take in 76 percent of the Jewish settlers living in the large blocs of settlements close to the old border and 0.7 percent of the Palestinian population. The “concept,” he says, was “to encourage as many as possible of the remaining 24 percent of settlers, over a period of two years, to move of their own free will into Israel proper or into the settlement blocs.”
Weissglas adds:
The disengagement from Gaza, though a complete step in itself, was intended to dovetail into a further move. This was based on two principles: (a) the road map—in other words, no peace negotiations until the first phase of the road map is implemented; and (b) the understanding that to leave things as they were would mean a dangerous deadlock that eventually would engulf us all.
Therefore, the logic was to continue in the West Bank with a series of similar actions … To create a situation of two nations living side by side in quiet—I’m not saying in peace—in coexistence, with economic development, with us helping them to build their economy, so that when we eventually reach the permanent status negotiations, things that now look important would suddenly look less important. We hoped that the fence would help create this reality. That Jews living on the other side of the fence would start coming back to Israel proper. We hoped that the Palestinians’ growing economic prosperity would help them to impose law and order, and security, on the West Bank, and we would gradually withdraw our troops from town after town, area after area—without the pomp and fanfare of permanent status negotiations, which would doubtless run aground over Jerusalem.
This was absolutely Sharon’s thinking. In October 2005, after the disengagement, we were together for a weekend at a rural resort in the Galilee—he, his sons, Adler, me, and my wife—and we had hours to talk about the future. And that was how he saw it. We set up a high-level team under [the director general of the Foreign Ministry, Aharon] Abramovitz, whose task was to draw up a list of problems—problems, not solutions—that would arise when we began applying this strategy to the West Bank. Security: what forces would need to remain on the other side of the fence. Currency, transport, telecommunications, health, everything … How you create a de facto reality of two states without the political label and let life take its course and, in time, eventually negotiate the permanent status accords.
The Bush-Sharon letters of April 2004 were accompanied by a “side letter” from Weissglas to Rice. On settlement building, which Israel was supposed to freeze (it never did) under the road map but had now in effect been legitimized inside the blocs,19 the letter undertook that “an effort will be made in the next few days to have a better definition of the construction line of settlements in Judea and Samaria [the West Bank]. An Israeli team, in conjunction with Ambassador Kurtzer, will review aerial photos of settlements.” And on the illegal outposts, which Sharon had repeatedly pledged to remove, the letter promised “a list of unauthorized outposts with indicative dates of their removal … within 30 days.”
“I’d go to Duby every week and a half after this,” Kurtzer recalled, “and say, ‘Do you want to start doing this?’ And he would say, ‘Yes, yes,’ and start shuffling his papers. And he’d say, ‘Let’s start with one of the easy settlements.’ And he’d send me to an official at Defense who would launch a whole exercise of mapping and GPS and all the rest of it. But at the end of the day nothing happened, because they didn’t want to do it.”h
Even allowing for an ongoing, genuine change of policy thinking on Sharon’s part, most commentators assumed that the prime minister and his advisers had devised the disengagement at this particular time in order to haul him back up from the ominous decline in his fortunes that dogged him during the summer and fall of 2003. Yoel Marcus, analyzing his celebrated interview, wrote that Sharon had “woken up to realize that while he’s been sticking to his guns, the world has moved away from him, and the Israeli public, too, has begun to lose its confidence in his credibility and wisdom … The turning point was the pilots’ letter in September.” Ze’ev Schiff, too, wrote of the troubling effect on Sharon of the pilots’ letter and the petition of the Sayeret Matkal reservists. Sharon had been especially disturbed by the broad support for the “Geneva Accord” because it meant, to him, that many Israelis were prepared to agree to a Palestinian state even before the Palestinians had put an end to terrorism. That, to Sharon, was the antithesis of the road map. Hence, according to Schiff, the disengagement.20
Such mixing of politics and policy is the entirely legitimate recourse of an elected leader responsive to the shifting moods of his own public and to changing circumstances internationally. Weissglas might dress up Sharon’s thinking as wholly strategic, but everyone knows that for a prime minister, especially an Israeli one, strategy and politics are inseparable and often indistinguishable. The kerfuffle over how extensive the disengagement was going to be hardly broadcast prolonged strategic thinking or steely resolve. Rather, it broadcast last-minute scrambling to achieve maximum popular and political gains from a long-contemplated but suddenly urgent change of policy. This was readily perceived—and largely condoned—by a public captivated by the hopefulness and boldness of the prime minister’s new initiative.
Between Sharon’s narrative as recounted by Weissglas and Gilady and the alternative narrative as constructed by his most implacable critics, there is a wide swath of legitimate middle ground. In October, Weissglas buttonholed two of Sharon’s aides and pressed them urgently to prepare material “on demography. ‘Everything’s demography now … I’m talking about withdrawal from the Gaza Strip … Write about the settlements on the West Bank, too. Arik’s opposed to that, but soon he’ll agree.’ ”21
Legitimate, or beyond the line of legitimacy? Weissglas said of himself, “If I have to sum up my role, it was to read Sharon’s thoughts even when he hadn’t yet articulated them.”22 This begs the obvious question: “Even when he hadn’t yet thought them?” Moshe Ya’alon, then the IDF chief of staff, recalled Weissglas trying to persuade him to support the disengagement plan with the argument “Look how he’s falling in the polls!” Legitimate? The question of how legitimate it is for considerations of domestic popularity to dictate foreign policy preoccupies all democracies. But that brazen appeal by the prime minister’s political aide to the state’s No. 1 soldier crossed the legitimacy line. It did not, though, delegitimize the new policy shift.
Ya’alon’s criticism, however, is deeper than that. He condemns both the method and the motive of the decision making. The method, he asserts, was irresponsible and hence led to a flawed decision. The motive, he believes, was corrupt. “There was no proper process of consultation,” Ya’alon charges. “Here we are embarking on a major strategic move, and the army and other defense agencies have been kept in the dark. There is no serious, professional analysis of what Israel can gain from the move and what it can’t … Basic military questions need to be considered, but no one has given them any thought.”i
To Ya’alon, the only reasonable motivation cited for the disengagement was the fear that with the eclipse of Abu Mazen and the road map, the vacuum would be filled by other international initiatives inimical to Israel. But he does not believe that was the true rationale. “I felt from up close that the true concern was Sharon’s political decline, both as a result of the criminal investigations and as a result of the pilots’ letter, the Sayeret’s petition, the ‘Geneva Accord,’ and all those other developments. That was my stron
g sense at the time. I had no hard evidence. If I’d have had evidence, I would have turned it over to the proper authorities and resigned. I did actually consider resigning. But I decided it would cause greater damage to the army and to Israeli democracy.”
QUESTION: How was the disengagement going to help Sharon get out of his criminal investigations?
YA’ALON: He thought, and he turned out to be right, that if he undertook an initiative like the disengagement, he would be etrogized!j The media would wrap him and etrogize him. They wouldn’t play up so prominently the allegations of corruption that were swirling around him. It’s a question of headlines, of editorials. The nation reads of a new initiative full of hope for the future, and it sees the media supporting and promoting it. Drugging the public, if you like. Sharon read the map aright. Politically, his move was brilliant.
QUESTION: But how does that save him from the judicial process?
YA’ALON: Judges and law enforcement officials are people, members of the public, part of the country. They’re influenced. Every judicial system, in its court verdicts, in its decisions whether to indict or not, reflects the norms of the society in which it operates. Does this influence a particular attorney general or a particular state prosecutor? I would hope not. But I’m not sure. I’m not sure if people aren’t influenced subconsciously. I’m not sure if they don’t think to themselves: “If I indict the prime minister now, when he’s in the middle of a major withdrawal initiative, Haaretz will slaughter me!” [Laughs.]23 Don’t underestimate the power of the press.
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a See p. 421; for the full text of the road map, see the Appendix.
