by David Landau
Netanyahu, accepting that the cabinet arithmetic was about to tilt against him—and recognizing, too, that public opinion was strongly in favor of the disengagement—softened his demands. Sharon embraced Livni’s compromise, and Netanyahu and some others voted for it, too, producing a final result of 14 ministers in favor and 7 against in a now-shrunken cabinet of 21. The official communiqué stated that the cabinet had “approved the amended disengagement plan.” It added that “this is not a decision to evacuate settlements … The cabinet will meet again to hold a separate discussion and decide whether to evacuate settlements or not, if so which settlements and at what pace to evacuate them in accordance with the circumstances then prevailing.”
Within moments of gaveling the meeting closed, Sharon was out in front of the cameras and microphones riding roughshod over these nuances and declaring triumphantly that “the cabinet has accepted my plan; the disengagement has begun.” In a speech some hours later he added, “Israel today has taken a fateful step for her future. The cabinet, by approving my disengagement plan, has sent a clear and unequivocal message to the Israeli nation, to our Palestinian neighbors, and to the whole world: Israel is taking its future into its own hands. The majority of the people of Israel understand the tremendous importance of today’s cabinet decision.”
Tommy Lapid, the Shinui leader, added, “Today may be the start of a real peace process with the Palestinians, even though the move we’ve decided on is unilateral.”
Sharon’s cavalier performance after the cabinet was ammunition for the “undemocratic behavior” charges that opponents of the disengagement now fired at him with increasing vehemence. He had betrayed his own policy platform on which he was elected prime minister, the critics accused. He had betrayed the majority vote of his own party, which he had pledged to accept. And he had fired his own ministers to influence cabinet decision making.
The ousted tourism minister, Benny Elon, bewailed “Israel’s degeneration to the status of an undemocratic country. An entire coalition faction is fired in order to produce a majority, and the prime minister’s not ashamed to say so openly. And if there’s still no majority? I suppose he’ll fire another three ministers?!”12 “He is nothing more than a dictator,” Uri Ariel of the National Union asserted in the Knesset. “That’s not incitement; it’s the truth. How do I know he’s a dictator? Because he does the things dictators do! He tells the people he won’t hold a national plebiscite but will conduct a referendum in the Likud. He says he’ll accept the results of the referendum, but when they don’t go his way, he bins them! He knows he doesn’t have a majority in his own party, so he ignores them.”13
Uzi Landau, leader of the Likud rebels—Sharon fired him from the cabinet in October—described the prime minister’s behavior as “lawful but stinking.” In a memorable speech to the Knesset in January 2005, Landau challenged
my many honorable friends on the left to imagine, just for a moment, that Shimon Peres had won the last elections and that he was prime minister, and that a few months later he were to sigh deeply and invite himself to the Herzliya Conference and tell the people there: “Ladies and Gentlemen, from where I’m sitting now, everything looks different. Begin was right. Shamir was right. Sharon was right. From now on our policy will be: Not one inch. We must strengthen the settlements; we must annex the West Bank.” I ask you, my friends, in all honesty, what would you do? What would you say? Wouldn’t you rise up against him and shout and take to the streets. Wouldn’t you demand new elections, or at the very least a plebiscite …? What this Sharon government has done is immoral and undemocratic.
A week later, also in the Knesset, another articulate rightist resorted to a Mafia metaphor to excoriate Sharon’s assault on Israel’s democracy. “He runs his party on Sicilian lines,” said Yuri Shtern, now of Yisrael Beiteinu but formerly a Likud man himself. “He’s taken the platform of Labor, which lost the election, and of Meretz and the Arab parties, and he says: ‘This is now our doctrine, this is now our policy.’ ”14 In May, Shtern switched from Sicily to Siberia. “Apart from the disengagement plan itself, which is one of the most destructive and dangerous things that ever happened to this country, and let’s still hope it won’t be implemented, there is … the antidemocratic aspect of it.” Law enforcement methods against opponents of the plan were “so Soviet, so totalitarian,” the Russian-immigrant MK asserted. The authorities were preparing special jails for detained protesters. “This is a real Israeli gulag … The Shin Bet is trying to infiltrate its agents into the ranks of the demonstrators … It is employing KGB methods in order to suppress dissent.”g
There was a heavy irony in this outpouring of democratic indignation. The Israeli settlements in the occupied territories, and the settlers who lived in them, were—and still are—the embodiment of anti-democracy, in that they are instrumental in denying the Palestinians their political rights. The Palestinians have neither a state of their own nor the right to vote in the state that has occupied them for more than four decades. A move to end the occupation, or part of it at least, was therefore inherently pro-democratic, both for the Palestinians and for Israel, whatever its supposed procedural flaws. The gimmick of invoking purported democratic norms to justify undemocratic ends was just that, a hollow gimmick.
But beyond that fundamental hypocrisy in his critics’ argument, there was in fact no violation by Sharon of the norms of parliamentary democracy. A prime minister in a parliamentary system is beholden solely to the parliament. Not to his election platform, not to his party, not to his coalition agreement. Party allegiance, and multiparty agreements, are susceptible to change at any moment during the life of a parliament, provided the parliament approves. As long as the prime minister retains the confidence of the majority in parliament, he rules.
That is the legal basis of parliamentary life. It sometimes results in a government and a parliament falling out of step with the majority of public opinion that installed them. So long as a government retains its majority in parliament, the public is powerless to oust it. But that was never the case with Sharon. His consistent majority in the Knesset reflected an even bigger majority of the public who wanted to see the disengagement plan go through. The polls were unanimous on that throughout the period. So in terms not only of legal procedure but of political substance, Sharon was on firm democratic ground.
* * *
a The attorney general in Israel is both the official legal adviser to the government and the head of the state prosecution service. Efforts to divide up these two discrete roles between two separate officeholders have thus far foundered.
b See p. 367.
c See pp. 431–32.
d Sharon was being funny; his reference was to the famous words of General Mordechai Gur, the paratroop commander, during the Six-Day War: “The Temple Mount is in our hands.”
e This was an adaptation of a policy slogan from the Rabin years, when Israel tried hesitantly to negotiate with Syria. “The depth of the withdrawal is as the depth of the peace,” the government declared, meaning that if Syria were prepared for full peace with trade, tourism, and diplomatic ties, then Israel would be prepared to make a full (or almost full) withdrawal from the Golan Heights.
f The fence was not impermeable, but its efficacy was incontrovertible. From January 2004 to August 2005 there were ten suicide attacks inside Israel. Of these, three were in Jerusalem and two in Beersheba—areas where the fence had not yet been completed.
g Shtern asserted that a Russian-immigrant scientist living on a settlement in Samaria had been rousted from his bed at dawn by plainclothes detectives who broke into his home without a warrant, handcuffed him, impounded his computer, and hauled him to their car “without his shoes, without his glasses, without anything. I know this family for twenty years. The wife’s father taught me at university … This whole family were Zionist activists back in Russia. The KGB searched their home looking for Hebrew books. But they were less violent than these guys.” The settler was still in
police detention, Shtern added, even though there was no arrest warrant. “How can a man be detained without an arrest warrant?”
“Maybe he’s an Arab,” the Arab MK Ahmad Tibi chimed in.
CHAPTER 17 · “YOU WORRY TOO MUCH”
The following year and a half the remainder of Sharon’s public career, as it turned out, was dominated by one thing only: the disengagement. For fourteen months after the cabinet vote in June 2004, public life in Israel centered on the single question, will he go ahead with it, or, in a variant, can he go ahead with it? Sharon himself, once recovered from the Likud referendum debacle, never doubted the answer: he would and he could.
His challenge during those fourteen months was how to translate public support into political strength while not risking another trial by ballot. His tactics were fluid as the political tides ebbed and flowed chaotically under the impact of his tectonic shift. The one constant was Shimon Peres’s support: he knew he could rely on his old rival and friend, who never wavered in his own recognition of the disengagement as a historic turning point. But Peres’s authority over Labor was tenuous and waning.
Sharon proclaimed in July that he was “extremely happy” with the present coalition, but if it proved impossible to carry out the disengagement with this coalition, he would have to create a different one. To his unruly Likud Knesset faction he explained: “This coalition is the best possible one from our point of view, and I’d like it to continue. But there’s just one problem: the members of the coalition want to keep it going, but they don’t want to vote for it in no-confidence motions in the Knesset.”1
As long as Sharon had been under the threat of a criminal prosecution for bribery, there was no realistic prospect of Labor agreeing to join the government. But Attorney General Mazuz’s decision, on June 15, 2004, to close the case against Sharon gave Peres the boost he needed. “I would not forgive myself,” he told the Labor Knesset members on July 12, “if our hesitations led to the disengagement not happening.”
Peres won over his own waverers but was blocked by the Likud rebels. They proposed a motion to their party convention in August stating baldly that “this convention objects to Labor joining the government” and won a majority of 843 to 612. Omri Sharon tried to save the day with a less specific counter-motion that merely approved “negotiations with any Zionist party with a view to broadening the coalition.” But that, too, was defeated, by 765 to 760. Sharon, nevertheless, discreetly assured Peres that the disengagement plan and the plan to bring Labor into the government were both still firmly on course. He was not about to hand over the country, he said, to the Likud convention.2
Sharon was determined to avoid a violent showdown with the settlers if possible. Some supporters of disengagement positively spoiled for a fight between the settlers and the army. They believed that if the settler movement were broken, spiritually and if need be physically, subsequent withdrawal on the West Bank would be easier. Sharon believed the opposite. The smaller the trauma, he thought, the greater his victory over the settlers. In this, the settlers agreed with him. They resolved, therefore, to make the trauma of disengagement powerful, painful, and unforgettable. Their fight was thus dual-purpose: to prevent the disengagement by parliamentary and extra-parliamentary means if possible, and, if that proved impossible, then to make it hugely, indelibly traumatic.
They were to fail on both counts but to succeed on a third, which turned out no less significant: shaping the narrative after the event. From a momentous but largely nonviolent anticlimax, they conjured up a tale of tragedy and despair. To assist them in this (still-ongoing) project, they needed the Gaza Strip settlers to have been shabbily treated by the state. The state played into their hands by submerging a generous relocation and compensation effort under a welter of slow-moving bureaucracy.
The administrative plans for the disengagement got off to an indifferent start partly because the settlers in the Gaza Strip refused to have anything to do with them and partly because the government bureaucracy itself took time to move into high gear.3 Some basic decisions were taken around the time of the cabinet vote in June 2004. The evacuation was to begin on September 2, 2005,4 and to take two weeks. The date of the cabinet vote was fixed as the determining deadline: whoever lived in the Gaza and north Samaria settlements on that day would be eligible for compensation from the state.
But what compensation? Would it be just a generous lump sum of money, with which the settlers—there were roughly nine thousand of them—would then be expected to make new homes and lives for themselves? That, in large part, was the compensation policy that the Begin government adopted back in 1982, when Sharon, as defense minister, evacuated six thousand people from eighteen rural and urban settlements in Sinai as part of the peace with Egypt.a It was not a success. The millions in taxpayer money paid out to them made them reviled in press and public as cynical freeloaders who had gone to live in Sinai only a few years before and now were cashing in. Many squandered their new wealth on luxuries or lost it in a crash on the Tel Aviv stock market in 1983. Many needed psychological help for years after, and many others succumbed to chronic illness or complained of the early onset of old age.
The most successful evacuees from Sinai were those who resolved to stick together as communities and, with the state’s help, were able to move collectively to new farming villages inside Israel. But they were the minority. Academic studies of this Israeli experience and of comparable episodes elsewhere concluded that money alone is not enough. People whose lives are dislocated in this way need help to recover. They need close support and counsel in their personal lives and their work or business. And they make the transition far better if they can keep together and reconstitute their communities in new locations.
“That was the way we wanted to go,” says Yonatan Bassi, who in August 2004 was appointed the head of an ad hoc government authority called Selab whose purpose would be to supervise a compensation and resettlement program. “We knew it would be better for the people and cheaper for the state.”
Bassi was a man whom Sharon felt comfortable with. A kibbutznik-farmer from the Beit She’an valley and a colonel in the reserves, he had served in the 1980s as director general of the Ministry of Agriculture (under a Labor Party minister). Efficient, decisive, and discreet, he had had to deal as director general with Sycamore Ranch’s various problems with milk and mutton and the like,c and he managed to emerge respected all around. He was, moreover, one of that shrinking breed: a religious Zionist who favored peace and compromise and saw the settlements in the occupied territories as an albatross around Israel’s neck.
It was a hard and thankless job right from the start. Bassi was boycotted and excoriated within his own national-religious milieu. Hundreds demonstrated against “Yonatan the hangman” (it rhymes better in Hebrew). Eventually, he had to move out of his kibbutz, where he had lived for decades, to a smaller but less dictatorial one nearby.
He and his handful of staffers did not really know what the bulk of the settlers wanted, because the bulk of the settlers refused to talk to Sela. There were exceptions. The people in the four north Samaria settlements were more pragmatic. But in Gush Katif and most of the other Gaza Strip settlements the dominant spirit was of rejection, resistance, and denial. “Hayo lo tihye”—“It will not come to pass”—was the watchword, rehearsed by leading nationalist rabbis and fervently believed, in the most literal sense, by many of the settlers. The disengagement was a nightmare or an ordeal sent to try them. God would intervene to stop it somehow.
That was not so far-fetched a prognosis in the summer of 2004 as it seems in hindsight. The political battle was not yet decided, nor was the fight for the hearts and minds of the public. On July 25, in their first major demonstration against the disengagement, the settlers and their supporters deployed 130,000 people (this was the official police figure; the organizers claimed it was higher) in a human chain that extended for fifty-six miles—from Gush Katif to the Western Wall in Jerusalem. Men and
women, students, schoolchildren, babies in strollers, all turned out along the highways and the streets of Jerusalem. At 6:45 as the sun went down, they all held hands, from Yitzhak and Shlomit Shamir, settlers in the original Kfar Darom, near Gaza, before 1948, to David Hatuel, the bereaved husband and father, who stood at the Wall and declared, “We have the willpower to continue to pursue our lives in all parts of the Land of Israel.”5
It was an impressive show of strength and discipline. But beneath the atmosphere of civilized, even good-natured mass protest, there was an undercurrent of talk of eventual violence and even bloodshed if Sharon did not back down. “Why don’t you talk to the settlers?” Ruby Rivlin asked Sharon privately a couple weeks later. Instead of replying, the prime minister asked a secretary to bring in a copy of a recent article from The New York Times. “I asked [a nineteen-year-old U.S.-born woman settler] if she would use the M-16 only against Arabs,” the reporter wrote, “or against Jews who came to tear down her outpost.”
“God forbid,” she said. “We wouldn’t want to hurt a Jewish soldier.”
What about a Jewish prime minister?
“Sharon is forfeiting his right to live,” she said.
I asked her if she would like to kill him.
“It’s not for me to do. If the rabbis say it, then someone will do it. He is working against God.”6
Such talk was taken seriously. That was inevitable, given the guilt-laden memory of Rabin’s murder only nine years before. Sharon’s security, already tight, was tightened still more.7
