bitterlemons-international.org
Middle East Roundtable /
Edition 31
An Israeli View:
Eat my laptop II
by Yossi Alpher It is too early
to determine definitively who won and who lost in Gaza. And it is certainly
premature to know whether and how the losers will learn the lessons of their
setbacks. So the following must be taken as a very tentative, and
provisional, judgment.
Broadly speaking, Israel prevailed in the five year low-level war between
Palestinians and Israelis that culminated in the Gaza withdrawal. The past
six months have seen a radical reduction in Palestinian violence.
Palestinian terrorists and their leaders know they can be tracked and
eliminated by Israel virtually anywhere. Israeli success in combining air,
land, and sophisticated intelligence forces in real time to locate and take
out terrorists constitutes an outstanding military victory. Disengagement
from Gaza was easier because it took place at a time of military victory.
The IDF and Israel Police emerged from the withdrawal operation itself as
big winners in Israeli and international eyes.
And yet the Israeli disengagement also, at a certain level, constitutes a
victory for Palestinian violence. The demographic and security folly of an
Israeli settler and military presence inside Gaza would have been less
obvious to many Israelis, less painful and more tolerable, had there been no
sustained Palestinian campaign of violence. The same, we well know, could be
said of the Israeli military presence in southern Lebanon, which ended five
years ago with the first unilateral withdrawal.
This assertion must be heavily qualified. In both cases, Lebanon and Gaza,
Israel retreated from areas it should never have continued to occupy in the
first place. Those withdrawals reflected a measured sense of priorities,
however painfully slow to manifest itself, among a very democratic public.
Palestinian assertions (including in recent days by Hamas military leader
Mohammed Deif) that the lesson of Gaza is that Israel can be forced out of
Jerusalem and Haifa, or even Maaleh Adumim, confront a very different set of
Israeli priorities, and hence reflect muddled Palestinian thinking.
Israeli sensitivity to violence is a double-edged sword. Take for example
the Palestinian "strategic weapon" of suicide bombings. Israel did not leave
Gaza because of suicide bombers, because none penetrated the security fence
around Gaza and few penetrated the settlements there; correspondingly, the
Israeli reaction to suicide bombings emanating from the West Bank has been
to build an effective security fence there too, at great cost to
Palestinians' welfare. As a "strategic weapon", suicide bombings have only
hurt the Palestinian cause. Palestinians who take too seriously the
assertion that "Israelis only understand the language of force" are destined
to replay the mistakes that have postponed Palestinian statehood for the
past 27 years, ever since the first Camp David agreements offered them a
violence-free route to sovereignty and they rejected it. As President
Mahmoud Abbas well knows, Palestinians could today achieve a lot more
without force.
The religious-ideological settler movement is a loser. It lost its
settlement foothold in Gaza and it lost a lot of Israeli public tolerance
for its messianic fundamentalist message. Whether it will draw the
appropriate lessons and act to maximize the settlers' territorial gains (the
settlement blocs) while ceasing to offend simple demographic, political, and
security logic, remains to be seen.
Ariel Sharon is a winner among the Israeli public, but a loser within his
own right wing Likud party. How he will maneuver out of this dilemma is not
at all clear.
Mahmoud Abbas is a winner: he successfully persuaded Palestinian militants
to hold their fire and show Israelis and the world that dismantling
settlements need not involve Israeli-Palestinian violence. But can he
translate this achievement into an extended ceasefire, a peaceful election,
and consolidated PA/PLO rule in Gaza and elsewhere? If he fails, this will
have been a temporary, tactical victory on the way to yet another defeat for
the legitimate Palestinian aim of a viable Arab state next to the Jewish
state.
Finally, this writer is both a winner and a loser. I won because I have been
advocating unilateral withdrawal for around four years now. I lost because
some three years ago I bet several colleagues, and published the fact in
these virtual pages, that Ariel Sharon would never remove a single
settlement. If he did, I offered to eat my laptop.
Suggestions as to the proper seasoning and mode of preparation are welcome.-
Published 29/8/2005 (c) bitterlemons.org
Yossi Alpher is coeditor of the
bitterlemons family of internet publications. He is former director of the
Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies and a former senior adviser to PM Ehud
Barak.
Bitterlemons-international.org is an internet
forum for an array of world perspectives on the Middle East and its
specific concerns. It aspires to engender greater understanding about
the Middle East region and open a new common space for world thinkers
and political leaders to present their viewpoints and initiatives on the
region. Editors Ghassan Khatib and Yossi Alpher can be reached at
ghassan@bitterlemons-international.org
and
yossi@bitterlemons-international.org, respectively.
hagalil.com 04-09-2005 |