Recall the context: The Gaza strip had been under military occupation for 38 years, with frequent terroristic incursions by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). Though Sharon has withdrawn military forces from a land in which they had no right to be, he has maintained the IDF presence in the West Bank. He has offered something, but transparently not peace. The tender is a propaganda ploy tactically obscuring the greater part of a triadic tragedy.
Out in the open, one sees the much-publicized removal of people from their homes, the inevitable result of a callous stratagem of using humans as instruments in the implementation of state policy. The policy is one that abuses the lexicon of security in the service of an ideology of unlawful expansion to create a Greater Israel. It perversely uses settlers as living bargaining chips-the residents of Gaza in exchange for the permanent annexation of the illegally occupied Judea and Samaria.
Also, cloaked in the rhetoric of withdrawal, one can see a still greater tragedy: the construction of a penitentiary for the Palestinian people. How? By controlling the border crossings of the territory by moving "the passage [from Gaza to Egypt] to the 'three borders' area, approximately two kilometers south of its current location" at Rafah, to quote directly from the disengagement plan. Israel would thus dominate the Palestinian polity by exercising military and economic control over its only other shared border. This policy, conjoined with a refusal to allow sea access to Gaza and a reduction of the inflow of Palestinian labor into Israel (or, as the plan puts it, "In line with Israel's interest in encouraging greater Palestinian economic independence, Israel expects to reduce the number of Palestinian workers entering Israel,") will shatter the already palsied Palestinian economy.
The results are predictable: continued Palestinian impoverishment and frustration with an impotent pseudo-sovereignty, and a deeper well of frustration from which violent ideologues can be expected to draw strength.
The result, Israeli leaders hope, will be further unrest, providing a superficially plausible excuse for an endless evasion of political engagement. As Dov Weisglass, Ariel Sharon's senior advisor, put in an interview with Ha'Aretz, the disengagement will act as "formaldehyde. It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that's necessary so that there will not be a political process with the Palestinians." Sharon and Weisglass well know that a political process will lead to a peace process, in line with an international consensus that has prevailed for over 30 years: A return to the pre-1967 borders with, perhaps, minor adjustments, mutual recognition and sovereignty, and a Palestinian capital in Arab East Jerusalem. Clearly a disastrous outcome, and one to be sedulously avoided.
How, then, to permanently maintain the massive settlement blocs in the occupied territories? Delay negotiations, continue creating "facts on the ground," as the settlements are referred to in the strategic literature, continue a horrid occupation in violation of every norm of international law, knowingly catalyze terror and cast censure as a new incarnation of the historic specter of anti-Semitism. Then, as Weisglass continued, "In years to come, perhaps decades, when negotiations will be held between Israel and the Palestinians, the master of the world will pound on the table and say: We stated already ten years ago that the large blocs are part of Israel."
Clearly, Palestinian nationalism is a evanescent dream in the face of more concrete and compelling realities, particularly the idea that legitimacy, law and morality mean nothing in a world ruled by bombs and tanks. It is unsurprising that Ariel Sharon-a war criminal if we are to take the Nuremberg precedent seriously-voiced similar sentiments toward widely-accepted principles of international behavior, noting that the Gaza withdrawal was solely a tactical retreat. As he said in his address to the Fifth Herzliya Conference in 2004, "[Israel] is directing the majority of our efforts to areas which are most crucial to ensuring our existence-the Galilee, the Negev, Greater Jerusalem, the settlement blocs and the security zones," omitting to note that great swaths of these areas are also under illegal military occupation.
Again, Israeli national existence is embedded in a zero-sum equation with Palestinian nationalism. As Israel continues to pursue a policy committed to territorial expansion and control over regional water resources, Palestinians will be forced to live on the paltry remainder of a formula dictated in accordance with the axiom that political solutions should flow out of the barrels of guns-crucially, American guns. In this vision, the Palestinian people will continue to live in a disconnected series of West Bank Bantustans, with a rump territory in Gaza, hindered by economic stagnation and ruinous poverty, directly alongside the vast wealth of Israeli society.
Meanwhile, terrorism and regional instability will continue to exist, fomenting escalating destruction. Still, it is possible that Palestinian nationhood can be indefinitely deferred, a cost in and of itself acceptable only to the most racist and jingoistic mindsets. But the violent blowback of this neocolonial policy of national destruction will be fierce, and might well be more than Israeli society, and ultimately, its American sponsors and armorers, can possibly bear.
Ajl can be reached at msajl@amherst.edu