Fenced it all round: Sharon's Master Plan
BARUCH KIMMERLING
Le Monde diplomatique, June 2004
Ariel Sharon's political troubles began a year and a half ago when a mainly grass-roots movement arose inside Israel demanding that a wall of separation be built around major urban centers. Supporters of the wall hoped it would prevent suicide bombers from entering Israel. The settlers and most of the Israeli far right opposed the wall because it created an implicit border that would, in effect, re-partition Palestine and leave many settlements outside its boundaries. It would also, many feared, mean the end of the Greater Israel ideology. Most of Sharon's parliament, cabinet, and the Likud central committee members also strongly opposed the program. Supporters of the wall were motivated less by ideology than by the anxiety about the Palestinian suicide bombings of civilian population that the Israeli military seemed unable to prevent. However, Sharon - as it will be demonstrated - realized the advantages of separation or "disengagement" and developed a detailed procedure for it as part and parcel of his master plan of politicide of Palestinian people. In order to bypass the opposition, he made an unprecedented gambit in Israeli political culture and call for a referendum among Likud party members. Sharon was confident that his popularity would be sufficient to sway voters, but the referendum, held on May 2, was defeated by a margin of 60% to 40%. In spite of this severe setback, political analysts do not expect presently his resignation.
The recent split between Sharon and his core constituency is neither surprising nor unexpected. Sharon's "school" of Zionism - Labor Zionism - is the historical rival of the Romantic Revisionist Zionism, which is the historical ancestor of the ruling Likud party. The vision of the revisionist Zionists was the establishment of a Jewish state within the borders of Greater Israel (including what today is the territory of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan), without specifying how this aim should be achieved or how to deal with the fate and reaction of the Arab inhabitants of the country and the region. The basic assumption of the Revisionist school was that the Jewish people have an incontestable historical and moral right over the entire ancestral land and this right will be self-implemented. During recent decades, this secular messianic movement - which was and is still detached from any political and social reality - found natural allies in the religious national and later also the orthodox messianic movements.
The approach of Labor Zionism to Jewish nation building in Palestine was completely different. They believed less in "rights" and more in incrementally established facts on the ground, while at the same time taking into consideration the changing local and international balance of power between the Jews and the Arabs. The basic tactic was to acquire by purchase, and later by sword, the maximum amount of territory with the minimal number of Arab inhabitants. Labor Zionism has no fixed or sacred borders but only frontiers. In the Labor Zionist view, the amount of territory under Jewish control was flexible and always subject to a complex combination of the ability to hold it and political, social demographic considerations. This pragmatic and sophisticated approach toward the colonization of Palestine was one of the principle causes of the incredible success of the Zionist project, which from the start seemed to be against all the odds. Even if during the last four decades the boundaries between these two basic approaches were blurred - one of the results the election of Ariel Sharon, a disciple of Labor Zionism as the leader of the historically rival Revisionist camp's - the distinctions between these two Zionist approaches remained essential and valid.
Since the 1967 War, the Israeli state and society became entangled in an ongoing and deepening existential crisis. This crisis was caused by basic internal contradictions that accompanied the gradual and selective absorption of the occupied Palestinian territories and population into the state. This absorption created an unprecedented economic boom and increased social mobility that obscured the crisis and become a part of it. By opening the borders of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the Israeli labor market was flooded by cheap labor, the Palestinian market was opened up for the internal-export of Israeli products, and Palestinian lands became the target of Jewish colonization.
. However, this prosperity was conditioned on the continuing "good behavior" and total cooperation of the Palestinian inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and their willingness to accept the Israeli policy of fully including them in the Israeli economy but completely excluding them from other spheres of the Israeli state. In fact, for nearly a whole generation the Palestinians accepted these colonial rules, benefiting from a relative economic prosperity while enduring a complete deprivation of most human and civil rights as well as a total lack of any satisfaction deriving from self-determination, collective symbols, and the exercise of any ethnic and national identity. In fact, both societies became addicted to this deeply asymmetric situation and grew interdependent. Most Israelis and Palestinians who grew up in this anomalous situation see it as natural and find it hard to imagine other kinds of relationships.
This system started to crack only after the first Palestinian uprising began on December 9, 1987, and was completely crushed when the second uprising started. It is interesting to notice that the Oslo Accords perpetuated the economic situation while pacifying the Palestinian population by granting them the satisfaction of self-determination. After the first Intifada began, the Israeli political economy adapted by importing foreign guest workers.
Quite apart from the economic interest in the territories, a new complication arose after the 1967 War-the desire of Israeli society as whole, both left and right, to annex the historic heartland of the Jewish people in the West Bank without annexing its Arab residents. A formal annexation would mean that Israel would no longer have a Jewish majority. Demographic changes would destroy the Jewish identity of the state even if the Palestinians were not granted full citizenship. This contradiction created a built-in crisis, leaving the Israeli state and society unable to make the important political decisions that were necessary not only to resolve the conflict but also to meet other domestic challenges - in economic reconstruction, education, welfare, state-synagogue relations, democratization and the demilitarization of society. As time passed, the crisis became more explicit and the contradictory interests became aligned with political parties and were absorbed into personal and collective identities.
In 1977, when the rightwing nationalist bloc headed by the Likud Party (the descendant of the Revisionist Party) came to power, its very first act was expected to be an immediate annexation of the entire West Bank and the Gaza Strip, which are regarded as part of the "Land of Israel." After all, this was the main plank in the party's platform and what Menachem Begin, the party's leader, advocated when he was in opposition. Annexation of the territories was also the reason Ariel Sharon, promptly after leaving the military in 1973, urged some medium and small rightwing and centrist parties to unite behind the veteran Revisionist leader.
However, except for the Syrian (Golan) Heights no additional territories were annexed in spite of their being considered the motherland of the Jewish people. The reason for this restraint was the existence of a rapidly growing Arab-Palestinian population in the occupied territories. This population, together with the Arab citizens of Israel, would at once transform the Jewish state into a bi-national entity even if the annexed population were not granted the right of full citizenship, suffrage and access to social welfare programs. Today, in spite of the unprecedented immigration of more than one million non-Arabs (Jews and non-Jews) from the former Soviet Union, the territory between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River contains about 5 million Jews (and non-Arabs) and 4.5 million Palestinians (citizens and non-citizens). Current demographic projections indicate that by the year 2020, a total of 15.1 million persons will live on the land of historic Palestine with Jews being a minority of 6.5 million.
Two deeply rooted existential anxieties exist within the Jewish Israeli political culture: one concerns the physical annihilation of the state, an issue that is frequently used, abused and emotionally manipulated by many Israeli politicians and intellectuals, and the other, the loss of the fragile Jewish demographic majority on which the supremacy and identity of the state rest. In fact, the loss of that demographic majority is perceived as a prelude to the physical elimination of the Jewish state. Thus, Israel found itself in an impossible situation: one patriotic imperative, to possess the sacred land, contradicted the other patriotic imperative, to ensure a massive Jewish majority on the land.
A large portion of the electorate that twice voted for Ariel Sharon - from both Zionist schools - expected him to provide the "proper solution" for these internal existential contradictions as well as to the renewed Palestinian armed resistance against the Israeli occupation following the failure of Ehud Barak to negotiate a deal at Camp David that would end the conflict.
Sharon indeed had his own idea for "solving the Palestinian problem," a concept tracing back to the 1948 War - to commit politicide against them. Politicide is a combined military political, diplomatic and psychological process that has, as its ultimate goal, the dissolution of the Palestinian people's existence as a legitimate social, political, and economic independent entity. This process may also, but not necessarily, include their gradual partial or complete ethnic cleansing from the territory known as the Land of Israel, or the historic Palestine. Yitzhak Rabin and the so-called peace camp tried to solve this problem by giving up most of the territories together with their people. Rabin was assassinated because of this policy and during subsequent elections, a majority of the Jewish population expressed rejection or at least ambivalence toward this solution, which was also was regarded as a deviation from Labor Zionist approach. Sharon's governments opted almost explicitly for a reversal of the Oslo approach.
The first phase of the politicide was military and started with "Operation Defensive Shield" on March 29, 2002 with the objective not only of dismembering any organized Palestinian security forces, but also and mainly to obliterate the main internal foundations of the Arafat's regime's authority. At the same time and for the same purpose, Israel also systematically attacked most of the Palestinian national and public institutions and infrastructure, even destroying databases like the Palestinian Bureau of Statistics.
An additional aim of the frequent and deep incursions into and sieges of Palestinian towns, villages and refugee camps - and of the extra-judicial executions of military and political leadership of all streams - was to demonstrate to the Palestinians not only Israel's military might, but also its readiness and political ability to use it. The aim was to prove to the Palestinians that they are vulnerable and defenseless against any wanton act of Israeli aggression. The Arab states and the international community paid lip service only to the defense of the Palestinians, mainly in order to silence internal unrest, because they suspected the present Israeli government of harboring a penchant for regional war.
Under the umbrella of the Bush administration-whose spirit lies close to Christian fundamentalism - Israel is considered (as never before) a moral extension of the United States. In this capacity, it enjoys, for the time being, the almost unconditional political and military support of the world's only megapower.
During the military stage of the politicide, Sharon gained immense popularity among many Israeli and on-Israeli Jews. Then, after destroying almost any organized capability of Palestinian to resist, Sharon came to the political phase of his politicide project, namely the "disengagement" plan. Sharon is pragmatic and aware that changing international norms will not accept either large scale ethnic cleansing or the transformation of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan into a Palestinian state, according to his initial approach that "Jordan should be the Palestinian state." Therefore, his plan was to dismantle all the Jewish settlements in Gaza Strip and four isolated small settlements in the West Bank. In exchange for pulling 7,500 settlers out of the Gaza Strip, Sharon requested that President Bush and the Likud party support retaining the major Jewish settlement blocks, holding about 95,000 settlers in the West Bank.
Sharon expressed a clear "vision" about the management of the conflict. He said that with the implementation of the road map proposed by President Bush, Israel would create a contiguous area of territory in the West Bank allowing Palestinians to travel from Jenin to Hebron without passing through any Israeli roadblocks or checkpoints, but separated by walls and fences from Israel and the Jewish settlement blocs. The "vision" was obvious. The Palestinian "state" will be formed by four or five enclaves around the cities of Gaza, Jenin, Nablus and Hebron that lack territorial contiguity. The plan to connect the Palestinian enclaves with tunnels and bridges means that there will be a strong Israeli presence in most other areas of the West Bank, comparable with the Gaza Strip, where Israel after the recent "disengagement" will retain the control over the access on ground, in air and the sea to the territory. By comparison, the Bantustans like symbols of freedom, sovereignty, and self-determination.
All of these conditions are designed to lower Palestinian expectations, crush their resistance, isolate them, make them submit to any "arrangement" suggested by the Israelis, and eventually cause their "voluntary" mass emigration from the land. However, Sharon's plan, which is certainly compatible with the pragmatic Labor Zionist approach, is certainly incompatible with the Revisionist and religious messianic dreams of an exclusive Jewish Greater Israel, even though the majority of Israeli citizens, according to the polls, support Sharon's plan and many abroad have the image of a breakthrough toward a settlement of the conflict.