Israel’s Parliament Tuesday night voted for the first time in 37 years of occupation to remove Jewish settlements from the Palestinian territories in a historic move that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said paved the way to the end of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
At the end of two days of at times raucous and bitter parliamentary debate, Sharon was forced to rely on the opposition to carry through his “unilateral disengagement plan” after his Likud Party split over the removal of all Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip and a small part of the West Bank. Sharon won, with 67 of the 120 M.P.’s voting for the plan and 45 against. The remainder abstained.
Israel’s deputy prime minister, Ehud Olmert, said: “The state of Israel is moving forward. We are going to change the status quo in the Middle East. We are going to make painful concessions. There is no return from this.”
Four cabinet ministers, including Sharon’s arch-rival, Benjamin Netanyahu, who voted in favor, nonetheless threatened to resign in a fortnight unless the prime minister agreed to a national referendum on the plan. The small National Religious Party also threatened to walk out of the government if there was not a plebiscite. But Sharon continued to resist the pressure, saying that a referendum would delay the withdrawal by a year.
After the vote, the prime minister swiftly carried out his threat to sack any cabinet ministers voting against disengagement by dismissing Uzi Landau, the leader of the ruling party’s rebels in Parliament. Sharon’s aides predicted that opposition within his party and government to the plan may force him to put together a new ruling coalition or call early elections.
Speaking to Parliament on Monday, Sharon broke with his core constituency among the settlers and right-wing Israelis when he called the vote a “fateful moment for Israel.”
The withdrawal plan removes only about 8,000 settlers, the bulk living in the Gaza Strip. About 420,000 Jews will remain in Israel’s West Bank colonies and East Jerusalem, occupied in 1967.
The leader of the Labor opposition, Shimon Peres, threw his party’s weight behind the plan because, he said, it was a historic opportunity that would create momentum toward a resolution of the Palestinian conflict. “This is a historic vote that will put the country back onto the right course. Once we return it will be hard to reverse it,” he said.
Palestinian officials remain deeply suspicious of the plan, saying the withdrawal from Gaza is designed to shield an expansion of Israeli control in the West Bank. Nearly half of Likud’s M.P.’s, led by Landau, voted against the disengagement process Tuesday night. “Unilateral withdrawal is simply signaling to the Palestinians that terrorism rewards and that Israel is in an ongoing retreat. “This is not going to reduce terrorism, it is going to boost it,” he said. “We see all these territories as our homeland. For many of us it’s as though they are encroaching on our very right to be there, but also it casts a shadow on our ability to really defend ourselves.
“There are many, many Arabs who hate our guts and want our destruction. We don’t want to see an additional terrorist state on our border.”
Some opponents have accused Sharon of “caving in to terrorism” and of being a traitor because he is considered the godfather of the settlements and oversaw the massive expansion of Israel’s West Bank and Gaza colonies during the ’70s and ’80s. But the latest opinion poll, in the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, shows overwhelming public support for the withdrawal, with 65 percent of Israelis in favor and 26 percent opposed. Several thousand settlers and their supporters rallied outside Parliament, but there were far fewer protesters than the organizers predicted.
Jonathon Patinkin, from Beit El settlement in the West Bank, headed three generations of his family at the protest. “This is a battle. We haven’t lost the war yet,” he said. “If it goes on we will lose all the settlements. It is only the first step in a domino effect. Even Jerusalem is at risk.” The protesters waved signs saying: “Settlements equal security, disengagement equals transfer” and “Soldiers, disobey orders to evacuate us.”
Some of the more vitriolic slogans of previous rallies, such as calling Sharon a Nazi, were missing after the police warned they would not permit such incitement at a time when Israel was remembering the ninth anniversary of the assassination of its former prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin. In Gaza, Hamas hailed the vote as a victory for Palestinian resistance. “The approval today of the Sharon plan to withdraw from the Gaza Strip is a big achievement of the Palestinian people and the resistance, which alone has pushed the Zionist enemy to think of leaving Gaza,” said the group’s spokesman, Mushir al Masri.
The cabinet still has to approve four stages of the withdrawal from Gaza.
The language hasn’t changed. To his critics, Ariel Sharon is still a brutal criminal, indifferent to suffering as he bulldozes through his security strategy. To his backers he is a visionary, prepared to take bold steps to protect Israel. But those who historically supported or opposed Sharon through his decades as Israel’s most controversial warrior and political leader have swapped places.
The prime minister’s former allies among Jewish settlers and the land-grabbing right are against him now for the same reason his peacenik opponents of many years rally to his support. They all believe that Tuesday’s vote in the Israeli Parliament backing the removal of Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip is a historic step that will inevitably lead to the unraveling of his life’s work at the vanguard of expanding Israel’s colonies and borders.
With it, the prime minister may also be realigning Israeli politics by turning his back on the once powerful religious and far-right factions in Parliament to emerge as the champion of the center. Some of his former Israeli critics now go so far as to compare him to Israel’s visionary first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion.
Shimon Peres, the leader of the Labor opposition, believes that the prime minister’s “unilateral disengagement plan” has set in chain a process that it will be difficult to reverse. “Once it starts, it will continue. It’s the beginning of a journey to a permanent solution with the Palestinians,” he said. “Sharon cannot stop it even if he wanted to.”
Sharon has laid out only the beginning of the process — the removal of about 8,000 settlers from the Gaza Strip and a small part of the West Bank — but not how he imagines it will end beyond oblique references to creating a Palestinian state and holding on to the major West Bank settlements.
The Palestinians fear that the blueprint is the prime minister’s earlier vision of an emasculated Arab state on the 42 percent of the occupied territories placed under Palestinian administration by the Oslo accords and spotted between the sprawling Jewish settlement blocs that divide up the West Bank.
The result would be a homeland without control of its airspace, water resources, borders or foreign policy. Cut off by the vast steel and concrete “security” fence and wall under construction through the West Bank, it would amount in many people’s eyes to little more than a bantustan reminiscent of apartheid South Africa.
The Palestinians are keenly aware that while Sharon talks of disengagement, his government is still expanding the major West Bank settlements. “It’s clear that Sharon is using the withdrawal from Gaza to consolidate the occupation of the West Bank,” said Ghassan Khatib, a Palestinian cabinet minister. “There is no reason to see this as a step toward the creation of a viable Palestinian state.”
But some of Sharon’s harshest critics say that he has set in motion a process that will force Israel to give up most of the occupied territories. “No matter what he says about his intentions — he wants to keep the West Bank and all that — basically this move is unleashing a new political dynamic,” said Yaron Ezrahi, a political analyst with the Israel Democracy Institute. “What he does has consequences which are unlikely to be what he says he wants to happen. The public wants it and expects it. The rest of the world wants it.
“He has made a turn based on the replacement of ideology by reality and necessity. I think he is walking against his own vision and his own ideology because he began to see the reality of the Israeli situation.”
Nearly two years ago, Sharon decisively won a general election over an opposition Labor Party committed to unilaterally withdraw from most of the occupied territories. The then Labor leader, Amram Mitzna, offered to take his party into a national unity government under Sharon if the prime minister would commit himself to dismantling just one small Jewish settlement in the Gaza Strip. Sharon refused, saying that to do so would weaken Israel’s defenses. Less than a year later, he announced the disengagement plan that went much further than what Labor was demanding.
“Three years ago nobody would have imagined that this government would dismantle settlements,” said Peres. “This prime minister and this government began to realize that we have to answer some very serious questions in the domain of demography, in the domain of geography. In 10 years’ time we are going to lose our majority in Israel. So we don’t have very much time.”
Sharon said as much in his speech to Parliament on Monday when he warned that Israel could not claim to be a democracy and go on governing millions of Palestinians who will soon come to outnumber the Jews in Israel.
This month, Sharon’s chief aide, Dov Weisglass, said the prime minister was also driven by fears that an alternative peace process might be thrust upon him and a realization that over time even American support for Israel would erode. The Israel Democracy Institute’s Ezrahi said Sharon’s attempts to paint Israel as a victim rather than a cause of global terror rebounded. “He realized that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is of great interest to the West as one of the causes of international terror,” he said. “In the beginning, when the terror started, everybody on the right was hoping that would actually globalize support for our war against the Palestinians. What it did eventually is to globalize the intolerability of our occupation to the Western world. This pressure can only grow.”
Weisglass, Sharon’s aide, also mentioned concerns that growing dissent within the military, particularly the refusal of elite pilots and commandos to carry out what they characterized as immoral operations in Gaza, was tearing at the tight bond between the Israeli public and its army.
Peres believes that no Israeli prime minister can resist such pressures and that whether he likes it or not, Sharon will eventually have to re-embrace the U.S.-led “road map” to a Palestinian state.
The price for Sharon has been to split his own party, possibly irrevocably. Peres believes the prime minister will have to put together a new coalition of centrist parties to remain in power. “In a very few days the prime minister will have to decide whether to build a new government or go for elections. We are ready for both,” he said.
But Ezrahi believes that Sharon remains the most powerful figure on the Israeli political stage. “Despite his difficulties, Sharon radiates the kind of power that few Israeli prime ministers have, only Menachem Begin and David Ben-Gurion. He is a tragic figure, but he’s also going to become a kind of heroic figure who was able to see at a certain moment that his life’s enterprise was self-destructive to what he was trying to achieve,” he said.
The cross and the diamond-studded bodice have gone, and she now announces herself to the world under the Hebrew name Ha-Malkah Esther — Queen Esther.
But that did Madonna little good with the men in black hats at Jerusalem’s Wailing Wall in the early hours of Sunday. As her convoy drew near Judaism’s holiest site, Orthodox men chanted shabbos — sabbath in Yiddish — while others shouted at her to go home and accused her of desecrating their religion.
The pop diva is visiting the Holy Land for a gathering of about 2,000 followers of Kabbalah, a form of Jewish mysticism, and to celebrate the Jewish New Year. Kabbalah is fashionable among some wealthy young Israelis, but some Orthodox rabbis say Madonna has debased Judaism’s deepest mystical tradition.
Kabbalah means “received wisdom” in Hebrew, and its study has traditionally been the preserve of men. An American rabbi, Philip Berg, popularized the texts in the sixties. Today they draw adherents such as Britney Spears, Demi Moore and Roseanne Barr.
Madonna has been spotted at the Kabbalah conference with her wrist adorned with red string to ward off the evil eye and designer Donna Karan and Marla Maples, an ex-wife of Donald Trump, in tow. Madonna’s husband, British film director Guy Ritchie, was seen dancing with a Torah scroll.
“This is entertainment, not Judaism,” said Uri Orbach, a popular Israeli talk-radio host.
Some of Madonna’s religious critics have not forgiven her for her “Die Another Day” video, in which she bound phylacteries to her arm, a Jewish custom usually reserved for men, and ran from an electric chair on which God’s name appears in Hebrew. But the Roman Catholic who shocked the pope with her raunchy use of religious icons has striven to be more restrained in Israel. She is swathed in rather more cloth than usual, and at her behest the Los Angeles Kabbalah Center that organized the conference has insisted that reporters covering her visit must wear white and not take notes on the Jewish high holidays.
No such demands were made of the dozens of policemen present as Madonna made a midnight pilgrimage to the grave of a Kabbalist sage, Rabbi Yehuda Ashlag, spending more than an hour praying and chanting.
The Israeli tourism minister, Gidon Ezra, presented the singer with an oil lamp and coin from the Byzantine period yesterday. But he could not bring himself to call her Esther. “Madonna’s visit to Israel has great significance for promoting tourism in Israel,” he said.
Madonna declined to talk to the press, but the Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv ferreted out some of those who spoke to her at the Kabbalah conference. Among them was a businesswoman, Galia Albin, who said: “Madonna told me that if she had known nine years ago what she knows today, she would have lived differently.” Albin said Madonna also told her: “I am very enthusiastic about Israel. I thought that everyone here would be extreme and fighting, but I see that this is a modern country with thinking people who know how to accept the other.” She added: “Israel looks a bit like America to me.”
Protesters rallied outside the singer’s hotel to object to her visit to Rachel’s tomb in the occupied territories without meeting the neighboring Palestinian communities confined behind the controversial “security” wall.
They sang “Don’t Cry for Me Palestina” and a version of Madonna’s hit song “Holiday.” “While you’re on your holiday, take some time to educate,” they sang.
The Americans, Israelis, Egyptians and British have attempted to cajole Mr Arafat into retreating to the position of figurehead leader, a role they can tolerate because he remains the Palestinians’ core symbol of their struggle for a country.
Occasionally Mr Arafat gave ground, but then often subverted the change. He rid himself of one troublesome Palestinian prime minister, blocked reform of the security forces and undercut attempts by his finance minister, much vaunted in the west, to ensure that the Palestinian Authority’s billions were accounted for.
But Mr Arafat now faces a potentially much tougher challenge to his overarching control from internal Palestinian rivalries.
Bitterness, fear and desperation have bubbled to the surface in the Gaza Strip, producing what some Palestinian commentators are describing as a mutiny that challenges Mr Arafat’s web of control, if not his position as leader.
Several days of chaos have been marked by kidnappings, open threats to some in the Palestinian leadership for their corruption, and mass protests against Mr Arafat’s appointment of a relative and close political allies to sensitive security posts in the Gaza Strip.
The Palestinian prime minister, Ahmed Qureia, sent Mr Arafat a letter of resignation and issued a warning. “This is a true disaster. This is a level of chaos that we have never seen before,” he said.
Mr Arafat declined to accept the resignation letter, drawing a large cross through it. But Mr Qureia and the entire Palestinian government may still be gone within days, amid growing frustration at what Mr Arafat’s critics describe as his greater interest in retaining political control than alleviating Palestinian suffering and confronting Israeli plans to annex large parts of the West Bank.
Mahdi Abdul-Hadi, the founder and head of the Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs in Jerusalem, said the immediate confrontation was a battle between reformers and the old guard within the Palestine Liberation Organisation.
But he said the challenge had been prompted by the competition for power in Gaza ahead of the Israeli withdrawal of Jewish settlers next year, and deep disillusionment at the corruption and incompetence of the Palestinian Authority under Mr Arafat’s control.
“Arafat is facing for the first time a challenge from within his own house. It’s a mutiny.”
On Friday gunmen from the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade in Gaza briefly kidnapped the territory’s police chief, Ghazi Jabali. His abductors accused him of stealing #7m of PA money but the real challenge was to Mr Arafat, who viewed Mr Jabali as one of his most trusted lieutenants in Gaza.
Another group of armed men seized four French aid workers to highlight similar concerns.
The al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, an armed offshoot of Mr Arafat’s Fatah, distributed leaflets demanding that money stolen from the PA be returned and the guilty men be put on trial.
Mr Jabali was released within hours, along with the French. Mr Arafat immediately sacked the police chief in the hope of placating public criticism, but further infuriated people in Gaza by replacing Mr Jabali with another ally who is distrusted by many, Saed Ajaz. He also named a first cousin, Moussa Arafat, as head of the main security force in Gaza.
Thousands of people took to the streets of Gaza city in protest, marching on the Palestinian legislature. Early yesterday gunmen torched the Khan Yunis security post staffed by officers serving Moussa Arafat. The Fatah leader in Gaza, Ahmed Khals, derided the protests as an attempt to create an alternative leadership to Yasser Arafat, with Israel’s backing.
Leading the political challenge to the old guard in Gaza is Mohammed Dahlan, the former PA security minister who is the favoured candidate of Israel and the US to take charge of the territory when the settlers leave. That support has led to him being labelled a collaborator by some of his opponents. But Mr Dahlan is said by his supporters to be doing well in internal elections within Fatah.
Last week, he warned the Gaza Strip was at a crucial juncture that would either see it gain independence or degenerate into the anarchy of Somalia with its warlords.
Mr Arafat’s critics say that if credible government is not restored in Gaza, the beneficiaries will be his two principal opponents Ariel Sharon and Hamas, which has built its political challenge to Fatah on the back of the PA’s corruption.
Yasser Arafat was facing a mounting challenge to his authority yesterday amid rebellion in the Gaza Strip against corruption and incompetence, and a threat by the Palestinian prime minister to bring down the government if he is not given more power.
Last night in southern Gaza, scores of Palestinian gunmen in Rafah refugee camp battled forces loyal to Mr Arafat’s new security forces chief, whose appointment over the weekend sharpened bitter rivalries.
Initial reports of some of the worst internal Palestinian violence for years said several people had been hurt in the assault on security headquarters in the Rafah camp. Earlier armed men razed a security post in Khan Yunis and thousands marched across Gaza to demand reform.
The crisis broke into the open with a spate of kidnappings on Friday to protest against the security situation. Mr Arafat responded by appointing a cousin to head the security forces, prompting more protests.
On Saturday the Palestinian prime minister, Ahmed Qureia, resigned saying Gaza was in the grip of “unprecedented chaos”. The two men met for several hours yesterday after Mr Arafat refused to accept the resignation. But Mr Qureia said he would go anyway unless the Palestinian leader gave the government greater powers, particularly control over the security forces.
The Palestinian cabinet is to discuss the crisis today.
“There is a consensus in the Palestinian nation and not just in Gaza that what is happening now can’t continue,” Sufian Abu Zaideh, a Fatah leader in Gaza, told Israel radio. “Things have changed in the last two days. There are no more sacred cows. People are simply fed up.”
The kidnapping episode started when the territory’s police chief, Ghazi Jabali, was abducted on Friday by the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, which accused him of corruption.
Mr Arafat sacked Mr Jabali but his replacement with another close associate of the Palestinian leader and, separately, the naming of Moussa Arafat as head of the main security force in Gaza prompted demonstrations and violence.
The al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, an offshoot of the Palestinian leader’s Fatah movement, accused Moussa Arafat of corruption when he was head of military intelligence in Gaza. “Moussa Arafat’s appointment will not pass, and he must submit his resignation,” the group said.
The head of the Palestinian coastguard resigned in protest yesterday. On Friday two security officials also quit.
“This is infuriating,” said Mr Abu Zaideh. “This shows disregard for people and their opinions. This is intolerable disregard, and in Gaza, thousands will rise up against this decision.”
Yesterday Moussa Arafat said he had no intention of quitting and that he was prepared to fight all “potential enemies”. He sent his forces to seize control of television and radio stations and the main police stations in Gaza.
“I take my orders from his excellency, President Arafat. The one who appointed me is the only one who can ask me to quit my job,” he said.
Mr Qureia’s resignation after 10 months in the job follows hefty foreign pressure on Mr Arafat to implement political reforms that would help revive the peace process and undercut Israel’s claim that there is no fit Palestinian government to negotiate with.
Last week, the UN’s Middle East envoy, Terje Roed-Larsen, told the security council that the PA is in “real danger of collapse” because Mr Arafat had blocked political reforms.
Israel’s intelligence service has warned of growing concern for Ariel Sharon’s safety as the far-right gives increasing support to violent resistance to his plan to remove Jewish settlers from Gaza and parts of the West Bank.
The Shin Bet has increased protection for the prime minister after threats by extremists to defend the settlements by force, and religious rulings by some rabbis justifying violence.
Amid echoes of the assassination of the then prime minister Yitzhak Rabin nine years ago, Mr Sharon told parliament he was disturbed by the warnings.
“It pains me that, as someone who all his life defended Jews in the wars of Israel, I now need defense against Jews, for fear someone might try to harm me,” he said. “This is something that must be uprooted. All these conferences and rhetoric cannot be allowed.”
Israel’s security minister, Tzachi Hanegbi, said Tuesday he believed that there were Jewish extremists who had already decided to kill a top official.
“There are those who have already made the decision, that when the time comes, they will save the people of Israel,” Mr Hanegbi said.
“They will try to kill a minister, prime minister, a policeman, a military officer, I have no doubt. They don’t always succeed and they don’t always have the means to carry out the acts. But we are not lacking extremists.”
Last week the rabbi of Jerusalem’s old city, Avigdor Neventzal, told colleagues from the settlements that anyone who gave up part of Israel to non-Jews was open to a din rodef religious licence for a Jew to kill a Jew. The rabbi qualified his ruling by saying it was not possible to put the ruling into practice in modern times.
Two cabinet ministers drew parallels with Rabin’s assassination by Yigal Amir, who used din rodef as his justification for the murder. The justice minister, Yosef Lapid, said: “These are examples of playing with fire, and the grave of Yitzhak Rabin is a reminder of this.”
Among those who have supported violence to defend the settlements is Uri Elitzur, chief of staff to former prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu.
Mr Rabin’s family has accused Mr Netanyahu and other rightwing politicians of contributing to the climate that led to the 1995 murder.
Earlier this week the Shin Bet chief, Avi Dichter, warned the cabinet about a process of “radicalisation” on the far right.
He singled out statements by some rabbis and leaders of the settler movement giving religious justifications for violent resistance to the forced evacuation of about 7,500 Jews from Gaza, and even attacks on politicians and senior military officials.
“I am worried about an escalation in violence,” he said.
The outlawed far-right Jewish group Kach said this week that there were “no more red lines” when it came to the actions justified “to prevent the expulsion of Jews from their land”.
On Sunday, Israeli television showed film of three settlers associated with Kach instructing pupils at a school in Gaza to resist the evacuation by beating up officials involved in the removals.
One of them, Itamar Ben-Gvir, told the Jerusalem Post the settlers would defend their homes any way they could. “I don’t believe we will be the first to open fire, but if the security forces fire on us then the settlers will fire back,” he said.
Mr Dichter told the cabinet that a senior army rabbi, Lieutenant Colonel Yekutiel Wisner, had been beaten up by Kach supporters in Jerusalem because of his involvement in the removal of a synagogue from an illegal settlement.
More moderate rabbis have called for the prosecution of those who incite violence.
