Sharon's retreat forward

February 6, 2004

WHEN HE DISCLOSED Monday that he is planning to evacuate unilaterally 17 Israeli settlements and 7,500 settlers from the Gaza strip, Israel's Prime Minister Ariel Sharon tacitly acknowledged that he had been mistaken to equate settlements with security. Nevertheless, skeptics are right to ask whether Sharon truly intends to implement his plan or whether it is a tactical feint designed to reconfigure Israeli politics, relations with the Bush administration, and the dormant dialogue with the Palestinian leadership.
Sharon's Gaza plan will affect his pending meeting with Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei as well as his visit to the White House at the end of this month. It already has set off waves of turbulence in the politics of Israel. Factions in Sharon's own Likud Party oppose a unilateral withdrawal from Gaza. Extreme right-wing members of his governing coalition are threatening to resign and bring down the government. And the Labor Party is split over the advisability of joining a refashioned governing coalition if Sharon chooses to invite his old friend, Labor Party leader Shimon Peres, to join a new coalition.

The greatest challenge for Sharon, if he truly means to carry through with a unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, will be to survive the looming battle within Likud. He may count on support from the party's 270,000 members, but not from the party's central committee. This is why he has approved a referendum on the plan. Former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with whom Sharon met this week, may nonetheless seize on this issue to challenge Sharon for the leadership of Likud.

No matter how these coming political struggles turn out, the mere broaching of Sharon's Gaza plan is welcome for two benefits it may bring. For the short term, it opens up a possibility of reviving a direct Israeli-Palestinian dialogue. Ideally, such talks would be aimed at fulfilling the requirements of the road map drawn up by Washington, the European Union, Russia, and the United Nations.

But even if no rapid progress is achieved in implementing the road map, Sharon as the ideological patriarch of the settler enterprise has now conceded that he was wrong all along -- that instead of enhancing security, settlements can harm Israel's security and so must be removed. Someday a successor may be able to build upon this acknowledgment to negotiate peaceful coexistence with a Palestinian partner.