Authors: Elliott Abrams
The political situation is very complicated, he said, and his main problem was that it appeared Israel was getting nothing for leaving Gaza and that therefore he had lied. He had said Israel could keep the major blocks, but every time a shovel was lifted in them, the United States attacked it. He delivered the following soliloquy:
I have lost my majority in the polls for withdrawing from Gaza, and there are calls for early primaries in Likud. I am behind in all the polls 10–15% and it's hard to bridge so large a gap. I’m in a real minority in the Likud Central Committee. You in the US have tended to understate the political problems I am facing. You relied on me to solve them, but you have not fully understood the challenge. I could succeed in withdrawing from Gaza and still lose my post as prime minister. If that happens, starting on the roadmap, the second phase, is gone.
How am I going to overcome all this? I need support and understanding. I reached an agreement with President Bush, the April 14th letter, but now people are saying there are no commitments at all in that letter and that I was lying about the major blocs. People don't believe something changed, because all settlements are treated the same. I have serious problems now. I could lose it. That would be the end of plans. What I need urgently is to make the distinction between the major blocs and the rest. Elliott, I tell you as a friend: if I can't speak about some construction in the major blocs I don't think I’ll be in power in three months. This is used against me daily. I must have this distinction. It's urgent. Because I don't have anything to show that this was done.
It is not sensible to use the construction zones rule for a remote little settlement, and the major blocs. I am not speaking about major construction, but small scale – but zero cannot be the Israeli government's position. That means that the Bush letter means no construction, and no future. The current rules are impossible politically. The understandings with the US, the letter, have led to a worse situation not better. President Bush is a politician. I need his immediate support. What is said is that consideration for withdrawing from Gaza does not exist. That's a strong complaint. Bibi says it – that we did Gaza for nothing, that Sharon has not got the major blocs. The Likud primary is mid-November. The Central Committee will meet in mid-September unless I can avoid it. I need support before the primary. I don't plan any major construction; I agree to limits. The problem is credibility. That's how I won in the past, and that's what's attacked here. The agreements with the US will have undermined us because there is no ideological compensation perceived.
These remarks and many others like them contradict those who said, in later years, that there was never any settlement agreement between Israel and the United States. Sharon perceived himself to be under constraints. In fact, the great expansion of Israeli settlements came under Labor governments, not under Sharon. Whether Sharon needed exactly the relief he asked for here – the ability to build anywhere in the major blocks, even outside the existing construction zones – is a different matter. No doubt it would have made life easier for him, but the Israelis never demonstrated to us that there was inadequate space in and near already built-up areas to accommodate housing demand in the major blocks. It seemed to me that we could help him by simply not taking an antagonistic position, by not looking for fights over construction in the major blocks. On this I agreed with Sharon and
with his criticism of our ambassador, Dan Kurtzer, who was clearly in the Labor Party camp and seemed to go out of his way to make trouble for Sharon.
And Sharon seemed to me correct: There was an anomaly in the U.S. position. We had said that Israel would, realistically, be keeping the major blocks. But we were treating construction in the major blocks we all knew Israel would keep exactly as we treated construction in small settlements beyond the security fence that would become part of the eventual Palestine. The explanation for the anomaly was simple enough: First, there were no agreed borders, so it was not agreed which blocks exactly were “the major blocks Israel would keep.” Second, even if there were agreed-on borders, Israel would win the unlimited right to build only when a final agreement with the Palestinians was signed; it was one of the rewards for reaching a final status agreement.
Weissglas proposed a different deal. Our agreement on settlements allowed Israel to build within the construction line in every existing settlement. What if Sharon said he would impose a freeze on all construction in settlements beyond the fence line, in return for the ability to build without these limitations in the major blocks? This would help Sharon politically, he said, by strengthening his argument that he had really won something in return for getting out of Gaza; this was the ideological compensation of which Sharon often spoke. Like the inclusion of four small West Bank settlements in disengagement, Dubi argued, such a freeze beyond the fence would signal to Palestinians that Sharon would take further steps after Gaza; it would signal that Israel was coming to see the area beyond the fence as Palestine. I had an additional thought: What if Israel adopted a Gaza-style compensation law for the areas beyond the fence, thereby encouraging settlers to move west? Surely many thousands would, again showing Israel's ultimate intentions.
Hadley rejected the deal, again on the ground that all of this had to await a final status agreement. To me it seemed a lost opportunity. In Israel, settlers in the major blocks are viewed as suburbanites, who might well live in the major cities if they could afford it. Those who live, for example, in Ma'ale Adumim, now a town of 40,000 from which it takes 15 minutes to get to downtown Jerusalem, are hardly viewed as settlers at all. Settlers beyond the fence have far less popular appeal. If we supported Sharon in dividing them, freezing beyond the fence only, I thought we would be helping Sharon build a majority for future West Bank disengagement. Instead, we made efforts to lower Kurtzer's volume and produce repeated statements of support for Sharon from the White House.
Gaza disengagement finally came to pass, beginning on August 15, 2006. Israeli police took the lead in evacuating the settlers, nearly eight thousand in Gaza and a few hundred in the West Bank, while the IDF stood guard. Settlers departed on August 15, and 16, and 17, and those who would not leave were removed forcibly. When protesters (many from Israel proper, not Gaza communities) gathered at synagogues in two Gaza settlements, the IDF stormed the synagogues and removed them too. By August 22, the last Israeli settlers were out of Gaza, and on the following day, they were out of those four West Bank settlements.
Israel's presence in Gaza was over. And so is this government, Weissglas told Rice on the phone as soldiers removed Israeli protesters. Now comes the struggle inside Likud, between Arik and Bibi. Please, he asked her, be careful what you say about settlement construction; don't treat every announcement as a
casus belli
.
In Gaza, the early days after disengagement did not give much reason for hope that – as we had endlessly told the PA leaders – Gaza would be a model for the Palestinian state. Look, we had said, if you produce in Gaza a working model, some place that is peaceful and democratic, it will occur to just about
all Israelis that it's time to move forward in the West Bank too; after all, what would there be to be afraid of if things are working out so well in Gaza? Make Gaza the model.
Instead, it quickly became a model of every Israeli fear, from disorder and terror to violence and misrule. The fate of the greenhouses, that experiment with benevolence and economic modernization, quickly pointed the way. Almost from the moment the Israelis pulled back, looting began. On September 13, the Associated Press reported that
Palestinians looted dozens of greenhouses on Tuesday, walking off with irrigation hoses, water pumps and plastic sheeting in a blow to fledgling efforts to reconstruct the Gaza Strip.…Palestinian police stood by helplessly Tuesday as looters carted off materials from greenhouses in
several settlements, and commanders complained they did not have enough manpower to protect the prized assets. In some instances, there was no security and in others, police even joined the looters, witnesses said.
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What in retrospect was even more consequential was the beginning of the war between Hamas and the PA/Fatah forces. On September 7, Moussa Arafat, one of the most powerful Fatah officials and a cousin of Yasser Arafat, was murdered. The
Times
of London reported the event:
Internecine strife in Gaza claimed its most senior victim yesterday when militants assassinated one of the most hated security chiefs there in a brazen challenge to Mahmoud Abbas's Palestinian Authority. Witnesses told how a convoy of about twenty four-wheel-drive vehicles packed with masked gunmen arrived outside Moussa Arafat's home in Gaza City before dawn. They fought a 45-minute battle with his guards before leaving him dead in the street and kidnapping his son.
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This was a huge show of force against Fatah and the PA, and the PA did not respond. Although on paper it had the guns and the men to assert control of Gaza, and the timing was perfect – just as Israel left – those in charge failed to take charge. Whether one blames Abbas, or Dahlan, or the entire PA leadership, this event and the failure to respond to it sent a dire message: Control of Gaza was not certain. It was up for grabs.
We were watching Palestinian politics with equal attention. The postponed elections were now scheduled for January 2006. When the president had called Sharon on August 14, on the eve of the actual Gaza withdrawal, he had found Sharon voluble about the old question of Hamas and the elections. Hamas participation cannot happen, he said. In a democracy you cannot have armed organized parties participate in elections. We are totally against their participation in
elections because everyone will say, “Look, Hamas participated in elections; they are democratic.” It's a major mistake. Sharon then said he would refuse to help the elections take place if Hamas was in them, and he had the means to do that. Though now out of Gaza, in the West Bank, Israel
could either cooperate on Election Day by making sure roads were open and mobility good for voters, poll watchers, and international observers – or if it refused to do so, elections would be far harder to pull off. In Jerusalem, Israel could allow Palestinian voters to participate in the voting or flatly forbid it. In the January 2005 presidential election, Israel had followed the precedent set in the 1996 Palestinian elections: It had permitted voting in five East Jerusalem post offices. By doing so, Israel maintained the fiction that Palestinians weren't “voting in Jerusalem” but rather mailing postal or absentee ballots from post offices there. Most Palestinians eligible to vote in PA elections did so outside Jerusalem, in the West Bank; only about 5,000 would likely vote in those post offices. Now Sharon was threatening to forbid that. That action might not reduce total voting much, but the symbolism was powerful and the PA might even call off the election entirely. It could not permit the appearance of relinquishing any part of its claim to Jerusalem, and agreeing that no Palestinian in Jerusalem was part of the Palestinian political system would be criticized as precisely such a symbolic act.
Why were not only Israelis but many Americans so strongly opposed to Hamas participation? It is worth recalling not only the terrorism Hamas practiced but also just what Hamas stood for, as embodied in the words of its Charter, adopted in 1988. Genocidal anti-Semitism and the elimination of the State of Israel are themes that permeate the document, as shown in the following:
The Hamas has been looking forward to implement Allah's promise whatever time it might take. The prophet, prayer and peace be upon him, said: The time will not come until Muslims will fight the Jews (and kill them); until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: O Muslim! there is a Jew hiding behind me, come on and kill him!
The Islamic Resistance Movement believes that the land of Palestine has been an Islamic Waqf throughout the generations and until the Day of Resurrection, no one can renounce it or part of it, or abandon it or part of it.
Initiatives, and so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences, are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement.
There is no solution to the Palestinian problem except by Jihad.
The enemies have been scheming for a long time.…They stood behind the French and the Communist Revolutions.…They also used the money to establish clandestine organizations which are spreading around the world, in order to destroy societies and carry out Zionist interests. Such organizations are: the Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, Lions Clubs, B’nai B’rith and the like.…They obtained the Balfour Declaration and established the League of Nations in order to rule the world by means of that organization. They also stood behind World War II, where they collected immense benefits from trading with war materials and prepared for the establishment of their state. They inspired the establishment of the United Nations and the Security Council to replace the League of Nations, in order to rule the world by their intermediary.
Their scheme has been laid out in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
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Over time, many efforts have been made to explain Hamas's conduct, but no guide is better than the Charter.
Later, in 2006 and afterward, questions were sometimes raised why Hamas did not bend in ways that might have put them in a better tactical position. But Hamas is neither a political party nor even a national liberation movement; it is a religious movement permeated by anti-Semitism that is not even disguised as anti-Zionism, and it is opposed entirely to the existence of the State of Israel. No doubt there are individuals in it whose motives are less pure, more personal, or more political and who would under pressure agree to amend its charter to eliminate the worst of the anti-Semitic filth. But when Israelis looked at the movement, they saw people who were killing Jews and explaining why it was right to do so. There was no “moderate strain” in Hamas arguing that terrorism is morally wrong, and those members who sometimes argued for a halt or reduction in terror made it clear that they sought only an armed truce and would never agree to the permanent existence of the Jewish State.