This disengagement thing — it’s not happening, according to Yisrael Meir Cohen.
The 42-year-old Israeli can rattle off a litany of reasons why: a vast financial burden, slipshod planning, dissension in the troops and so on. Add Cohen leading thousands of protesters in a series of coordinated acts of civil disobedience and he’s certain he’ll dis’ the disengagement.
“It may start, but it’ll fall apart quickly,” predicts the Rhode Island-born resident of Efrat — “That’s the ‘Occupied West Bank.’ I’ll save you the time.”
“They might go after some of the more isolated places. And they might succeed there. But this will fall apart. Many soldiers don’t want to take part, the number of people who oppose this is astronomical and Sharon doesn’t understand what he’s up against.”
Cohen, a printer by trade and a member of the right-wing Israeli activist group Revava, was in the Bay Area this week concluding a cross-country speaking and fund-raising tour. His speech at San Francisco’s Orthodox Chevra Thilim was sponsored in part by Club Maoz, a right-wing pro-Israel group based in the Bay Area.
And Cohen is confident his packs of “Oslo Youth,” young people for whom mention of the peace process evokes images of “your friends, neighbors and parents being killed,” will bring disengagement to its knees. Israel simply doesn’t have the manpower to deal with them.
When Cohen led a procession to pray at the Temple Mount — perhaps his principal m.o. — thousands of police were forced to contain his group. Israel has 17,000 police officers, according to Cohen, and only 8,000 are in the field. How will these cops, he asks, deal with thousands upon thousands of demonstrators in Gush Katif and scores more across the country specifically aiming to draw law enforcement away from Gaza?
But dealing with large groups of irate young people is just the warm-up act. How is Israel going to pay for this party, continues Cohen, a tall, stocky man wearing jeans, sneakers, a work shirt and a small kippah. Both the European Union and United States have balked, and if Israel is forced to go it alone, Cohen predicts a financial crisis (and that’s the reason Benjamin Netanyahu quit the government, he adds).
What’s more, the whole operation has been badly planned, he says. The Gaza disengagement has been far more hastily thrown together than the evacuation of the Sinai, but far more settlers are hunkered down — and they don’t plan on leaving quietly.
Finally, Cohen feels the whole disengagement is based on a faulty survey that predicted a “demographic bomb” of escalating Arab births. This widely reported study, he says, double-counted hundreds of thousands of Arabs living in East Jerusalem and relied upon inflated Palestinian Authority population and birth rate totals elsewhere.