Let’s face it. With disengagement from Gaza over in a flash, the anti-disengagement forces have already won.
That’s not how it seemed along the way, however. In the media we saw tearful settlers being evicted by tearful soldiers, playing hide-and-seek with thousands of ideologically hot-headed teenagers until the last of them was pulled from the bushes in time to go back to school at the end of the summer vacation.
In short, disengagement triumphed.
Except that it hasn’t. Not really.
As many commentators including myself have pointed out, the evacuation of Jewish settlements from the Gaza Strip makes absolutely no sense unless it is part of a larger plan leading to a unilateral withdrawal from most of the West Bank, too.
The necessity for such a double disengagement is predicated on the assumption that no formal, negotiated end to our conflict with the Palestinians is possible on terms acceptable to both sides, and that unless we Jews want to become a minority (some demographers claim we already are) between the Mediterranean and the Jordan, we have to retrench to new borders that we draw ourselves, e.g., to the West Bank security fence. A withdrawal from Gaza alone would be at best a temporary demographic palliative. It would still leave us with a population whose 40 percent of Palestinians has double the number of children and a far higher birthrate than its 60 percent of Jews.
And on one thing it is possible to agree with the anti-disengagement camp: It wasn’t worth going through this summer’s agony for a temporary palliative.
Indeed, as many commentators including myself have also pointed out, this summer’s agony was never really about the Gaza Strip. Had the settler movement and its supporters on the right been offered a quid pro quo by the government, containing an ironclad pledge that, in return for giving up the Gaza settlements, not one settlement in the West Bank would ever be moved, their leaders would have gladly signed on the dotted line.
But there was and could be no such pledge. The settlers knew that after Gaza would come the turn of the West Bank — and their entire protest campaign this summer was designed to convince the Israeli public that a Gaza-style disengagement from the West Bank is not possible.
In this they have succeeded. They have shown us what it takes to move 8,000 Jewish settlers out of a far corner of the land of Israel having no great strategic value or Jewish historical significance. Does anyone care to imagine what it would take to move 60,000 or 70,000 settlers from the biblical heartland of Judea and Samaria, which sits smack in the middle of this country, scant miles from Jerusalem?
Just the physical logistics of it would be mind-boggling. Although the Gaza Strip was easily isolable, thousands of protesters slipped through the army’s cordon. Even with its security fence, this is not true of the West Bank. An attempted evacuation of settlements from it could easily result in tens of thousands of protesters flowing to any one of them. The entire Israeli army couldn’t handle this, not even if reinforced by the navy and the air force — and if military insubordination has been relatively minor this summer, it could swell to malignant proportions in such a situation.
It’s not going to happen. The settlers can wipe the tears from their eyes and start smiling. The Palestinians giddily celebrating our departure from Gaza might as well make it as big a bash as they can, because they won’t have an opportunity for another one soon.
In return for our acknowledgment of their triumph, however, the settler movement and its supporters owe us one thing. This is an explanation: Exactly where do we go from here?
It better be a good explanation, too. And it better not include any of the following arguments:
1. There’s no need to rack our brains, because the Messiah will soon show up to solve our problems.
2. We only have to beat the stuffing out of the Palestinians a bit harder and longer for them to come to their senses and beg to go back to being our hewers of wood and drawers of water — or else, once they see that we have gotten Thais and Romanians to do the job, to be allowed to fold their tents and vanish. For those stubborn enough to want to elect their own leaders, Bantustans named Nablusland and Ramallahland, having their own flags and soccer teams and full membership in the United Nations, will provide the solution.
3. It doesn’t matter what we do, because the United States will always support us. It has no choice because Americans read the Bible and know God promised the Holy Land to the Jews.
4. The demographic problem is a bogeyman. As soon as we reorganize the Ministry of Absorption, send the right emissaries to the diaspora, and spruce up this country a bit, millions of Jews will be standing in line to immigrate.
5. Yes, it will take a miracle to save us — but why worry? The success of Zionism and the creation of Israel have been one big miracle anyway, so it’s perfectly reasonable to expect more of the same.
Although such arguments may sound like caricatures, they are actually the ones that the politicians and so-called intellectuals of the anti-disengagement camp have been trying to foist on us. As long as they appeared to be losing the disengagement battle, this hardly seemed to matter. After all, it wasn’t they who would have to make the decisions.
Yet now they have won. A second disengagement from the West Bank is a dead duck, at least for the foreseeable future — and by the time the foreseeable future is gone, the only politician in Israel capable of carrying out such a step, Ariel Sharon, will be gone too.
That leaves, as I say, a big question: Exactly where do we go from here?
Hillel Halkin is a columnist for the Jerusalem Post, where this column previously appeared.
Two Views:
Who really won in the disengagement battle?