It’s interesting that the 2005 disengagement from the Gaza Strip, rather than the Oslo Accords, has become the shadow hovering over the battle for and against the government’s “judicial reform.”
The question, “Where were you during the disengagement?” is the essence of the defense mounted by the reform’s sponsors and supporters in the face of the protests against it, including the refusals to report for army duty.
But in my view, this is a question disengagement opponents ought to be asking themselves: Why was nobody there for us during the disengagement? And they should consider that perhaps this simply attests to support for the disengagement and a lack of sympathy for the entire settlement enterprise.
This obsessive preoccupation with the disengagement isn’t just a compulsive, post-traumatic revisiting of the event. When the government isn’t busy advancing the reform, the governing coalition is working to annul the disengagement. Two months ago, the Knesset enacted an amendment to the Disengagement Law stating that Jews may once again reside in the parts of the northern West Bank evacuated under the plan.
“This is an exciting night, because we’re beginning a historic rectification,” Bezalel Smotrich, the de facto minister for settlements, tweeted. “Tonight, we’re starting to erase the shame of the expulsion from our lawbooks. … What you vote for is what you get!”
And MK Limor Son Har-Melech reminded everyone of what the goal is: “Returning home, including to the communities of Gush Katif that were evacuated and destroyed with horrific stupidity and became a nest of terrorism.”
Now that it has taken over the government, the settlement enterprise’s remaining problem is the Israel Defense Forces. What do you do when the West Bank is occupied territory, and for Israeli law to apply there, you need the head of the IDF’s Central Command to sign an order applying it? That’s exactly what all the tension over the outpost of Homesh has been about.
The head of Central Command, Maj. Gen. Yehuda Fuchs, indeed signed an order allowing Jews to stay there, but only on part of Homesh’s territory. This infuriated the chairman of the Samaria Regional Council, who wrote the following to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and Smotrich: “We were stunned to discover that, in complete defiance of the decision by the Knesset, which is the sovereign … the order signed by the head of Central Command applies the law in a very partial fashion … this is inconceivable.”
And it’s not just the IDF. Netanyahu, as readers may recall, voted for the disengagement plan. And this isn’t just another anecdote revealing his tendency to flip-flop. In his actions, he has been consistent in his support of the disengagement.
But because he is a coward and lacks the courage to stand up to the settlers like former prime ministers Yitzhak Rabin and Ariel Sharon did, he has always fought them through proxies – center-left parties that he added to his governing coalitions, American pressure or the Supreme Court, his favorite proxy, which he is now being forced to castrate for lack of political choice. Consequently, the only thing he has left to stop them with is the IDF.
That’s his system: Pass legislation repealing the disengagement, then send the IDF to stand up to the settlers and absorb their frustrations. And then, be astonished at the attacks on the army. Netanyahu is using the IDF, just as he used the Supreme Court, as a human shield against the far right.
The settlers are more obsessed with the disengagement than with Oslo because the former was a step in the right direction that was actually completed. The bottom line is that it succeeded. True, Gaza is no Singapore, there’s no picturesque tourism on its beaches, Hamas seized control of it, and there are missiles and rounds of fighting. All that is true. Nevertheless, it’s preferable for the IDF not to be there (similar to the consensus about the pullout from Lebanon).
The disengagement embodies a plan for leaving the territories that isn’t dependent on a partner, negotiations and peace. It serves as proof that you don’t have to be a leftist to leave them. But a government which calls to mind everything that’s backward is seeking to annul a move whose essence was moving forward.
So maybe what is needed now, given the madness that has been let loose in the settlements, is the exact opposite of what the settlers want – an enormous public movement to set borders for the settlers, with or without a partner. Israel needs a plan for a disengagement from the West Bank.