Aluf Benn, The Washington Post -- Arab News

TEL AVIV, 10 February 2004 — Last week, Sharon, who is struggling to save his job amid a corruption investigation, surprised many Israelis by announcing his intention to close down almost all Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip and leave the territory captured in 1967 to the Palestinians. While exiting one territory, he moved to reinforce Israel’s position in another: Sharon wants to move Jews from Gaza to expanded West Bank settlements and to continue to construct a West Bank security fence, which largely ignores the pre-1967 lines. Later this month, an international court will debate whether those lines are, in fact, legal borders violated by the fence.

Political expediency may have been a catalyst for Sharon’s Gaza move. Gaza is a low-lying area of little strategic value. The West Bank fence and settlements keep many strategic hilltops under Israel’s control.

A bit of history explains why drawing a solid border between Israelis and Palestinians is so difficult. The 1948 war created a de facto partition, but no Palestinian state. Jordan took the West Bank, and Egypt grabbed the Gaza Strip, filled with refugees from Israeli areas that now included 78 percent of the British Mandate territory. The armistice line of 1949, known as the “green line,’’ separated the foes but was honored in its breach: Infiltration by Palestinians led to terror attacks and Israeli cross-border retaliations commanded by Sharon.

The “green line’’ has always reflected necessity rather than acceptance. The 1949 armistice specifically said it was not a formal boundary. Only when weak would either side recognize the line’s legitimacy. In 1953, when Israel faced American and British pressure to give away territory, it told the United States: “The armistice lines should be seen as permanent borders, with both moral and political validity, until changed by agreement.’’ But after the Six Day War in 1967, which left Israel in control of all Palestine, Israel changed its mind. Its current position states that the West Bank and Gaza are “disputed areas’’ that were never ruled by a recognized sovereign. The Palestinians, for their part, didn’t accept the pre-1967 war borders until 1988.

Sharon’s declaration last week appears to many as a reversal of his position. After all, he once said that the fate of the small Gaza settlement of Netzarim was the fate of Tel Aviv.

More than any other Israeli, Sharon worked to erase the green line from the maps and the ground. Immediately after the Six Day War, as head of the Israel Defense Forces training department, he moved military schools — the forerunners of civilian settlements — to abandoned Jordanian camps in the West Bank. As agriculture minister in the late 1970s, Sharon launched an ambitious settlement plan based on “strategic topography.’’

Faced with international pressure, broken consensus at home and a defunct Palestinian Authority, Sharon came out with the newest, and politically boldest, version of his plan. In a policy speech in December 2003, he proposed “unilateral disengagement,’’ creating political turmoil in Israel with his willingness to evacuate some settlements and to turn his back on his own creation. Last week he specified the price tag: Dismantling 17 settlements in Gaza and three small ones in the West Bank. To the right-wing, this was heresy from Sharon, who only recently warned that unilateral withdrawal was a recipe for more terror.

But Sharon has not abandoned his strategic vision of Israel’s borders. His plan for disengagement is built upon two pillars — “relocation’’ of isolated settlements and “strengthening the hold’’ over others.

In the coming weeks, the battle over the borders will come to the fore. The international court will open its hearings and Sharon will travel to Washington to ask for President Bush’s consent to Israel’s hold on about half the West Bank until “a new Palestinian partner emerges’’ to discuss the final deal. Washington is hesitating for fear of giving a kiss of death to its “road map’’ for Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation. At the same time, Sharon must fight desperate legal and political battles at home against possible indictment and opposition to settlement removal. Given the level of public disappointment over his job performance, this could be the last fight of his professional life. But he may escape defeat this time as well.