Ramzy Baroud, Special to Arab News

AMMAN, 20 February 2004 — Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon announced that he wants to evacuate 17 of Gaza’s 21 illegal Jewish settlements. Some those who believe it is high time that some of Gaza’s unlawfully appropriated land was returned found it as gratifying and welcomed as such.

But the proposed Gaza settlement evacuation must be seen in the context of Israel’s disengagement plan, which is effectively being carried out unilaterally in the rest of the occupied territories. The disengagement plan (a repackaging of past threats and unilateral actions) was first pronounced during a fiery speech last December. Sharon then vowed to carry out “unilateral measures” if the Palestinian Authority failed to live up to its road-map commitment. Washington reacted with a mild rejection of Sharon’s threats.

“A settlement must be negotiated and we would oppose any Israeli effort to impose (one),” Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman responded. Yet Sharon proceeded with his unilateral measures; the construction of Israel’s separation wall continued unabated; plans to annex major illegal Jewish settlements to Israel are going ahead; and now, the once-taboo subject of transferring Arab towns in Israel to Palestinian jurisdiction, in exchange for Jewish settlements built in the West Bank, is openly being discussed.

The Arabs’ “demographic bomb” is always on the Israeli mind. Of course, the problem at the heart of Israel’s disengagement plan is not merely its unilateral nature, but the fact that Israel is fully capable of executing and maintaining whatever new reality such unilateral disengagement might bring about. After all, every step initiated by the Israeli government with regard to the status of the occupied territories after 1967 was unilateral, and always became the status quo.

The dismantling of most of Gaza’s settlements, then, must be seen within its proper context of the Israeli government’s incessant attempts to sideline any significant Palestinian role in determining their own future — keeping in mind that any geopolitical transformation in the occupied territories will have a much greater impact on Palestinians than it will on Israel. Sharon has suggested that a pullout from Gaza is crucial to Israel’s “survival”; this means that, in order for Israel to survive as a Jewish state, there has to be a clear and decisive Jewish majority in areas that are marked Israeli. A few thousand Jewish settlers living among over 1.2 million Palestinian Arabs in Gaza hardly contribute to a clear Jewish majority, and therefore, smaller and remote settlements would have to be sacrificed for the “greater good”.

This is borne out by assertions made by Israeli officials and media that the Gaza settlers will be allocated to West Bank settlements, most likely to large settlements such as Ariel and Maale Adumim, according to Sharon’s vision, and the direction in which his wall is to be built, with or without a mutual agreement, and in violation of international law.

The link between the proposed Gaza evacuation and the insistence on creating permanent geographical continuity between West Bank settlers and Israel becomes clearer if we consider the course of the separation wall.

The 600 km of concrete, barbed wire and trenches will turn the West Bank and Jerusalem into islands, leaving little hope for a true sense of Palestinian sovereignty over their yet-to-be-born state. The wall will eventually twist and maneuver to swallow much of the West Bank, mostly with the intention of annexing Jewish settlements, creating another reality that is deemed to be the prevailing status quo.

Much like “security fence”, “disengagement plan” is also a deceptive term. Israel is not simply washing its hands of the Palestinians — it is rearranging the geodemographics of these territories to guarantee either direct or indirect control over the occupied territories and its people. Although Israel will continue to control the border around Gaza and militarily partition the strip into four entities, Sharon still scored a substantial political victory by declaring his intentions to dismantle the 17 settlements; the majority of Israelis are backing his plan, the United States cheered him on, and even the PA found it tasteless to dispute the Israeli initiative.

Moreover, as noted by Harvard scholar Sarah Roy, while Sharon will be praised by the US and Europe for having made “painful concessions” for peace (which will lead to generous financial rewards), “Palestinians will have to reciprocate.” With this clever move, and with intense American and Israeli pressure to mute international criticism of the separation wall, Sharon has managed to turn the tables on the Palestinians once again.

Conversely, as far as Sharon’s right-wing government is concerned, appeasing the settlers with a half-a-million-dollar-per-family compensation scheme, merely to be repositioned in the West Bank or Negev is a price — most likely to be disbursed by American taxpayers — worth paying. Once the plan is completed, says Roy, a Palestinian state, when it is declared, “will be weak, diminished and highly dependent on Israel.”

— Ramzy Baroud is an American-Arab journalist.