:: Home

Israel's Gaza gamble is an opportunity for Palestinians

BY AHARON KLIEMAN

After 38 years of a direct military presence in the Gaza Strip, Israel’s wrenching yet historic leave-taking has deep, long-term implications. Despite its “unilateral disengagement,” Middle Eastern realities caution that disentangling itself from Gaza may be one thing for Israel; separation from the Palestinians is quite another.

Both ethnic communities are compelled by demography, topography, scarce resources and interdependence to seek some form of uneasy but necessary framework for engagement and coexistence. If at some future date President Bush’s vision of a two-state solution should derive from what the Gaza disengagement has now set in motion, the best to be hoped for is a kind of “soft partition” that would enable both peoples to live separately but together.

Such a situation symbolizes what U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recently described as “connectivity” — the ambiguous, still-to-be-defined relationship between the Gaza Strip on Israel’s western flank and the contested West Bank to the east. Having long been left on the back burner of negotiations and dismissed casually as a secondary peace agenda item, turning the concepts of Gaza-West Bank contiguity and “safe passage” into reality is going to prove anything but technical or marginal.

Two things are increasingly clear in the shadow of disengagement. Either both sides will address “safe passage” as a zero-sum game, making it a major sticking point, or they will be forced to work out some compromise formula for contiguity, requiring significant concessions by Israel in consenting to one or more land links.

Should Israel comply with Palestinian demands for multiple land links cutting across the country under Palestinian sovereignty, the Jewish state would be dissected into two. The problem becomes even more acute, given the Palestinians’ announced intention to further claim the right to a complete grid of water, gas and oil pipelines, plus a railroad and an air corridor in the name of economic viability and the free movement of people and goods.

Conversely, were Israel to deny territorial contiguity or, alternatively, insist upon maintaining exclusive jurisdiction over the approximately 35-mile safe passage land route, including the right to impose closure, for all intents and purposes the projected West Bank and Gaza Palestinian entity would enter existence as a bifurcated or split state.

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon perceives his Gaza move as benefiting Israel, not least diplomatically, as already witnessed in the first open contacts between Israel and Pakistan. If the Palestinians unite and undertake the serious administrative, budgetary and institutional reforms obligated by the road map to peace, then suspended bilateral talks would presumably resume. On the other hand, should the Gaza Strip descend into chaos and civil war, the peace process could be permanently arrested.

As Middle Eastern affairs so often confirm, even the best of strategies has the potential for unraveling. In this instance, the wisdom and success of Sharon’s bold enterprise rest less on his personal astuteness than on Palestinian reactions and countermoves, not to mention the vagaries of Israeli politics.

Although it originated as a unilateral Israeli plan, the success or failure of Israel’s Gaza disengagement greatly depends on the Palestinian response. It is their opportunity — theirs to win or lose.

Klieman is a visiting professor at the UCLA International Institute.