Now what?

Wednesday, August 24, 2005

The deal was finally struck between Egypt and Israel for the deployment of 750 properly trained and equipped Egyptian border police to patrol the 14-kilometer stretch of border between Gaza and Egypt known as the Philadelphi Corridor. There are demands in the Knesset that the agreement be brought to the parliament for ratification, with Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee Chairman Yuval Steinitz leading the opposition to the arrangement. It is unclear however, that the government must bring the agreement to the parliament. And if it does, the same majority that approved the disengagement by a margin of more than 20 votes in the 120-seat parliament will approve it.

Yet to be finalized, however, is the three-way deal involving Israel paying the Palestinians to remove the rubble from the demolished settlements, with the hazardous materials - mostly asbestos - going to a dumping ground somewhere in the vast reaches of the Sinai peninsula. According to the Israeli press, the Egyptians have not agreed in full to the details of the plan. But judging from the pace at which the Phioladelphi Corridor deal was done, it's reasonable to expect the rubble deal to be approved by mid-September, when the army would like to be out of Gaza - more than a month earlier than it planned.

So, now what? That's what U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will be asking Deputy Prime Minister Ehud Olmert this evening (Israel time). The reason Olmert, and not Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom was summoned to Washington, is simple, as Israel Radio's Washington correspondent Yaron Dekel explained this morning: 'when Shalom makes up his mind if he is for or against the disengagement, Washington will know whether to invite him.' But Shalom can't make up his mind, for a very simple reason: public opinion polls. Not the public opinion polls of the general public, which is wholeheartedly in favor of disengagement, but polls of the registered members of the Likud. Two weeks ago, a poll showed Netanyahu way ahead of Sharon. Three days ago, a new poll showed Sharon way ahead of Netanyahu. This morning, a new poll showed Netanyahu way ahead of Sharon. And since it is the Likud membership that nominates the party's candidate for prime minister, that's the poll that the conventional wisdom at least says is the one that counts. After all, nobody expects the Left to suddenly resurge in the coming elections. Trouble is (for Shalom, indeed for Likud party members in general), without Sharon at its head, it is not at all clear that the Likud will remain the dominant political party. Netanyahu might be popular among Likud party members, but he is not a particularly popular politician in the overall Israeli electorate. Expectations in the political arena are now for some more polls, just to straighten out the discrepancies between the recent ones. Of course, all the volatility in the polls could merely be a symptom of the effects of the recent events.

In any case, as of now, the Israeli political debate is now over the narrative that dominates the story of the disengagement. The debate is between those who regard the relative ease with which the settlements were removed as proof that it is possible to move against the illegal outposts of the West Bank, proof the settlement movement is much weaker than it has appeared to be over the past 35 years. Others, however, insist that the body politic could not suffer more self-inflicted wounds so soon after the major surgery out of Gaza. And of course, much - too much, perhaps - depends on the Qassam rockets stockpiled by the Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades in Gaza and if the Qassam rocket knowhow reaches the West Bank.

The Israeli defense and political establishment likes to claim that it was its operations over the past two years that broke the back of the second intifada that erupted in the fall of 2000 and saw the deaths of some 3,000 Palestinians and 1,000 Israelis. Others say that the death of Yasser Arafat, combined with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' strategy of mainstreaming the militants into electoral politics might be working to 'normalize' Palestinian politics. The Palestinian legislative council elections are now set for January, 2006 and while polls show that the Palestinian narrative of the Israeli disengagement says Palestinian self-sacrifice - shaheeds and summud (steadfastness) - that forced Israel out of the Strip, the same polls show that the Palestinian public wants to see the Palestinian Authority succeed at building Gaza and reaching a full-fledged peace deal with the Israelis.

Sharon loathes talk of entering final status talks with the Palestinians and has always couched his unilateral disengagement strategy as a way of creating his favored 'long-term interim agreement' with the Palestinians. But the astonishing (to most Israeli eyes) success of the evacuation of the settlements is bound to set into motion forces that Sharon could not have predicted, such as an innocent question by Bush: if it was possible to evacuate so swiftly and so (relatively) peacefully settlements of hundreds of households, how about those pesky illegal outposts, as Sharon has promised over and over since the roadmap was presented?

Meanwhile, as expected, Sharon is turning Rightward. The IDF is said to be moving to begin fencing Maale Adumim, east of Jerusalem, into the Jerusalem 'envelope,' essentially cutting the southern and northern West Bank from each other, as well as Jerusalem. The U.S. - the entire world, except the Likud central committee, the Rightists and the hawks in Labor - is against that. But maybe Sharon is reckoning that his 'courageous move' in Gaza gives him enough political credit to do what he wants in Jerusalem. According to the fence he has approved, Israel is grabbing about 8 percent of the West Bank. Maybe Bush can convince him to pay the Palestinians back with land from the Negev as a 'safe passage' route between Gaza and Hebron.

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