I have to admit that that one of the Right's biggest successes has been toppling the "Left"'s unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. In a Zoom meeting with a group of young people, one asked me how the Left still didn't understand that "the Arabs" turn every territory from which we lead a withdrawal into a springboard for attacks on us. I asked him to what territory, exactly, he was referring. Without missing a beat, he answered, "Gaza, of course."
"And the prime minister then, Ariel Sharon, was a member of which 'Left'?" I responded innocently.
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"Kadima, of course. The left-wing party with Peres, Livni, and Olmert," he said.
I tried to make history clearer for the polite and impassioned young man. Sharon, I told him, was seen by many as the "father of the settlements," even though they weren't his invention. Even when he was foreign minister under Netanyahu in 1998, when he returned from the signing ceremony for the Wye River Memorandum, he called on the settlers to settle every hilltop. In 2003, when he won the election and asked Amram Mitzna, who was leader of the Labor Party, to join his government, he refused Mitzna's request that Israel pull out of the settlement Netzarim, in the heart of the Gaza Strip, and said, "Tel Aviv will meet the same fate as Netzarim." Two years later, he announced a unilateral withdrawal from all settlements in Gaza.
Sharon didn't make the decision or carry it out as head of Kadima, but as leader of the Likud. And just like the provocative visit he paid to the Temple Mount with other Likud faction members and about 1,000 other people led to the outbreak of the Second Intifada the next day, his unexpected and inexplicable decision to withdraw from Gaza without any peace agreement in place was made with his characteristic stubbornness. He ignored the results of a Likud referendum on the matter that he himself had requested.
People are still trying to understand what he was thinking, and why he made such a surprising decision. This was no election promise, like the ones made by Yitzhak Rabin (a peace deal with the Palestinians within six to nine months) or Ehud Barak (a withdrawal from Lebanon within a year). Opponents of the move, on both the Right and the Left, were convinced that he had made the decision to distract attention from the criminal investigations against him. His chief of staff, Dov Weissglas, was interviewed at the time and said that the withdrawal had to do with interviews given by former heads of the Shin Bet security agency in which they condemned the stalled peace process, whereas Sharon himself told the New York Times that he had made the decision so that the ideas raised in the informal Geneva Initiative, which garnered surprising public support in 2003, would not be adopted and cause harm to Israel.
The idea of pulling out of Gaza didn't come from the Left, and it didn't adopt it. Plenty of members of the peace camp saw it as an attack on the Oslo Accords. We tried to persuade Sharon to withdraw under a peace deal with the newly-elected Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, but Sharon insisted on not doing that. He knew that even if the Left wasn't excited about the move as it was laid out, there was no chance that those who wanted an end to the occupation would join forces with the Land of Israel camp and vote against a pullout from Gaza. We in Meretz gave him the majority he needed in the Knesset, but we warned him that without peace talks, it would be a huge coup for Hamas and would encourage violence.
The retreat from Gaza and its results don't prove that "you can't trust the Arabs," or that there is no partner for peace. It proves that the idea, which came from the Likud, was a shot from the hip, without any serious planning, that took the simplistic view that there was no difference between the pragmatic and fanatic Palestinian camps. In these aspects, it must remind us of the intention to carry out another unilateral move -- to annex a third of the West Bank "by July 1." One is annexation, and the other was a withdrawal, but they are equally irresponsible.
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