MIDEAST: West Bank Faces War Fall-Out

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Analysis by Peter Hirschberg

JERUSALEM, Aug 23 2006 (IPS) - Just three weeks ago, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was still enthusing about his plan for a unilateral withdrawal from most of the West Bank. The fighting in Lebanon, he said in an interview in early August, had not doused his determination to move forward with his plan. In fact, he said, the conflict with Hezbollah would ultimately help in promoting it.

But with the fighting now over, it appears that rather than bolstering Olmert’s withdrawal plans, the fighting in Lebanon has all but shattered them. The Prime Minister has been telling ministers in private discussions in recent days that while the government cannot ignore the conflict with the Palestinians, its priority now is to rebuild northern Israel, which was battered by Hezbollah rockets for over a month.

Responding to questions over whether the Prime Minister had shifted his withdrawal plan – the focal point of his election campaign earlier this year – to the backburner, Assaf Shariv, a senior aide to Olmert, said: “Right now we will deal with other issues. It’s not that it (the withdrawal) was cancelled, but it is not on the agenda.”

Transportation Minister Meir Sheetrit, who is a member of Olmert’s ruling Kadima party, said the plan for a unilateral withdrawal in the West Bank would not be implemented in the “foreseeable future”. But he did add that Olmert had not abandoned the idea altogether.

Olmert’s plan calls for a withdrawal from some 90 percent of the West Bank, with Israel evacuating 60,000-70,000 Jewish settlers living in the more isolated settlements, but retaining control of major settlement blocs that are closer to the 1967 border.

The separation barrier Israel is building in the West Bank is meant to serve as a border between Israelis and Palestinians until such time as they return to the negotiating table and a final agreement on borders can be hammered out.

When Olmert first ordered a fierce military response to the Jul. 12 kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah, some commentators suggested he was trying to send a message not only to the Shia organisation, which had violated Israeli sovereignty, but also to the Palestinians – ahead of a future West Bank withdrawal. The message was that Israel is prepared to make territorial concessions, but that if these withdrawals are interpreted as a sign of weakness, and if the lines to which Israel withdraws are not honoured by the Palestinians, then they will face a harsh response.

But the fact that Palestinian militants have continued to fire rockets into southern Israel from Gaza ever since Israel withdrew unilaterally from the coastal strip a year ago, and the Israeli army’s inability to halt Hezbollah rocket fire on northern Israel, has eroded that deterrent threat. It has also made the Israeli public, and many of its political leaders, increasingly skeptical of unilateralism.

Last year, a clear majority of Israelis backed Ariel Sharon, who was prime minister at the time, when he evacuated all Israeli troops and some 7,000 settlers from Gaza. Israelis were similarly supportive six years ago when then prime minister Ehud Barak extracted the army from south Lebanon where it had occupied a security zone along the border for 18 years. Like in Gaza, the pullout was conducted unilaterally, without a negotiated agreement.

But, in both cases, the withdrawals did not end attacks, ultimately leading to Israel sending thousands of troops back into Gaza – after a soldier was abducted by Palestinian militants in late June – and Lebanon, after the two soldiers were snatched on Israel’s northern border.

Despite the withdrawal from south Lebanon, Hezbollah continued to carry out attacks along the border, claiming that Israel had failed to relinquish the Shebaa Farms – a small strip of territory that the United Nations determined in 2000 belonged to Syria, not Lebanon, and therefore had to be dealt with in future talks between Jerusalem and Damascus.

And despite the withdrawal from Gaza, Palestinian militants continued to fire rockets from the strip at Israeli towns in the south. The large-scale incursion that Israel launched in Gaza following the abduction of the soldier was aimed also at halting the rocket fire.

With thousands of troops having been sent back into Gaza just a year after the military pulled out, and with tens of thousands of troops having been sent into Lebanon earlier this month, the Israeli public has lost the faith it once had in unilateralism as an effective mechanism for managing conflicts.

The Gaza and Lebanon experiences have convinced Israelis that a unilateral pullout in the West Bank would leave Hamas militants armed with rockets and waiting to launch them, on the doorstep of the country’s major population centres.

With peace talks almost certain to remain in a deep freeze while Hamas is in power, Olmert is going to find it tough to come up with an alternative plan – on the Palestinian front, at least. This leaves the Prime Minister, whose popularity ratings at the end of the fighting in Lebanon plummeted to just 27 percent, without a clear agenda, and increasingly vulnerable as the public’s disenchantment with his management of the war grows.