Newsday - SETTLEMENTS MUST GO
For Israel, controlling areas populated by Palestinians just isn’t worth it
December 22, 2004
The Israeli leaders, Ariel Sharon chief among them, who promoted widespread settlement of the territories that Israel occupied in the 1967 war have created a huge problem for their country.
Now that it has become obvious to most Israelis, including Sharon, who is now prime minister, that the settlements must be dismantled, there is a revolt brewing in the settler movement. Its leaders are calling for widespread civil disobedience when the government starts to remove the settlements from the Gaza Strip next summer.
The only ray of light in all this is that the settlers are calling for civil disobedience and not a civil war, which some of the more fanatical among them favor. But this will still be a wrenching and possibly violent experience for Israel.
With the exception of altering the difficult-to-defend border between the high ground of the West Bank and the coastal plain, the vast majority of settlements never should have been approved by the government. Many of them were built on the misplaced belief that Israel had a historic and religious right to the West Bank. The right-wing leaders who championed the settlers, including Sharon, never took into consideration the problem Israel would face when it tried to control a territory largely populated by Palestinians. Only recently has it become clear that the settlements are not worth the effort. Ultimately, they threaten Israel's existence as a democratic and Jewish-majority state.
Sharon's plan now is to dismantle all the settlements in Gaza and four of the smaller settlements in the West Bank. Sharon is not talking about dismantling the large settlements in the heart of the West Bank or those on the outskirts of Jerusalem. But the logic is clear to the settler movement: Once the Gaza settlements are removed, a precedent will have been set. Ultimately most, if not all, of the West Bank settlements will have to go. The ones that stay should pertain solely to security concerns.
Given that he is the father of the settlement movement, it is poignant that Sharon will now be the leader who has to oversee the beginning of the dismantlement effort. He has created a huge task for himself.
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