イスラエル／パレスチナ和平

When the first shot is fired

As Sharon prepares to pull out of Gaza, tensions between the settlers and other Israelis are coming to a head

Daphna Baram
Monday April 18, 2005
The Guardian

Three Israeli divisions and more or less the entire police force are now ready for one of the biggest military operations in Israel's history: the evacuation of about 8,000 settlers - most from the Gaza Strip, and a few hundred from the northern West Bank. Ariel Sharon's unilateral "disengagement" plan is about to move to an operational stage. The political tension between most Israelis, who back Sharon's plan, and the settlers and their supporters is rising. The 8,000 settlers, out of a total of 400,000 in the occupied territories, are to be paid compensation and returned to Israel proper. The rest are bracing themselves for what they regard as an existential struggle.
Sharon's attempt to calm them by implying that the disengagement plan will strengthen Israel's hold on the West Bank and allow the vast majority to stay was not well received. "No more niceties," settlers told the Israeli paper Ha'aretz after the vote to approve the plan a month ago. "From now on we shall move beyond the boundaries of the law".

The settlers are divided into two groups. The first is the ideological, often religious, hardcore who pioneered the settlement project after Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza in 1967. Their claim to the land is often based on "biblical rights". The settlers' leadership consists mostly of descendants of this group.

The second, much larger, group (up to 90%) was lured by government campaigns and financial benefits in the 80s. It is widely assumed that they would willingly go back to Israel proper in return for compensation. But even in this group, many were born in the settlements and had children there. Their claim to the land may be less "biblical" and more practical, but some will not give it up without a fight. The boundaries between the two groups are getting blurred.

The assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 by a supporter of the settlement movement created a wave of anti-settler feeling. But the failure of the Camp David talks in 2000 and the outbreak of the second intifada appeared to bring the settlers back into the embrace of the Israeli mainstream. Suicide attacks in the heart of Israel won sympathy for the settlers' slogan "The territories are here" - in other words, there is no difference between Israel and the occupied territories because "the Palestinians are out to get us all anyway".

But now the mainstream is closing ranks around Sharon and disengagement, which appears to them to encapsulate an old dream about peaceful and prosperous lives - and the settlers, again, stand in the way. And while the media have often ignored settlers' attacks on Palestinians, clashes between settlers and soldiers or police are treated with great severity. The campaign to refuse to serve in the army to protest at disengagement, which divides the settlers, arouses no sympathy elsewhere.

The settlers feel betrayed. At the moment of truth, when the threat of evacuation hangs over their heads, they have discovered that no covenant was forged between them and the majority of Israelis. As long as Israeli governments supported the settlement project, ideological settlers had no difficulty in reconciling their nationalist commitment to the state of Israel with their religious commitment to "the land of Israel". Now that the state seems to be turning its back, which is to prevail: loyalty to the state, or zeal for the land?