Feature Page: Sharon submits proposal to ‘re-deploy’ Zionist settlements

by Gerry Foley

It is clear that Israeli authorities are no less ruthless than they were before recent “peace” proposals by the Sharon government. On Feb. 7, the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) carried out another killer missile strike in Gaza City aimed at members of Islamic Jihad.

One militant was killed. But as usually happens in these “targeted” air strikes, uninvolved Palestinian passersby were also hit. A young boy on his way to school was killed, and a number of other schoolboys were wounded. The big news in recent weeks are initiatives by the Sharon government that seemingly indicate he is looking for a way out of the bloody impasse into which the policy of brutal repression against the Palestinians has led.

The first was an agreement to free 400 Palestinian prisoners, along with a few dozen prisoners from other Arab countries, in return for the bodies of three Israeli soldiers and one still-living reservist in the hands of the Lebanese Islamist organization Hizbullah.

The trade was incomprehensible to the Israeli press. Even the liberal Haaretz complained, raising the question of why Sharon had been willing to concede to a irreconcilable enemy of Israel what he had refused to grant moderate Palestinians seeking a deal with the Zionist state.

Sharon’s trade with the Hizbullah in fact does not seem to make much sense from the Zionist point of view, unless it was intended as a signal that it was possible to negotiate with his government, and that his attitude had changed since he had refused to free Palestinian prisoners in exchange for a truce with the militant organizations.

A far more important initiative was Sharon’s announcement that he intended to evacuate the Zionist colonies from the Gaza Strip. This step, which outraged his most right-wing supporters, seemed to be a response to a general dilemma of the Israeli rulers.

The Zionist colonies can only survive, surrounded as they are by a hostile Palestinian population, with massive military protection. And such protection is more and more straining the Israeli government’s resources. Gaza is the predominately Palestinian area in which the Israeli authorities have the least interest. It is one of the grimmest pockets of misery in the world, a small barren area packed with desperate unemployed refugees. In fact, it is also being used as an outdoor prison. It is where Israel deports Palestinian activists from the West Bank.

However, far more than any proposal of conciliation with the Palestinians, Sharon’s plan seems to be for a strategic restructuring of the Zionist state and the Zionist colonies.

He is proposing a consolidation of the Jewish settled area by transferring part of the West Bank to Israel and some Israeli Arab communities to the territory designated for the Palestinian Authority.

Sharon was quoted in the Feb. 4 Le Monde as saying: “My intention is to proceed to an evacuation—pardon, a redeployment—of the colonies that pose a problem for us and sites that we will not in any case maintain in the framework of a final settlement, such as the colonies in the Gaza Strip.”

The response of the Palestinian Authority was that it was positive that Sharon was agreeing to give up the Gaza colonies, but they had no intention of conceding any of the West Bank to Israel.

The response of the Palestinians living in Israel was horror, because the proposal would deprive them of all the rights they currently have, specifically the right to work in Israel, which will continue to have most of the jobs and economic possibilities.

As bad as their situation is in Israel, where they are discriminated against and consigned to the lowest rung of society, it is far better than the situation of the Palestinians living in the besieged areas formally administered by the Palestinian Authority.

In its Feb. 1 issue, the British Independent quoted a report by a delegation of British MPs who had carried out a fact-finding tour of Palestine as saying: “Rates of malnutrition in Gaza and parts of the West Bank are as bad as anything one would find in sub-Saharan Africa. The Palestinian economy has all but collapsed. Unemployment rates are in the region of 60 to 70 percent.”

The New York Times of Feb. 3 took note of the reaction of spokespersons of Palestinians with Israeli citizenship: “Ahmed Tibi, an Israeli Arab lawmaker, was outraged. ‘We are talking about a dangerous, antidemocratic suggestion, which will bring about a schism between the state and its Arab citizens,’ Tibi said. He said residents of Israel’s Arab towns ‘are not pawns that Sharon can play with.’”

Sharon was explicit in making his scheme dependent on U.S. approval. It would obviously amount to a major change in the structuring of the Zionist settler state and, in the present political conditions, it is unlikely that he can carry it through.

But the fact that he has made such a proposal indicates increasing stress on the Zionist state. And curiously, in defending himself against the attacks of his own right wing, Sharon, the hard-liner, the unyielding supporter of the Zionist colonies, has been pointing to opinion polls that show a majority of the Jewish population of Israel supporting the evacuation of the colonies.