Israel: Onus now on Palestinians

Now that Israel has redrawn its own borders before the world’s eyes, completing with dazzling speed its pull-out from the Gaza Strip and part of the West Bank, it has this message for the Palestinians: We’ve dealt with our extremists, now you deal with yours.

And the Palestinians are telling Israel: you’ve proven that withdrawing is feasible, so do not stop.

Both Israeli and Palestinian officials said the evacuation opens a rare opportunity for renewing talks. But militant violence, chaos in Gaza, Israeli politics and big differences on the issues of statehood and borders bode poorly for peace.

On Tuesday, optimism outweighed the misgivings.

“This is a momentous and very important point in history for us,” said Rafiq Husseini, the Palestinian presidential chief of staff. “But now we want to start building.”

Once the Palestinians begin reining in their militants, said Israeli foreign ministry spokesman Gideon Meir, “we can start to talk about the final status of the territories".

It took the army just six days to clear residents out of all 21 settlements in Gaza and four in the West Bank – the same amount of time it took for Israel to capture Gaza, the West Bank, Sinai and the Golan Heights during the 1967 Mideast war.

Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas telephoned Israel’s prime minister and president to praise them for the withdrawal and suggest renewing negotiations. Israeli premier Ariel Sharon agreed to meet soon to discuss it.

Tuesday’s evacuation of two hard-line settlements in the West Bank was particularly significant because it took place in the heart of biblical Israel - delivering a stinging blow to right-wing zealots who view relinquishing land there as a betrayal of God’s will.

The pullout has sent a dramatic message that the settler movement, which wielded great power in Israel for decades, is no longer untouchable.

In the West Bank, as in Gaza, Jewish settlers and their supporters failed to achieve their goal of making Israeli withdrawals appear so costly that no future government would dare attempt them again.

Palestinians hope the precedent – that it’s feasible to dismantle Jewish settlements – can lead to further Israeli withdrawals and the establishment of an independent state. But they fear Israel, arguing that it has sacrificed enough, will use it to avoid further pullouts.

Tuesday’s resistance – extremists on a rooftop throwing eggs and tins can at troops, protesters at a Jewish seminary locking arms and kicking – crumbled quickly as the army fulfilled Sharon’s pledge, made more than a year ago, to “disengage” from the Palestinians by withdrawing for the first time from land they claim for a future state.

Some analysts argue that Israel is unilaterally imposing a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Without a renewal of peace talks, they say, the conflict will increasingly be defined by Israel drawing its own borders, through unilateral withdrawals and the completion of the separation barrier Israel is building in the West Bank.

Without a negotiated solution, Palestinian hopes for a viable, contiguous state would falter.

Most agree that if Sharon’s disengagement is to lead to new peacemaking, Abbas’ Palestinian Authority will have to assert control in the Gaza Strip, which for the past five years of Israeli-Palestinian fighting has been a virtual no man’s land ruled by militants and rival gangs.

Palestinian success in Gaza also depends on Israeli willingness to allow the Palestinians to have a harbour and an airport, keeping the borders open for the movement of goods and people. This openness is crucial to Gaza’s prosperity and the future of Mideast peacemaking, but Israel fears it, since open borders can be used to smuggle in deadly weapons.

But if allowing Gaza to be open risks terror, keeping it closed is sure to increase its misery and fuel extremism.

The weak Palestinian government is likely to have a hard time taking on the militants of Islamic Jihad and Hamas, which are painting the Israel pullout as a victory for their resistance and which may attempt to use violence to spur more withdrawals.

“We disengaged the people from the land in the Gaza Strip and the northern part of the West Bank. Now it’s the Palestinians’ turn to disengage themselves from violence and terror,” said the foreign ministry’s Meir.

If Gaza becomes Hamas-stan, as many Israelis fear, few will expect Israel to hand over more territory to the Palestinians.

For their part, Palestinians remain suspicious of Israeli intentions, with settlement construction forging ahead in the West Bank even as huge bulldozers demolish the remains of Jewish Gaza.

Palestinians have listened closely to Sharon’s oft-repeated statements that quitting Gaza can help Israel hold on to major settlement blocs in the West Bank. They’re deeply concerned about Israel’s plans to build thousands of new homes in the West Bank’s largest settlement to connect it to Jerusalem, a city they claim as their future capital.

Still, Husseini, Abbas’ chief of staff, welcomed the Israeli withdrawal as “a very important step toward liberation and freedom and independence.”

In an interview with The Associated Press, he said the Palestinian Authority has every intention to “create accountability and transparency in dealing with the land evacuated by the settlers.”

He said the Palestinians were hoping to co-opt the militants into the political system, but held out the possibility that force might also be needed.

“The options should be open, especially for those gangsters ... on the streets who think they cannot be gotten,” he said.

Israelis hotly debate why Israel’s 77-year-old prime minister, after spending most of his career as the champion of Jewish settlements, suddenly became the first Israeli leader to dismantle them in the West Bank and Gaza.

Some believe he suddenly woke up to the reality that Israel cannot hope to be both a Jewish and democratic state if it holds on to the West Bank and Gaza and the millions of Palestinians who, according to one recent study, already outnumber the Jews.

The study said that by placing Gaza’s 1.3 million Palestinians outside its boundaries, Israel has bought itself another 20 years of a solid Jewish majority inside the lands it controls.