Sharon's Gaza manoeuvre

Disengagement from the Palestinian territories occupied by Israel in 1967 has begun, according to the Israeli prime minister, …

Disengagement from the Palestinian territories occupied by Israel in 1967 has begun, according to the Israeli prime minister, Mr Ariel Sharon. The decision taken by his cabinet in principle on Sunday to withdraw from Gaza and dismantle settlements there is historic, he says, affirming Israel's willingness to find peace if the Palestinians renounce violent resistance.

His critics say no such conclusions can be drawn. According to them, it suits Israel to disengage from an unsustainable presence in Gaza and to consolidate its hold on the West Bank, where 240,000 settlers live among nearly two million Palestinians. Cantonisation of the West Bank under continuing Israeli control will undermine any basis for a viable peace agreement.

There is little room for compromise between these two accounts of what is at stake in the Israeli cabinet's decision. The political circumstances involved make it all the more difficult to interpret. Following decisive rejection of the Gaza plan in a Likud party referendum on May 2nd, Mr Sharon amended it to remove 21 Gaza settlements and a mere four out of 120 on the West Bank in four stages by the end of 2005. Thus four more cabinet votes will be required to implement the plan. It still took the sacking of two cabinet members from the pro-settlement National Union Party to secure a majority.

This leaves Mr Sharon with a bare majority of one vote in the Knesset, and the likelihood of losing his majority there if another small right-wing party withdraws support. His options then will be either to seek a grand coalition with the Labour Party or have elections for the third time in five years.

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Even if this is an historic decision, the political circumstances in which it is taken have simply deferred its substance without resolving the crisis it provoked. Mr Sharon has chosen to delay a showdown with party opponents such as Mr Benjamin Netanyahu in the hope that the Israeli public's support for the Gaza plan, along with the Labour Party's, will in due course favour his objective. In the meantime, he gives the Bush administration the impression that he is ready to make progress. He can disregard his more trenchant critics at home and abroad, who say such a unilateral action, together with continued strengthening of the West Bank occupation, will undermine the limited opportunities to restore a peace process, not to mention a viable independent Palestinian state which is meant to be in place by 2005, according to the internationally-agreed "road map" for a Middle East peace.

The likely beneficiaries of this political impasse and delay will be fundamentalist opponents of a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians, together with leaderships of Middle Eastern states who oppose the Bush administration's plan for democratising the region. If European states are to help restore the road map, they will need to make this clear to Mr Bush at this week's G-8 summit in Georgia.