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home > by publication type > interviews > Indyk: Sharon’s Plan to Pull Out of Gaza and Part of West Bank Could Lead to Increased Violence
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| Interviewee: | Martin S. Indyk, Director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy, Brookings Institution |
|---|---|
| Interviewer: | Bernard Gwertzman, Consulting Editor |
March 19, 2004
Martin S. Indyk, who twice served as U.S. ambassador to Israel during the Clinton administration, praises the unofficial plan being discussed by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon for unilateral Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and some 50 percent of the West Bank.
But, he says, the plan will need U.S. backing to succeed, and he urges President Bush to press for a U.S. military presence in Gaza to keep order until the evacuated areas are taken over by a rejuvenated Palestinian Authority. Speaking before the Israeli killing March 22 of Hamas leader Sheik Ahmed Yassin, Indyk says that Hamas will want to step up attacks to show it forced Israel out of Gaza, and Israel “will be stepping up [its] attacks to show that in fact, Hamas was defeated and this withdrawal was not in the face of terrorism.”
Of Sharon, Indyk says: “It was Sharon who was in charge of evacuating the settlements in the Sinai in 1982. He’s the only political leader who has evacuated settlements in the past, and I believe he is the only political leader in Israel who can do it in the future.”
Indyk, the director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, was interviewed by Bernard Gwertzman, consulting editor for cfr.org, on March 19, 2004.
What’s going on in terms of Israeli-Palestinian relations, particularly in light of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s announced plan for a unilateral Israel withdrawal from most settlements in the Gaza Strip and some in the West Bank?
There are two different dynamics at work on the Israeli and Palestinian sides. In Israel, as the terrorism wanes, you have an increasing impatience on the part of the Israeli public, [which is] demanding from its government a way out of this crisis. They want to see some kind of political horizon that provides a future for their children and some way out of the existing economic difficulties. At the same time, as they think about the future, they are becoming much less concerned about their regional environment and much more concerned about the demographic threat. That combination leads them to want to separate from the Palestinians.
Please explain the “demographic threat.”
The demographic threat is that probably by the end of this decade, because of differing birth rates, Arabs will outnumber Israeli Jews in the area that Israel controls between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
How many Jews and Arabs are we talking about?
The numbers would be about 6 million each. But by the end of the decade, if Israel retains the territories now in its control, Jews will cease to be a majority. It is that combination of demographics and the terrorist threat that is leading Israelis to demand of their government that they put up a fence and disengage from the Palestinian population.
I thought the Israelis wanted to negotiate for a Palestinian state. Why the rush to pull out?
Yes, most Israelis would support a Palestinian state. But they don’t see a partner on the Palestinian side to [negotiate] this deal. That’s why they are insisting that the government not wait, but move now. And Sharon and other contenders for the prime ministership, such as Ehud Olmert, [currently the deputy prime minister] recognize the shift in the public mood and are trying to respond to it. Sharon is bumping along in the low 30s in popularity polls. Some 57 percent of Israelis say he has no credibility; 53 percent believe he should resign. Sharon understands that he has to do something. So that’s what’s fueling the unilateral disengagement idea on the Israeli side.
Now on the Palestinian side, what you have is the slow-motion collapse of the Palestinian Authority (PA) which has ceased to function in the northern part of the West Bank and the southern part of Gaza. And the PA might well be one or two monthly payrolls away from ceasing to be relevant at all to the Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza. The Israeli desire to get out is combining with the Palestinian inability to have an effective authority that would fill the vacuum. So the big concern in Israel in moving ahead with a unilateral withdrawal is what will fill the vacuum: will it be a coalition of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and, perhaps, [PA leader] Yasir Arafat? That, in turn, is getting the attention of the Bush administration as it is forced to respond to Israeli unilateralism.
The Israelis, of course, wouldn’t want to do anything without the Bush administration’s endorsement, and I assume they would request funding for the plan as well.
They want payment in various forms. They don’t want to negotiate withdrawal with the Palestinians. They certainly don’t want to negotiate it with Arafat. So they are engaged in a negotiation with Washington to get Bush’s blessing. The most important payment that Sharon is looking for is not money. It is some kind of letter of assurance about what the U.S. view will be in terms of the territory that will remain under Israeli control after the unilateral disengagement takes place.
In other words, Sharon is basically trying to respond to the impatience of his people by giving up all of the settlements in Gaza, and holding on to 50 percent of the West Bank.
How many settlers would be pulled out of Gaza?
7,500. There are 17 settlements in Gaza [that would be evacuated under the Sharon plan].
Under the Clinton plan that was on the table in 2000, the Palestinians would have gotten back virtually all of the land that was outside Israel’s pre-1967 borders, right?
The Clinton parameters provided for [a Palestinian state in] 95 to 97 percent of the West Bank and all of Gaza, [as well as] an agreement on Jerusalem and an agreement on refugees. But that wasn’t the last plan on the table. The last plan was the road map.
That’s true. It left the final agreement open for negotiation, right?
The road map had a number of phases. In the first phase, the Palestinians were supposed to uproot the terrorist infrastructure. Israelis were supposed to stop settlement building and pull the army back. There was supposed to be a ceasefire. There was nothing about the evacuation of settlements. In the second phase, a Palestinian state with provisional borders was to be established. In the third phase, a final negotiation would take place.
There is a reason why I go into all this. The road map may be dead for all intents and purposes, but Sharon does not want to abandon it. This is because the idea of establishing provisional borders is his idea. What he is basically trying to get the United States to agree to in this process of unilateral disengagement is [for Israel] to give up Gaza, but to define the Palestinian state with provisional borders in the West Bank according to his own unilateral withdrawal. And essentially, he is focused on keeping 50 percent of the West Bank for a long-term interim arrangement. The Palestinian state with provisional borders would be created in the other 50 percent [of the West Bank], plus all of Gaza.
Under the Oslo process [a series of Israel-Palestinian negotiations that began in 1993] the Palestinians got control of 42 percent of the West Bank and 90 percent of the Palestinian population. The Sharon plan means withdrawing from another 8 percent of territory and evacuating some outlying settlements. That would provide a territorial contiguity for the Palestinians in 50 percent of the West Bank. Almost all of the Palestinians would be in that 50 percent.
But under this unilateral arrangement, the Palestinians wouldn’t get permanent statehood until they fulfilled their obligations in phase one of the road map, which is to say, the uprooting of the terrorist infrastructure. That’s what I think Sharon’s game plan is. He basically is looking for American assurances that we will accept such a withdrawal and will not press Israel to make any further withdrawals until and unless the Palestinians fulfill their commitments.
From what you have described, isn’t this a pretty good deal for the Palestinians?
I certainly don’t think the Palestinians see it that way. But certainly, in Gaza, the Palestinians will be very happy to have Israel withdraw and pull out of the settlements. The terrorist organizations see this as a great victory for the use of violence and terror. Palestinians more generally will be very happy to have the settlements gone, particularly those right in the middle of Gaza that make it impossible for them to travel freely between the north and south in Gaza. In the West Bank, they’ll be happy to have the Israeli army out and the checkpoints gone, and have those outlying settlements evacuated as well. But what they will be very concerned about is if the Israeli withdrawal constitutes the end of the process, rather than a provisional arrangement. They do not want to end up with all of Gaza and just 50 percent of the West Bank.
So if you were in the Bush White House, what kind of advice would you give the president?
First of all, for political reasons, when Sharon comes here [to meet with President Bush, no date has yet been set], the White House is going to have to bless the plan. That blessing is very important to Sharon. He needs it to show the Israeli people that he’s got a plan that is viable. It is only the American blessing that will be persuasive in Israel. Therefore President Bush has some leverage. And he should use that leverage to shape the Israeli urge to get out of Gaza and some of the West Bank in a way that can ensure that the bad guys— - Hamas and other terrorist organizations ---don’t take over and that the withdrawal can be used as a catalyst for subsequent Palestinian-Israeli negotiations.
Now that’s where the administration has to be concerned about what’s happening on the Palestinian side. The collapse of the PA means that we don’t have a viable partner to take over [in the areas] where Israel withdraws. So therefore, we are going to have to lead an international effort to reshape the Palestinian Authority in a way that makes it capable of taking control.
Is that possible?
Yes, it is possible, but it will require a kind of intervention that it is not at all clear the Bush administration is prepared to undertake. I suggested in the past a trusteeship where we would, in effect, take control of the territories Israel withdraws from. But we don’t have to be as bold as that. We could simply lead an international intervention that took control of the settlements, to ensure that we don’t have the image of Hamas fedayeen [literally, “men of sacrifice”] dancing on the roofs of the settlements, and would hold those areas in trust for the Palestinians until an election takes place in Gaza. Hamas would no longer have any justification for carrying on terrorist activities from Gaza since Israel would have evacuated completely from there. Therefore we would need to come in and oversee a process [through] which a new leadership [can] emerge, starting in Gaza first.
Could the United States actually do this, or is it in such bad odor in the Middle East these days that it wouldn’t be feasible?
It would have to be a U.S.-led effort. Why? Because the Israelis will only accept the United States. The United States is not in bad odor with the Palestinians when it comes to helping secure their rights. They have understood for some time that the United States is the only party that can deliver because of its relationship with Israel. Hamas, as a matter of fact, has never attacked Americans.
How many troops would you need?
If it is a matter of taking control of the evacuated settlements, I don’t think you need very many, so long as you were also engaged in an effort to restructure, retrain and re-equip Palestinian security forces in Gaza so they would take the lead role. That is provided for, by the way, in the first phase of the road map, and is an obligation the United States took on and in which the Egyptians are prepared to help us with. There are Palestinian security forces that we could work with.
With the Bush administration so involved in the war on terrorism, won’t the Israeli unilateral withdrawal be perceived as a victory for terrorism?
I think that the terrorists will have a very big stake in showing that it is a victory for terrorism. That is why we can expect, in advance of an Israeli withdrawal, that they will be stepping up their attacks to show the direct correlation. The Israelis, understanding this, will be stepping up their attacks to show that, in fact, Hamas was defeated and this withdrawal was not in the face of terrorism.
Is it definite that Sharon is coming here at the end of March? I have seen speculation in the Israeli press to that effect.
It is Israeli speculation. The White House has not set a date and the reason is that they are still trying to work out with the Israelis what the arrangements are going to be and what they are going to bless. They have two questions. One is, ’Who will fill the vacuum after the Israelis withdraw?’ The last thing Bush wants is a failed terrorist state in the Middle East. And the second question is, ’What will Israel do in the West Bank?’
Can Bush gain something politically with the other Arab states by blessing this Israeli withdrawal? Will the Arabs praise the withdrawal or just discount it and say it doesn’t mean anything?
Their position generally is to discount it. But when they see Israeli settlers being evacuated, and a right-wing government potentially coming down, and Labor joining the government, and the Israeli army pulling out of Gaza, it will be hard for the Arabs and for the general international community to say that this is a bad thing. They are predisposed to think that this is a trick or something, but I think the reality will be very different.
From my point of view, even the evacuation of one settlement is a very important and positive move in the context of a peace process, because there is only one man in my opinion who is capable of doing such things and that is Ariel Sharon. None of the previous prime ministers— [Yitzhak] Rabin, [Shimon] Peres, [Ehud] Barak, [Benjamin] Netanyahu— was willing to undertake the kind of political risks and costs involved in such a move.
It is like Nixon going to China in 1972. Or [Prime Minister Menachem] Begin and [Egyptian President Anwar] Sadat making peace in 1979, isn’t it?
It is quite similar to Begin because Begin gave up all the settlements in the Sinai as part of the 1979 peace treaty with Egypt in order to keep the West Bank. Sharon is giving up Gaza in order to keep 50 percent of the West Bank. And it was Sharon who was in charge of evacuating the settlements in the Sinai in 1982. He’s the only political leader who has evacuated settlements in the past, and I believe he is the only political leader in Israel who can do it in the future.
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