Six days in June of 1967 created the settlement movement.
Six days in August of 2005 threatened to exterminate it.
In the end, however, the disengagement from the Gaza Strip, fought tooth and nail every step of the way by settlers and tens of thousands of their supporters, may have actually saved the settlement enterprise as a whole.
In particular, the disengagement may be the factor which enshrines the core project of the settlement movement, the rooting of Jews in the West Bank.
There are a number of reasons for this. Here are 10:
1. Qassams and the case of Sderot
Soon after IDF troops, Israel police and Border Police expelled the thousands of settler families from the Gaza Strip, and after Israeli bulldozers crushed their homes to rubble, armed Palestinian groups moved in to use the rubble for Qassam rocket launch sites.
Among their targets: the Negev town of Sderot, home of Amir Peretz, one of Israel's strongest supporters of a Gaza withdrawal; the leftist kibbutzim near the Gaza Strip, traditionally among Israel's strongest supporters of the cause of Palestinian independence; and areas south of Ashkelon to which settlers were moved after the disengagement.
More than 500 Qassams have rocked Sderot alone since the disengagement, striking day care centers, medical clinics, schools, a library, and many private homes. "This has become a city which is impossible to live in," Sderot Mayor Eli Moyal said Monday, as the whole town prepared to go on strike in protest the daily attacks.
Consequences:
-- A sense in Israel that the Palestinians, including the government which yearns for international recognition and legitimacy, cannot, or are unwilling to, curb attacks on innocent civilian populations within the Green Line.
-- Reinforcement of the Israeli right's argument that withdrawing from territory aids neither peace nor security, only whetting the Palestinians' appetite for more withdrawals.
Result:
A precipitous drop in Israeli public support for a further withdrawal in the West Bank.
2. White House endorsement of settlement blocs
In April, 2004, then-prime minister Ariel Sharon, in essence trading away Gaza for a landmark new U.S. policy on West Bank settlements, won President George Bush's public ratification of the concept that settlement blocs near the Green Line would eventually become part of the sovereign state of Israel.
Consequence:
Palestinians immediately saw what settlers and the Greater Israel hard right were less anxious to recognize: A sea change in U.S. foreign policy.
Result:
For the first time, an American president recognized settlement blocs as "new realities on the ground" and major Israeli population centers, declaring it unrealistic to expect Israel to cede them in a future peace deal.
3. The Hamas election victory
There is every reason to believe that the disengagement helped Hamas, not long ago the prime engine of Palestinian terrorism, and a body formally opposed to the existence of the state of Israel, win its landslide Palestinian Authority election victory in January.
Result:
That fact alone could deter many Israelis from backing a major pullout in the West Bank, despite relative higher Palestinian support for Fatah in the area.
4. Arms smuggling Last week, Palestinian Foreign Minister Mahmoud al-Zahar of Hamas made headlines by returning from a diplomatic swing through Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei, China, Pakistan, Iran and Egypt, with a suitcase containing $20 million in cash.
Although al-Zahar's cargo was above ground and relatively above board, the main traffic into the Strip remains underground, consisting of arms smuggling on an unprecedented scale.
According to the Shin Bet, since the IDF pulled its forces out of the Strip last September 12, among the weaponry smuggled into Gaza through tunnels dug from the Egyptian half of Rafah into the Palestinian half, were 11 tons of TNT, 3 million rifle bullets, some 10,000 rifles, 1,600 guns, 65 rocket propelled greade launchers (RPGs), 430 RPG shells, and an unspecified number of shoulder-fired missiles.
Result:
Further reluctance on the part of Israelis of all stripes to withdraw from more of the West Bank, especially eastern areas which may allow access to smuggling over the Jordan River from Jordan.
5. The costs and hardships of settler resettlement
Some 10 months after the disengagement, Israel has proven itself unable to see to the employment and housing needs of many of the some 1,700 settler families taken out of Gaza.
Experts have also found difficulty in addressing the problems of a sizable number of the evacuated youths, who shown signs of depression and other disorders.
Moreover, the disruption of anti-disengagement protests, coupled with the enormous financial and human cost, the deployment and training of tens of thousands of security forces, and the diversion of those personnel for evacuation operations, proved to be one of the largest non-war efforts in Israeli history.
Result:
There is growing concern within Israel that if moving 8,000 settlers in a concentrated area proved so costly and difficult to manage, the costs and hardships of moving tens of thousands would be more than the government, and the society, could bear.
5. Civil War I
The upheaval of the disengagement, the passionate, at times violent, protests, and the estrangement that many rightwing and religious Israelis felt from their government and their fellow citizens, sparked fears that Israeli society would itself come apart at the seams.
Result: A decided reluctance on the part of many Israelis to rip open the same wounds, and new ones as well.
6. Civil War II
When the last Israeli settler and soldier left the Strip, there were hopes among many Palestinians that a Gaza wholly governed by the Palestinian Authority would be a model for reconstruction, and stability.
But the power struggle between Hamas and Fatah spilled over in recent weeks into bloodshed, arson, and chaos, with a number of dead on both sides.
Result:
While some in Israel may reap some satisfaction from the sight of Hamas and Fatah gunmen targeting each other instead of Israelis, the anarchy in the Authority bodes poorly for expanding Palestinian sole rule in the West Bank, and little encourages Israelis to foster such a prospect.
7. The Islamic Jihad
The Islamic Jihad, unlike Hamas, Fatah, and other armed Palestinian groups, takes its marching orders from Iran, which is well-served by continuing terrorist attacks within Israel.
When most Palestinian groups, notably Hamas and the Fatah Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, declared a taadiya, or unilateral relative truce in attacks on Israelis, the Islamic Jihad vocally disassociated itself from the move.
The Jihad has since carried out uncounted Qassam firings against the Negev, and has repeatedly launched suicide bombings against Israeli cities.
Consequence:
Israelis have seen the Jihad carry out terror attacks largely unchecked by the Palestinian Authority, with Hamas elements said to be covertly aiding Jihad bombing and rocket cells.
Result:
There is less and less openness within the Israeli public to the concept of increasing the area in which the Jihad can work undisturbed.
8. Declining support for unilateralism
The fact that the disengagement in Gaza was, in essence, a return to Israel's pre-Six Day War border, allowed the members of the Quartet, Washington, Moscow, Europe and the United Nations, to freely support it, despite an explicit effort by Sharon to represent the move as unilateral ["Israel, acting on its own interests, is taking its future into its own hands"] and in no way a function of negotiations with the Palestinians.
The Quartet, nonetheless, along with such key mediators as Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, remain firmly committed to a return to Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, and have made it clear that they will not recognize the West Bank border which Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has indicated he intends to set unilaterally.
Result: Olmert cannot expect the international umbrella of support for his convergence plan, that Sharon garnered for the disengagement. In fact, he has been forced to back-peddle on his plans, after receiving pointedly lukewarm responses to the plan in London and elsewhere.
9. Hatred for Gaza
Prior to the disengagement, and for decades prior, Israelis, by and large, viewed Gaza as a foreign entity, a burden to be cast off, a trap, a stronghold for the Philistines, in short, not a part of the Land of Israel.
The West Bank is an entirely different story. Hebron, for all of the problems it poses, was the original capital of the children of Israel, and remains the second most sacred place in Judaism. Shechem (Nablus), Bethlehem, Beit El, Shilo, and many other areas have a strong biblical connection for many Israelis, even among the secular population.
Result:
The contrast between Gaza - over which even the settlement movement seemed to exhibit ambivalence - and the West Bank, which also borders on the most populated areas of the country, as well as its major international airport, lessens the desire of Israelis to cede Judea and Samaria land to the Palestinians.
10. Hippies in Orange
From the standpoint of Orthodox Judaism as a whole, perhaps the most significant legacy of the disengagement was the creation of a now-worldwide counterculture of young people for whom resistance to withdrawal has become a kind of religion in itself.
There is something extraterritorial about this movement which is all about the Land. There is something as fierce and fearless and reckless and righteous as adolescence itself.
It is clear that the young radicals in Orange will fight any and all withdrawal efforts, down to the last illegal private Wild West ranch "crime outpost."
Consequence:
Israelis have good reason to believe that if a further withdrawal is ordered, the protests may reach unprecedented proportions, with blockages of major highways and other actions just the beginning.
Result:
The prospect of mammoth protests is also likely to dampen grass-roots support for a withdrawal.
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