Interesting Twist

Asked why President Bush was pushing for the disengagement plan, former Israeli diplomat Yoram Ettinger replied, “When I visited Washington recently, I was told that President Bush was and is against this disengagement, but it was Sharon who pressured him. The tradition in Washington is that the administration does not second guess an Israeli prime minister. There was, therefore, no real deliberation on how this plan would affect U.S. interests in the region.”

One of the top officials in Israel’s Government Press Office told me four weeks ago that the disengagement plan is Sharon’s. He said Sharon had the plan at least a year before it was introduced on December 18, 2003.

Carolyn Glick of The Jerusalem Report wrote that according to the recently released book Boomerang — by two veteran, well-respected, left-wing Israeli journalists, Raviv Drucker of Channel Ten TV and Ofer Shelach of the newspaper Yediot Acharonot — provide an insider’s narrative account of how Sharon came to make the decision to withdraw from Gaza and Northern Samaria. Their findings are appalling.

Based on interviews with senior government and military officials, Drucker and Shelach report that Sharon’s decision in December 2003 to abandon his electoral platform, which opposed the unilateral transfer of land to the Palestinians and rejected out of hand the notion of expelling Israelis from their communities in the Gaza Strip or Judea and Samaria, stemmed from considerations that had absolutely nothing to do with Israel’s national security interests.

According to the two writers, Sharon’s basic impetus for adopting the radical left-wing plan that had been overwhelmingly rejected by voters in the January 2003 elections was his desire to avoid indictment for his role in corruption scandals for which he and his sons Gilad and Omri were under police investigation.

They write: “In private conversations, [Sharon] said he was convinced that [state attorney Edna] Arbel would try to bring about his indictment and his resignation from the premiership.” Sharon’s aides, first and foremost among them his personal attorney and chief of staff Dov Weisglass, told Sharon that to avert indictment, he had to take a bold initiative ‘to change the public agenda away from the media's focus on the investigation.’” And so, the disengagement plan was born.

Moreover, there was also enormous international pressure on Sharon after the April 30, 2003, delivery of the Quartet’s Road Map. There was the Aqaba, Jordan, conference on June 4, 2003, that was hosted by King Abdullah of Jordan, it was attended by President George Bush, Ariel Sharon and Mahmoud Abbas the Palestinian prime minister; there were Abbas and Sharon meetings at the White House on July 25 and July 29, respectively, and a summer of negotiations in reference to the Road Map.

Regardless of the reason, the disengagement effort will produce enormous consequences not only in Israel but throughout the world. The Sharon government and the U.S. have further legitimized the flawed peace process. No one stood up to the international community, and they will pay an even greater price going forward. The outcome? Only the God of Israel knows how this will play out in the days, months and years ahead.
 
Bill Koenig
Eyeviewreport