Israeli businesses also hurt as terror tunnels shut crossing point
By Rafael D. Frankel
While many of the Gush Katif farmers have yet to plant their crops in new soil, the great hope that the greenhouses they left in Gaza would provide a boon to the Palestinian economy is withering on its own vine.
The closure of the Karni goods crossing from Gaza to Israel for three weeks in January and now 10 days and counting in February has led to immense financial loss for the Palestinian farmers and the corporation which took over the greenhouses in August.
Additionally, the Israeli export firm which signed on to ship the Gaza-grown produce to Europe, the US, and other international markets, has also taken a financial hit from the closing.
According to Dr. Bassil Jabir, the CEO of the Palestinian Economic Development Company, which is overseeing the production and exports of the produce grown in the former Gush Katif greenhouses, his corporation has lost over $1 million due to the closures and is losing between $40,000 and $100,000 more each day the Karni crossing remains closed. "What we are seeing is a real catastrophe," Jabir said.
"There is also indirect loss because we haven't been harvesting every day.
Therefore the produce stays on the vine and the growth of the seedlings and stems are damaged," he said.
As part of the deal brokered by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in November, the Karni crossing was to remain open as much as possible to allow for Palestinian exports from Gaza, such as the greenhouse produce, to make it to the Israeli and international markets. Closing Karni was only to be ordered by Israel in the event of imminent security threats.
However a series of attempted attacks by Palestinian terrorists near the site and the discovery of what the IDF thinks may be terror tunnels filled with explosives underneath the terminal have prompted the long closures, the IDF said.
"It's one big disaster," said Avi Kadan, the managing director of Adafresh, the Israeli firm which signed on to ship the Gaza produce overseas. Both Kadan and Jabir were at a December meeting at Karni attended by representatives from the IDF, Palestinian Authority, and USAID, the overseas development agency of the US government, in which the relevant parties all agreed to do their best to keep the crossing open.
"I had promises. Everybody said they plan to cooperate and keep the border open and suddenly in January they closed the border for three weeks for security reasons. What can you do against security reasons? Nothing," Kadan said. Adafresh's direct losses as result of the closures are nearly $118,000, with indirect losses growing by the day, he said.
Before the closures hit, the Palestinians were able to ship around 1,000 tons of strawberries, hot peppers, tomatoes and cherry tomatoes out of Gaza to the Israeli and international markets, Jabir said. However that left at least 5,500 tones of fruits and vegetables from productive greenhouses stuck in Gaza.
In December, Jabir and Kadan estimated that the 3,200 dunam of greenhouses left over from the Gush Katif farmers could yield 30,000 tons of produce and generate $50 million in revenue for the Gaza economy and $14.5m. for Adafresh.
This being the first season of their partnership, both had modest expectations of breaking even on the deal, or turning a small profit. Now, Jabir said, the PEDC would lose money on the greenhouses this year while Adafresh, Kadan said, was hoping the harvest season ending in May could yet be salvaged.
Additionally, the PEDC had employed over 6,000 Palestinians to work in the greenhouses, though some who had worked for the Jewish farmers before the disengagement reported in December that their hours were reduced. Due to the closures, Jabir has slashed his work force to 3,500 and is planning further cuts of as many as 2,000 more jobs.
The Gush Katif greenhouses were purchased in August by a group of American philanthropists for $14m. and given to the Palestinians in a deal brokered by Quartet Envoy James Wolfensohn, the former World Bank president who donated $500,000 of his own money to the cause.
However, when the PEDC took control, less than half of the greenhouses were in working order, having been looted by Palestinians in the days following the IDF's withdrawal from Gaza or left in disrepair by the departing Gush Katif farmers.
The PEDC, a private company owned by the PA, spent an additional $14m. rehabilitating those greenhouses in preparation for their fist growing season under Palestinian control.
According to Kadan, the 305 tons of Palestinian produce he inspected and shipped to Europe was of high quality, "even after the first closure in January." Both he and Jabir refused to blame anyone in particular for the Karni closings.
"I am not in politics. I am an investor," Jabir said. "I am doing this business because I was told I would find a way to export my produce. I always knew there would be difficulties, but if we want to encourage economic development for the Palestinians, attract business, and get people jobs, then this is not the way things are done."
As an Israeli, Kadan said, he "trusts" that the authorities are acting in good faith. "If they tell me it's a security reason, I can't blame and I can't judge them," he said. "Things will get better, it's only a question of time."A US embassy official commenting on the matter said the United States "encourages all parties to work together to strike a proper balance between security concerns and economic opportunity and development."
©2006 The Jerusalem Post
Tuesday, February 28, 2006
Friday, February 24, 2006
A taxing dilemma
In its customs union with the PA, Israel holds vast economic leverage over Hamas. Is it time to use it? If the decision was made to unilaterally abdicate the Paris Protocols and break the customs union, the effect would likely be far-reaching across the Palestinian economy.
Analysis
By Rafael D. Frankel
Through five years of fighting, Israel has tried numerous tactics to prevent, punish and dissuade attacks on its citizens. Extensive ground-based operations, targeted killings from helicopters and jets, home demolitions, mass arrests, road blocks, checkpoints and other means have all been employed against the Palestinians.
The results are mixed. Terrorist attacks are much lower than they were at the height of the intifada, but, as The Jerusalem Post reported on Thursday, 14 suicide bombers were intercepted and arrested by the IDF and Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) in the past three weeks alone, indicating that the relative calm is not for lack of trying by Palestinian militants who have stepped up their operations in the wake of the Hamas victory at the polls.
In the varied success of these strategies, one common thread woven among them is their physical nature. (On only one occasion, when terror was at its height in 2002 and Arafat was caught red- handed smuggling in weapons on the Karine A, did Israel withhold funding for the Palestinian Authority.)
So while it is clear that physical measures have worked to prevent hundreds, if not thousands of terrorist attacks, the strategy has not managed to dissuade them with the same degree of effectiveness. And in the long-run, if the will remains to attack Israelis, casualties will inevitably follow.
But physical tactics, though clearly the preferred choice of the government to this point, are only one set of a vast array of tools which Israel has at its disposal to fight terror.
For some time, calls have been growing to employ not only non- violent, but entirely non-physical means against the Palestinians which could nonetheless prove exceedingly effective at dissuading terrorists from even attempting attacks. Now, with the Hamas ascendancy, those calls have translated into an indefinite cessation of transferring tax revenues to the PA and an examination by the government of other tactics which follow the same line.
Cutting off electricity to the Palestinians in Gaza after rockets are fired is one such idea. Closing off Israel to Palestinian workers is another. Both have been floated as possible counter-measures to terror for some time, the latter having been periodically used. But at a moment where Israel is walking a tight- rope in trying to maintain an international coalition against Hamas, those measures, branded by many in the West as a form of "collective punishment," could backfire.
Thus, attention is slowly turning to the long taken- for- granted economic relationship between Israel and the PA. This has more or less maintained the same shape since the 1994 Paris Protocols which, in essence, amalgamated the two into a single economic entity.
"We've always been reluctant to use the economic weapon in our struggle with the Palestinians. At least partly, we were apprehensive about what the Americans would say if we applied economic pressure," said Yakir Plefner, a former deputy governor of the Bank of Israel. "But we've been supplying the Palestinians the whole time with the electricity, the fuel and the fertilizer to make bombs. I don't think there's been anything like that in history. It's us who make it possible for the Palestinians to keep functioning militarily."
UNTIL NOW, the one aspect of the Paris Protocols which has made its way into the news is the revenue clearance mechanism, in which Israel collects the revenue for PA import and export duties, income taxes and value added taxes (commonly referred to in the United States as "sales tax"), and transfers that revenue to the PA on a monthly basis. It was the transfer of this revenue that the cabinet decided to halt Sunday.
But the Paris Protocols go much further in creating a customs union which envelopes Israel and the PA into a single trading body that allows goods to move between the two, tax free. The accord also harmonized nearly the entire tax structure of Israel and the PA and provided for goods originating in the PA (mostly produce) to be exported under the same conditions and in the same ships and airplanes used by Israeli goods.
However, according to David Brodet, who led the Israeli negotiating team in Paris, the accord is out of date.
The Paris Protocols, Brodet said, were brokered based on four assumptions: that relations between Israel and the PA would be peaceful; that there would be no physical barrier; that an Israeli presence would remain in all parts of the customs envelope; and that the accord would give way to a final economic status agreement by 1999.
Those assumptions have been replaced by terrorism and violence; a fence around Gaza and one being completed around the West Bank; a disengagement from Gaza, leaving no Israeli presence in the territory; and the unlikely prospect of reaching a final status agreement with Hamas.
The final factor, Hamas assuming power in the PA, has finally "brought Israel to consider unilaterally changing part of the Paris Protocol and that's part of the price [exacted on the Palestinians] for Hamas's stance," Brodet said. "We should be very moderate in giving all kinds of possibilities to the Palestinian people to continue to benefit from any trade regime with Israel. But of course, the level of economic relations will be fixed according to the political situation."
While withholding the tax revenue has put pressure on the Hamas- led PA, if the decision was made to unilaterally abdicate the Paris Protocols and break the customs union, the effect would likely be far-reaching across the Palestinian economy.
In the immediate term, it would mean a huge shortfall of funds generated by the PA through the tax revenue Israel collects for it. Though that money is currently being withheld, the assumption that it will be transferred at a later date allows the PA to borrow against it to finance its budget.
"But if we stop collecting indirect taxes for the PA, that's a big change. There's no way for the PA to collect them," said Avi Ben-Bassat, a professor of economics at the Hebrew University and the director general of the Finance Ministry under Ehud Barak. "They would have to build a new system [of tax collection] and that takes time, so meanwhile they are losing the money."
The second consequence for the Palestinians of breaking the customs union, and the one which would remain in the long-run, would be the taxation of every commodity that travels to and from them through Israel. In effect, aside from some agriculture products and a few low-end garments, everything Palestinians buy and sell would be significantly more expensive.
While taxing goods between Israel and the PA would also mean higher prices for Israelis on some items, the macroeconomic affect on Israel would be negligible. Israel's economy was worth an estimated $140 billion in 2005, half of which was in the hi-tech sector. The best estimates of economists (because of circumstances it is hard to measure) value the PA economy at only $3 to $4 billion. And whereas the vast majority of Israeli trade is conducted directly with the United States, Europe and other large economies, nearly everything which flows into and out of the PA comes from or is destined for Israel, or at the very least must pass through Israel.
"The connection between Israel and the PA economy as Israel sees it is marginal. The dependence of the Palestinians on the Israeli economy is absolute," said Ezra Sadan, a partner in Sadan & Leventhal consulting, a member of the government task force which prepared the Paris Protocols.
YET, FOR all its potential as an economic sanction against Hamas, breaking the customs envelope is not a step Israel can take immediately - at least not in totality.
Partitioning any economic union requires the ability to inspect everyone and everything passing between two entities, and subsequently physical separation. As long as the border between Israel and the West Bank remains porous (under the best-case scenario, the security fence will not be complete before the end of 2007), the customs envelope including the two must remain.
"You can't have a different customs scheme in Hebron or any other Palestinian city than you do in Jerusalem, because anyone will just take goods from the lower tax area to the higher one," Ben-Bassat said.
The same is not the case in Gaza, however, which not only has a fence surrounding it allowing for customs control, but also possesses a gateway to the outside world in the Rafah border- crossing with Egypt. Since the Palestinians would be able to import goods without using Israel as an intermediary, and Israel could easily inspect anything coming in from Gaza, Israel should be able to dissolve the customs envelope where Gaza is concerned.
Whether this is the right time to do so is another story. "Israel doesn't have much leverage, politically speaking, over Hamas. Maybe the only thing we have is the customs envelope," said Eran Shayshon, an analyst with the Re'ut think tank in Tel Aviv. "Israel could be playing its cards too soon."
Were Israel to dissolve the customs envelope around Gaza, Shayshon said, Hamas may decide to abdicate the Rafah agreement signed in November which limits Rafah to a pedestrian-only crossing. While the reality of known terrorists entering Gaza through Rafah has already created problems, the extent to which it erodes Israel's security pales in comparison to what Hamas could do with an Egyptian-linked goods-crossing.
Under those circumstances, acting as the PA, Hamas may seek to import weapons far more potent than the rifles and crude rockets currently finding their way through the border. The arrival of "strategic weapons" - such as shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles - into Gaza, Shayshon said, could force Israel "to reconsider its national security conception, which is currently based on the premise that the PA is demilitarized."
Moreover, despite the temptation to enact punitive measures on Hamas, Israel should remember that it is the stronger player and should not rush into any hasty decisions, said Jonathan Lipow, the chief economist of Forum FIE, who also served as a consultant in the Office of the Economic Adviser to the Defense Ministry.
"What's missing from the public forum is: What are we trying to achieve? Once we decide that, it's very easy to do," Lipow said. "Jettisoning the whole agreement is a decision we might want to take, but it's not clear why we should do it now instead of four years ago. What Hamas says doesn't matter as much as what Hamas does. Under the circumstances, I would say let them push the issue first."
©2006 The Jerusalem Post
Analysis
By Rafael D. Frankel
Through five years of fighting, Israel has tried numerous tactics to prevent, punish and dissuade attacks on its citizens. Extensive ground-based operations, targeted killings from helicopters and jets, home demolitions, mass arrests, road blocks, checkpoints and other means have all been employed against the Palestinians.
The results are mixed. Terrorist attacks are much lower than they were at the height of the intifada, but, as The Jerusalem Post reported on Thursday, 14 suicide bombers were intercepted and arrested by the IDF and Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) in the past three weeks alone, indicating that the relative calm is not for lack of trying by Palestinian militants who have stepped up their operations in the wake of the Hamas victory at the polls.
In the varied success of these strategies, one common thread woven among them is their physical nature. (On only one occasion, when terror was at its height in 2002 and Arafat was caught red- handed smuggling in weapons on the Karine A, did Israel withhold funding for the Palestinian Authority.)
So while it is clear that physical measures have worked to prevent hundreds, if not thousands of terrorist attacks, the strategy has not managed to dissuade them with the same degree of effectiveness. And in the long-run, if the will remains to attack Israelis, casualties will inevitably follow.
But physical tactics, though clearly the preferred choice of the government to this point, are only one set of a vast array of tools which Israel has at its disposal to fight terror.
For some time, calls have been growing to employ not only non- violent, but entirely non-physical means against the Palestinians which could nonetheless prove exceedingly effective at dissuading terrorists from even attempting attacks. Now, with the Hamas ascendancy, those calls have translated into an indefinite cessation of transferring tax revenues to the PA and an examination by the government of other tactics which follow the same line.
Cutting off electricity to the Palestinians in Gaza after rockets are fired is one such idea. Closing off Israel to Palestinian workers is another. Both have been floated as possible counter-measures to terror for some time, the latter having been periodically used. But at a moment where Israel is walking a tight- rope in trying to maintain an international coalition against Hamas, those measures, branded by many in the West as a form of "collective punishment," could backfire.
Thus, attention is slowly turning to the long taken- for- granted economic relationship between Israel and the PA. This has more or less maintained the same shape since the 1994 Paris Protocols which, in essence, amalgamated the two into a single economic entity.
"We've always been reluctant to use the economic weapon in our struggle with the Palestinians. At least partly, we were apprehensive about what the Americans would say if we applied economic pressure," said Yakir Plefner, a former deputy governor of the Bank of Israel. "But we've been supplying the Palestinians the whole time with the electricity, the fuel and the fertilizer to make bombs. I don't think there's been anything like that in history. It's us who make it possible for the Palestinians to keep functioning militarily."
UNTIL NOW, the one aspect of the Paris Protocols which has made its way into the news is the revenue clearance mechanism, in which Israel collects the revenue for PA import and export duties, income taxes and value added taxes (commonly referred to in the United States as "sales tax"), and transfers that revenue to the PA on a monthly basis. It was the transfer of this revenue that the cabinet decided to halt Sunday.
But the Paris Protocols go much further in creating a customs union which envelopes Israel and the PA into a single trading body that allows goods to move between the two, tax free. The accord also harmonized nearly the entire tax structure of Israel and the PA and provided for goods originating in the PA (mostly produce) to be exported under the same conditions and in the same ships and airplanes used by Israeli goods.
However, according to David Brodet, who led the Israeli negotiating team in Paris, the accord is out of date.
The Paris Protocols, Brodet said, were brokered based on four assumptions: that relations between Israel and the PA would be peaceful; that there would be no physical barrier; that an Israeli presence would remain in all parts of the customs envelope; and that the accord would give way to a final economic status agreement by 1999.
Those assumptions have been replaced by terrorism and violence; a fence around Gaza and one being completed around the West Bank; a disengagement from Gaza, leaving no Israeli presence in the territory; and the unlikely prospect of reaching a final status agreement with Hamas.
The final factor, Hamas assuming power in the PA, has finally "brought Israel to consider unilaterally changing part of the Paris Protocol and that's part of the price [exacted on the Palestinians] for Hamas's stance," Brodet said. "We should be very moderate in giving all kinds of possibilities to the Palestinian people to continue to benefit from any trade regime with Israel. But of course, the level of economic relations will be fixed according to the political situation."
While withholding the tax revenue has put pressure on the Hamas- led PA, if the decision was made to unilaterally abdicate the Paris Protocols and break the customs union, the effect would likely be far-reaching across the Palestinian economy.
In the immediate term, it would mean a huge shortfall of funds generated by the PA through the tax revenue Israel collects for it. Though that money is currently being withheld, the assumption that it will be transferred at a later date allows the PA to borrow against it to finance its budget.
"But if we stop collecting indirect taxes for the PA, that's a big change. There's no way for the PA to collect them," said Avi Ben-Bassat, a professor of economics at the Hebrew University and the director general of the Finance Ministry under Ehud Barak. "They would have to build a new system [of tax collection] and that takes time, so meanwhile they are losing the money."
The second consequence for the Palestinians of breaking the customs union, and the one which would remain in the long-run, would be the taxation of every commodity that travels to and from them through Israel. In effect, aside from some agriculture products and a few low-end garments, everything Palestinians buy and sell would be significantly more expensive.
While taxing goods between Israel and the PA would also mean higher prices for Israelis on some items, the macroeconomic affect on Israel would be negligible. Israel's economy was worth an estimated $140 billion in 2005, half of which was in the hi-tech sector. The best estimates of economists (because of circumstances it is hard to measure) value the PA economy at only $3 to $4 billion. And whereas the vast majority of Israeli trade is conducted directly with the United States, Europe and other large economies, nearly everything which flows into and out of the PA comes from or is destined for Israel, or at the very least must pass through Israel.
"The connection between Israel and the PA economy as Israel sees it is marginal. The dependence of the Palestinians on the Israeli economy is absolute," said Ezra Sadan, a partner in Sadan & Leventhal consulting, a member of the government task force which prepared the Paris Protocols.
YET, FOR all its potential as an economic sanction against Hamas, breaking the customs envelope is not a step Israel can take immediately - at least not in totality.
Partitioning any economic union requires the ability to inspect everyone and everything passing between two entities, and subsequently physical separation. As long as the border between Israel and the West Bank remains porous (under the best-case scenario, the security fence will not be complete before the end of 2007), the customs envelope including the two must remain.
"You can't have a different customs scheme in Hebron or any other Palestinian city than you do in Jerusalem, because anyone will just take goods from the lower tax area to the higher one," Ben-Bassat said.
The same is not the case in Gaza, however, which not only has a fence surrounding it allowing for customs control, but also possesses a gateway to the outside world in the Rafah border- crossing with Egypt. Since the Palestinians would be able to import goods without using Israel as an intermediary, and Israel could easily inspect anything coming in from Gaza, Israel should be able to dissolve the customs envelope where Gaza is concerned.
Whether this is the right time to do so is another story. "Israel doesn't have much leverage, politically speaking, over Hamas. Maybe the only thing we have is the customs envelope," said Eran Shayshon, an analyst with the Re'ut think tank in Tel Aviv. "Israel could be playing its cards too soon."
Were Israel to dissolve the customs envelope around Gaza, Shayshon said, Hamas may decide to abdicate the Rafah agreement signed in November which limits Rafah to a pedestrian-only crossing. While the reality of known terrorists entering Gaza through Rafah has already created problems, the extent to which it erodes Israel's security pales in comparison to what Hamas could do with an Egyptian-linked goods-crossing.
Under those circumstances, acting as the PA, Hamas may seek to import weapons far more potent than the rifles and crude rockets currently finding their way through the border. The arrival of "strategic weapons" - such as shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles - into Gaza, Shayshon said, could force Israel "to reconsider its national security conception, which is currently based on the premise that the PA is demilitarized."
Moreover, despite the temptation to enact punitive measures on Hamas, Israel should remember that it is the stronger player and should not rush into any hasty decisions, said Jonathan Lipow, the chief economist of Forum FIE, who also served as a consultant in the Office of the Economic Adviser to the Defense Ministry.
"What's missing from the public forum is: What are we trying to achieve? Once we decide that, it's very easy to do," Lipow said. "Jettisoning the whole agreement is a decision we might want to take, but it's not clear why we should do it now instead of four years ago. What Hamas says doesn't matter as much as what Hamas does. Under the circumstances, I would say let them push the issue first."
©2006 The Jerusalem Post
Friday, February 17, 2006
Has unilateralism run its course?
Even its architects couldn't foresee the prime minister's stroke, the Hamas victory or escalation on the Iranian front. Six months after disengagement, support for the strategy is sliding. While Sharon's health problems deprived the unilateral movement of its leader, his condition carries no weight in evaluating unilateralism as a political tool.
Analysis
By Rafael D. Frankel
Six months ago, the great experiment of unilateralism began. Israel had tried the path of the Left by negotiating for a comprehensive peace agreement. It had tried the path of the Right by attempting to battle the Palestinians into submission. Neither worked, and what emerged was a consensus among a solid majority of Israelis that something in between, which did not depend on the other side, was the only pragmatic solution which remained.
That was the beauty of this new path, the supporters of unilateralism said.
In the Mideast, a region often euphemistically referred to as "turbulent," the unilateral approach would still apply regardless of the outside factors thrown at it. But even the architects of this strategy probably could not foresee what lay around the bend.
In the last six months, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon exited the government stage, Hamas entered it, and the Iranians resumed uranium enrichment, as their president went on weekly anti-Israel and anti-Semitic diatribes that roused even the Europeans out of their comfortable complacency.
While Sharon's health problems deprived the unilateral movement of its leader, his condition carries no weight in evaluating unilateralism as a political tool. Hamas's election victory, on the other hand, and the terror group's ties to Iran, are a different story. With the right wing banging the lecterns daily, saying "we told you so," in regard to appeasing terrorists with land concessions, the unilateralists are taking a closer look at their philosophy.
"It's a moment where those of us who supported unilateralism need to pause and ask ourselves" whether continuing on this course is the correct step forward, said Yossi Klein Halevy, a senior fellow at the Shalem Center. "The rise of Hamas has made [further] unilateral withdrawal even more complicated. On the one hand, the logic of unilateralism, that there is no partner for peace, has been confirmed, but so have the security warnings of the opponents of unilateralism. We're not gong to be withdrawing from the West Bank and leaving a void behind. We're going to be withdrawing and bringing Iran up to our borders."
When the last tank rolled out of Gaza at 7:02 a.m. on September 12, polls showed that 59 percent of Israelis supported disengagement, whereas only 34% said it was wrong. Those numbers are in sharp contrast with the poll released Monday showing that 50% of Israelis categorically oppose a unilateral withdrawal from the West Bank and another 18% oppose it unless it produces conditions for negotiating peace with the Palestinian Authority.
The prospect of an Iranian-allied Hamas army sitting within Katyusha range of all the major Israeli population centers, and shoulder rocket firing range of airplanes landing at Ben Gurion is a major reason for the precipitous fall in support for unilateral disengagements. But there are many other factors.
TO BEGIN with, the West Bank was never viewed in the same light as Gaza by many Israelis. For years, a large segment of the country supported leaving the tiny coastal strip for demographic reasons, since only 8,000 Jews lived among 1.3 million Arabs. This sector also sought to stem what they considered to be the hemorrhaging of resources that providing security for the settlers there drained in terms of both money and blood. Moreover, Gaza was not the crucial security corridor that the West Bank is, nor were its sand dunes once home to the tribes of Israel, as were the hills and gullies of Judea and Samaria.
For those reasons alone, a unilateral withdrawal from the West Bank would never have garnered the support of as many people as did the Gaza disengagement. But there are many non-ideologically driven Israelis who have also reconsidered their thinking on unilateralism based on what has happened since, said Abraham Diskin, a professor of political science at The Hebrew University.
"What we expected as a result of the evacuation didn't happen," Diskin said. "We still have daily missile attacks, and second is the misery of those we evacuated. We were promised by the government that everything was arranged [for the Gaza evacuees] and it definitely doesn't seem like these people are about to be settled in the very near future."
While both of these aspects are clear failures, unilateralists argue that the blame lies not with the philosophy of unilateralism, but with the performance of the government in implementing it. Where the Gaza settlers are concerned, the failure is obvious: Half a year after the evacuation, as The Jerusalem Post reported Wednesday, around 30% of the evacuees are still without temporary housing. This is a practical failure, though, not a philosophical one.
In terms of the rocket attacks, both Diskin and Halevy said, the mistake was not necessarily failing to anticipate them, or failing to stop them, but choosing not to come clean with the Israeli public prior to disengagement about their likely continuation. While most unilateralists who thought disengagement through expected the kassams to continue falling, and supported the withdrawal anyway, many Israelis were led to believe by the government, either directly or indirectly, that leaving Gaza meant quiet would necessarily follow.
With that dream failing to materialize, and the election of Hamas shattering any illusions of peace that lingered after the bloody years of the second intifada, unilateralists find themselves in a difficult position.
THOUGH DISENGAGEMENT absolved Israel of all responsibility for Gaza in the eyes of the international community, and supposedly staved off a demographic disaster for two or three decades, it also played a part in bringing an organization committed to Israel's destruction into power.
That dual nature is a characteristic of unilateralism, said Eran Shayshon, an analyst with the Re'ut think-tank in Tel Aviv. "Unilateralism was adopted as an Israeli strategy due to the analysis that there is no partner for peace, and that hasn't changed," Shayshon said. "But it's a paradox because it also creates an entity that is not a partner."
However, the true unilateralists don't see it that way. True, they say, disengagement may have led in some way to Hamas's electoral victory, but the partner for peace was already long absent.
"The only difference between Hamas and Fatah is Hamas won't allow Israelis to cheat themselves because Hamas is less courteous," said Dan Schueftan, who pioneered the unilateralist approach with his 1999 book Disengagement. "Hamas is a repulsive, anti-Semitic, totalitarian group. The previous Palestinian administration was not terribly different, but they at least tried to pretend."
Schueftan acknowledges that getting Israelis on board for another round of unilateral withdrawal was complicated by Hamas's electoral victory since it is now clear that disengaging will not turn the Palestinians into friends.
Nevertheless, the unilateral approach is still Israel's best option, he said, since the two underlying factors have not changed since the Hamas election: There is no partner for peace, and Israel cannot maintain control over all of the West Bank if it wants to remain a Jewish democracy.
"Israelis realize that in the immediate sense we may not have instant benefits," said Schueftan, who is also the deputy director of Haifa University's National Security Studies Center. "But most Israelis are right to be convinced that the long-term benefits of disengagement are so enormous, and the long-term cost of not pursuing it would be so enormous, that it is the only course of action."
Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert appears to agree with Schueftan. In recent interviews and speeches, he made clear that, under his leadership, Israel will disengage from the Palestinian population and that the highest task of the next Knesset will be to set the permanent borders of the state. He even went so far as to outline in general terms what those borders will include.
Given the current resistance by Hamas to recognize Israel's right to exist, Olmert is not so subtly hinting that Israeli territorial moves in the near future will be determined by Israel alone.
Nevertheless, the Hamas victory has altered the course unilateralists are seeking to navigate, even if it has not knocked the wind out of their sails.
The original model of unilateralism - the Gaza disengagement - was based on total withdrawal. It was a calculated risk from which unilateralists said two important conclusions can be drawn. The first, said Brig.- Gen. (Res.) Shalom Harari, a Palestinian expert at the Institute for Counter Terrorism in Herzliya, is that Israel has finally shown the world that the Palestinians' dire state of affairs is of their own making, and not the result of occupation.
"The laboratory test in Gaza has failed," said Harari, who predicted before the Palestinian elections that the polls indicating a Fatah victory should not be trusted. "They've had enough time. If you could give me success in one level at least, OK. But I look at their management, their security forces, their economy - you can't have a democracy where every party has its own army."
In fact, Harari said, Gaza has gotten so bad that it is "headed toward a fiery crash," the ensuing chaos of which will mean more attacks against Israel. One day in the not-too-distant future, he said, Israel would be forced to conduct ground operations in the territory for limited amounts of time.
Assuming a similar reality would befall the West Bank after Israeli settlers leave there, unilateralists say one difference in the next disengagement would be the retention of some military installations in the vacated territory to allow the army to operate against terrorists (or Hamas- controlled PA security forces) as it sees fit.
The second major lesson learned from the Gaza withdrawal is the danger of allowing Palestinians unfettered access to the outside world. Though many security analysts warned against it, Sharon felt that to completely absolve Israel of responsibility over Gaza, the Palestinians there needed to be able to control at least one border. The result has been a 300% increase in arms smuggling, according to Shin Bet Chief Yuval Diskin.
"If we don't have a partner for peace, the main goal is to make sure the PA is demilitarized, which means we must control international crossing points," said Tafnit party chief Maj.-Gen. (Res.) Uzi Dayan. For all intents and purposes, that requires retaining the Jordan Valley, a move the former national security adviser to Ehud Barak and Sharon favors since the area has very few Palestinians and would therefore not present a demographic problem.
The retention of the Jordan Valley and military bases in vacated territory thus represent an adapted model of disengagement that unilateralists are coalescing around after learning the lessons of Gaza. And despite the polls which say Israelis are mostly against further unilateral disengagement, surveys also indicate the party which most represents the unilateralist ethos - Kadima - will run away with the elections.
Whether unilateralism eventually triumphs where the West Bank is concerned will probably not be known for some years. But even its supporters are hoping that it not gain too much stature - that Israelis not cling to it in the face of possible future evidence which suggests its time has run its course.
"One of the appealing aspects of unilateralism was that it represented flexible thinking," Halevy said. "I'm weary of unilateralism becoming a new dogma in the same way that Left and Right became dogmas and ignored reality and tried to substitute ideology for realistic thinking. If something has changed on the ground, we need to take that into account."
©2006 The Jerusalem Post
Analysis
By Rafael D. Frankel
Six months ago, the great experiment of unilateralism began. Israel had tried the path of the Left by negotiating for a comprehensive peace agreement. It had tried the path of the Right by attempting to battle the Palestinians into submission. Neither worked, and what emerged was a consensus among a solid majority of Israelis that something in between, which did not depend on the other side, was the only pragmatic solution which remained.
That was the beauty of this new path, the supporters of unilateralism said.
In the Mideast, a region often euphemistically referred to as "turbulent," the unilateral approach would still apply regardless of the outside factors thrown at it. But even the architects of this strategy probably could not foresee what lay around the bend.
In the last six months, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon exited the government stage, Hamas entered it, and the Iranians resumed uranium enrichment, as their president went on weekly anti-Israel and anti-Semitic diatribes that roused even the Europeans out of their comfortable complacency.
While Sharon's health problems deprived the unilateral movement of its leader, his condition carries no weight in evaluating unilateralism as a political tool. Hamas's election victory, on the other hand, and the terror group's ties to Iran, are a different story. With the right wing banging the lecterns daily, saying "we told you so," in regard to appeasing terrorists with land concessions, the unilateralists are taking a closer look at their philosophy.
"It's a moment where those of us who supported unilateralism need to pause and ask ourselves" whether continuing on this course is the correct step forward, said Yossi Klein Halevy, a senior fellow at the Shalem Center. "The rise of Hamas has made [further] unilateral withdrawal even more complicated. On the one hand, the logic of unilateralism, that there is no partner for peace, has been confirmed, but so have the security warnings of the opponents of unilateralism. We're not gong to be withdrawing from the West Bank and leaving a void behind. We're going to be withdrawing and bringing Iran up to our borders."
When the last tank rolled out of Gaza at 7:02 a.m. on September 12, polls showed that 59 percent of Israelis supported disengagement, whereas only 34% said it was wrong. Those numbers are in sharp contrast with the poll released Monday showing that 50% of Israelis categorically oppose a unilateral withdrawal from the West Bank and another 18% oppose it unless it produces conditions for negotiating peace with the Palestinian Authority.
The prospect of an Iranian-allied Hamas army sitting within Katyusha range of all the major Israeli population centers, and shoulder rocket firing range of airplanes landing at Ben Gurion is a major reason for the precipitous fall in support for unilateral disengagements. But there are many other factors.
TO BEGIN with, the West Bank was never viewed in the same light as Gaza by many Israelis. For years, a large segment of the country supported leaving the tiny coastal strip for demographic reasons, since only 8,000 Jews lived among 1.3 million Arabs. This sector also sought to stem what they considered to be the hemorrhaging of resources that providing security for the settlers there drained in terms of both money and blood. Moreover, Gaza was not the crucial security corridor that the West Bank is, nor were its sand dunes once home to the tribes of Israel, as were the hills and gullies of Judea and Samaria.
For those reasons alone, a unilateral withdrawal from the West Bank would never have garnered the support of as many people as did the Gaza disengagement. But there are many non-ideologically driven Israelis who have also reconsidered their thinking on unilateralism based on what has happened since, said Abraham Diskin, a professor of political science at The Hebrew University.
"What we expected as a result of the evacuation didn't happen," Diskin said. "We still have daily missile attacks, and second is the misery of those we evacuated. We were promised by the government that everything was arranged [for the Gaza evacuees] and it definitely doesn't seem like these people are about to be settled in the very near future."
While both of these aspects are clear failures, unilateralists argue that the blame lies not with the philosophy of unilateralism, but with the performance of the government in implementing it. Where the Gaza settlers are concerned, the failure is obvious: Half a year after the evacuation, as The Jerusalem Post reported Wednesday, around 30% of the evacuees are still without temporary housing. This is a practical failure, though, not a philosophical one.
In terms of the rocket attacks, both Diskin and Halevy said, the mistake was not necessarily failing to anticipate them, or failing to stop them, but choosing not to come clean with the Israeli public prior to disengagement about their likely continuation. While most unilateralists who thought disengagement through expected the kassams to continue falling, and supported the withdrawal anyway, many Israelis were led to believe by the government, either directly or indirectly, that leaving Gaza meant quiet would necessarily follow.
With that dream failing to materialize, and the election of Hamas shattering any illusions of peace that lingered after the bloody years of the second intifada, unilateralists find themselves in a difficult position.
THOUGH DISENGAGEMENT absolved Israel of all responsibility for Gaza in the eyes of the international community, and supposedly staved off a demographic disaster for two or three decades, it also played a part in bringing an organization committed to Israel's destruction into power.
That dual nature is a characteristic of unilateralism, said Eran Shayshon, an analyst with the Re'ut think-tank in Tel Aviv. "Unilateralism was adopted as an Israeli strategy due to the analysis that there is no partner for peace, and that hasn't changed," Shayshon said. "But it's a paradox because it also creates an entity that is not a partner."
However, the true unilateralists don't see it that way. True, they say, disengagement may have led in some way to Hamas's electoral victory, but the partner for peace was already long absent.
"The only difference between Hamas and Fatah is Hamas won't allow Israelis to cheat themselves because Hamas is less courteous," said Dan Schueftan, who pioneered the unilateralist approach with his 1999 book Disengagement. "Hamas is a repulsive, anti-Semitic, totalitarian group. The previous Palestinian administration was not terribly different, but they at least tried to pretend."
Schueftan acknowledges that getting Israelis on board for another round of unilateral withdrawal was complicated by Hamas's electoral victory since it is now clear that disengaging will not turn the Palestinians into friends.
Nevertheless, the unilateral approach is still Israel's best option, he said, since the two underlying factors have not changed since the Hamas election: There is no partner for peace, and Israel cannot maintain control over all of the West Bank if it wants to remain a Jewish democracy.
"Israelis realize that in the immediate sense we may not have instant benefits," said Schueftan, who is also the deputy director of Haifa University's National Security Studies Center. "But most Israelis are right to be convinced that the long-term benefits of disengagement are so enormous, and the long-term cost of not pursuing it would be so enormous, that it is the only course of action."
Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert appears to agree with Schueftan. In recent interviews and speeches, he made clear that, under his leadership, Israel will disengage from the Palestinian population and that the highest task of the next Knesset will be to set the permanent borders of the state. He even went so far as to outline in general terms what those borders will include.
Given the current resistance by Hamas to recognize Israel's right to exist, Olmert is not so subtly hinting that Israeli territorial moves in the near future will be determined by Israel alone.
Nevertheless, the Hamas victory has altered the course unilateralists are seeking to navigate, even if it has not knocked the wind out of their sails.
The original model of unilateralism - the Gaza disengagement - was based on total withdrawal. It was a calculated risk from which unilateralists said two important conclusions can be drawn. The first, said Brig.- Gen. (Res.) Shalom Harari, a Palestinian expert at the Institute for Counter Terrorism in Herzliya, is that Israel has finally shown the world that the Palestinians' dire state of affairs is of their own making, and not the result of occupation.
"The laboratory test in Gaza has failed," said Harari, who predicted before the Palestinian elections that the polls indicating a Fatah victory should not be trusted. "They've had enough time. If you could give me success in one level at least, OK. But I look at their management, their security forces, their economy - you can't have a democracy where every party has its own army."
In fact, Harari said, Gaza has gotten so bad that it is "headed toward a fiery crash," the ensuing chaos of which will mean more attacks against Israel. One day in the not-too-distant future, he said, Israel would be forced to conduct ground operations in the territory for limited amounts of time.
Assuming a similar reality would befall the West Bank after Israeli settlers leave there, unilateralists say one difference in the next disengagement would be the retention of some military installations in the vacated territory to allow the army to operate against terrorists (or Hamas- controlled PA security forces) as it sees fit.
The second major lesson learned from the Gaza withdrawal is the danger of allowing Palestinians unfettered access to the outside world. Though many security analysts warned against it, Sharon felt that to completely absolve Israel of responsibility over Gaza, the Palestinians there needed to be able to control at least one border. The result has been a 300% increase in arms smuggling, according to Shin Bet Chief Yuval Diskin.
"If we don't have a partner for peace, the main goal is to make sure the PA is demilitarized, which means we must control international crossing points," said Tafnit party chief Maj.-Gen. (Res.) Uzi Dayan. For all intents and purposes, that requires retaining the Jordan Valley, a move the former national security adviser to Ehud Barak and Sharon favors since the area has very few Palestinians and would therefore not present a demographic problem.
The retention of the Jordan Valley and military bases in vacated territory thus represent an adapted model of disengagement that unilateralists are coalescing around after learning the lessons of Gaza. And despite the polls which say Israelis are mostly against further unilateral disengagement, surveys also indicate the party which most represents the unilateralist ethos - Kadima - will run away with the elections.
Whether unilateralism eventually triumphs where the West Bank is concerned will probably not be known for some years. But even its supporters are hoping that it not gain too much stature - that Israelis not cling to it in the face of possible future evidence which suggests its time has run its course.
"One of the appealing aspects of unilateralism was that it represented flexible thinking," Halevy said. "I'm weary of unilateralism becoming a new dogma in the same way that Left and Right became dogmas and ignored reality and tried to substitute ideology for realistic thinking. If something has changed on the ground, we need to take that into account."
©2006 The Jerusalem Post
Tuesday, February 14, 2006
Planting trees among the ghosts
JOURNAL
By Rafael D. Frankel
KISSUFIM - Looking over the rolling farm land to the west, Yaffa Dahan took a deep breath. "Over those hills, that's it," she pointed, before falling silent. Half a minute later, she continued. "It's so hard to be so close, because really, we're so far away."
Like nearly everyone else at this Tu Bishvat tree- planting ceremony, Dahan, a mother of four, used to live over those hills, in Gaza. But seeking to bridge that distance - spiritually if not physically - some 2,000 Gaza evacuees gathered next to Kibbutz Kissufim Monday, just a few kilometers from the Kissufim Checkpoint that once led to their homes, to plant trees in honor of Tu Bishvat.
So on a cool day, when the sun chose not to show itself, a ridge next to the kibbutz nevertheless glowed orange. Orange ribbons were tied to heads, dogs and belt loops. Orange shirts, dusted off from six months ago, were back in style for an afternoon. Even the food set out for the crowd - oranges - made a statement: That this was "holy ground," as many here called it, and their bond with it would not be broken.
"We came here today to continue our connection to this land, because this land is our eternal connection to the land of Israel," Kadosh Gabi, the rabbi of Ganei Tal, told the gathering.
Following his words, a group of teenage girls read a poem they wrote collectively, comparing Gush Katif to the holiday's honorees. "We were a big tree there," a line of the poem read, "with many leaves, and blossoms, and deep roots."
Afterwards, the crowd walked down the hill to the pre- dug holes separated into plots of the different Gaza communities. Neveh Dekalim, Gadid, Pe'at Sadeh, Morag, Kfar Darom and all the others were there.
The former settlers dug the final inches and planted the seeds with the green thumbs so many of them developed cultivating the much harsher sand dunes of their desert oasis.
But instead of dispersing after the planting was done, the crowd lingered.
The Gaza reunion, brought about by Tu Bishvat, was too precious to leave.
"This is what gives us the strength to continue," said Itsik Konki, 42, a former resident of Neveh Dekalim who came with his wife, children and grandson. As he spoke to a reporter, two men interrupted the conversation to give him hugs. "We came here for the holiday, sure. But to see our friends from Gush Katif, that's the best part."
Though around 2,000 Gaza evacuees are living in Nitzan, the rest are scattered across the country. From Ashkelon to Jerusalem to the Golan, they mostly live in caravans and hotels, and are often far away from many they once saw on a daily basis and miss just as often now.
"It brings us back to the memories, it's fun to see everyone," said Daliya Danino, 42, who spoke with three other women who were also from Neveh Dekalim. "It's not like a city where you don't even know the people below you. There, we were all family and we miss each other so, so much."
But the nostalgia was not altogether a pleasant one. Every rock, every tree and every highway sign from which the words "Gush Katif" were conspicuously absent, brought with it a ting of melancholy that was impossible for some to shake.
"I'm trembling now being here, being reminded of everything," said Sabir Atias, 17. She recalled the night she left her house in Gush Katif, her father having "sold" it to two otherwise out-of- luck reporters for NIS 500 for the duration of its existence. "It felt like I had already moved forward and left it all behind. But when I come back here I come back to the past, and it feels like a wound that will never fully heal."
In addition to missing the friends and house she left behind, Atias said it was "the little things" of life in Nitzan that weighed on her on a daily basis.
"There are no birds," she said of caravan park built by the government in a matter of months, "I don't know why."
The point of coming to Kissufim for the ceremony was to recapture as much as possible of the life that was, said Lior Kalfa, the head of a committee organized by the former Gaza settlers to represent them. "This is the place that is closest on earth to Gush Katif," he said.
But in planting the new trees so close to the roots of the stumps of the recently felled ones, a sense of profound loss saturated the hills of Kissufim on a holiday of birth.
"Do you know what it is like to come here?" Konki asked. "We want to be over there," he said, pointing to Gaza. "Over there. Over there. Just on the other side of that hill is the entrance to our homes."
©2006 The Jerusalem Post
By Rafael D. Frankel
KISSUFIM - Looking over the rolling farm land to the west, Yaffa Dahan took a deep breath. "Over those hills, that's it," she pointed, before falling silent. Half a minute later, she continued. "It's so hard to be so close, because really, we're so far away."
Like nearly everyone else at this Tu Bishvat tree- planting ceremony, Dahan, a mother of four, used to live over those hills, in Gaza. But seeking to bridge that distance - spiritually if not physically - some 2,000 Gaza evacuees gathered next to Kibbutz Kissufim Monday, just a few kilometers from the Kissufim Checkpoint that once led to their homes, to plant trees in honor of Tu Bishvat.
So on a cool day, when the sun chose not to show itself, a ridge next to the kibbutz nevertheless glowed orange. Orange ribbons were tied to heads, dogs and belt loops. Orange shirts, dusted off from six months ago, were back in style for an afternoon. Even the food set out for the crowd - oranges - made a statement: That this was "holy ground," as many here called it, and their bond with it would not be broken.
"We came here today to continue our connection to this land, because this land is our eternal connection to the land of Israel," Kadosh Gabi, the rabbi of Ganei Tal, told the gathering.
Following his words, a group of teenage girls read a poem they wrote collectively, comparing Gush Katif to the holiday's honorees. "We were a big tree there," a line of the poem read, "with many leaves, and blossoms, and deep roots."
Afterwards, the crowd walked down the hill to the pre- dug holes separated into plots of the different Gaza communities. Neveh Dekalim, Gadid, Pe'at Sadeh, Morag, Kfar Darom and all the others were there.
The former settlers dug the final inches and planted the seeds with the green thumbs so many of them developed cultivating the much harsher sand dunes of their desert oasis.
But instead of dispersing after the planting was done, the crowd lingered.
The Gaza reunion, brought about by Tu Bishvat, was too precious to leave.
"This is what gives us the strength to continue," said Itsik Konki, 42, a former resident of Neveh Dekalim who came with his wife, children and grandson. As he spoke to a reporter, two men interrupted the conversation to give him hugs. "We came here for the holiday, sure. But to see our friends from Gush Katif, that's the best part."
Though around 2,000 Gaza evacuees are living in Nitzan, the rest are scattered across the country. From Ashkelon to Jerusalem to the Golan, they mostly live in caravans and hotels, and are often far away from many they once saw on a daily basis and miss just as often now.
"It brings us back to the memories, it's fun to see everyone," said Daliya Danino, 42, who spoke with three other women who were also from Neveh Dekalim. "It's not like a city where you don't even know the people below you. There, we were all family and we miss each other so, so much."
But the nostalgia was not altogether a pleasant one. Every rock, every tree and every highway sign from which the words "Gush Katif" were conspicuously absent, brought with it a ting of melancholy that was impossible for some to shake.
"I'm trembling now being here, being reminded of everything," said Sabir Atias, 17. She recalled the night she left her house in Gush Katif, her father having "sold" it to two otherwise out-of- luck reporters for NIS 500 for the duration of its existence. "It felt like I had already moved forward and left it all behind. But when I come back here I come back to the past, and it feels like a wound that will never fully heal."
In addition to missing the friends and house she left behind, Atias said it was "the little things" of life in Nitzan that weighed on her on a daily basis.
"There are no birds," she said of caravan park built by the government in a matter of months, "I don't know why."
The point of coming to Kissufim for the ceremony was to recapture as much as possible of the life that was, said Lior Kalfa, the head of a committee organized by the former Gaza settlers to represent them. "This is the place that is closest on earth to Gush Katif," he said.
But in planting the new trees so close to the roots of the stumps of the recently felled ones, a sense of profound loss saturated the hills of Kissufim on a holiday of birth.
"Do you know what it is like to come here?" Konki asked. "We want to be over there," he said, pointing to Gaza. "Over there. Over there. Just on the other side of that hill is the entrance to our homes."
©2006 The Jerusalem Post