Disengagement from settlements a crucial step toward peace

Nikki Nilon, Guest Columnist

Transcribed from the clipping

“Almost a year and a half ago, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon announced his courageous initiative to disengage from the entire Gaza Strip and northern tier of the West Bank. This will effectively remove the Israeli civilian and military presence from these areas, allowing the Palestinian Authority to take full control and responsibility for what goes on there.

Sharon’s disengagement initiative, when first announced, was intended to be a unilateral act to protect Israel’s interests in the absence of a credible peace partner.

Now that the most serious impediment to peace, Yasser Arafat, is gone, and Mahmoud Abbas has been elected with the mandate to pursue Palestinian aspirations nonviolently, Sharon’s disengagement plan could become a catalyst toward Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation.

Sharon’s meeting with President Bush in Crawford, Texas, on Tuesday will take places as implementation of disengagement is assured in the wake of passage in the Knesset of Israel’s state budget in March. The prime minister has repeatedly imperiled his political career in order to see the disengagement initiative carried out.

For Israelis, disengagement promises to be a painful and disruptive sacrifice. Some 8,000 Jewish residents in the Gaza Strip and several hundred more in the West Bank will be relocated this summer, along with Israel’s military presence.

Undoubtedly, the families of the uprooted communities will face hardship and trauma in remaking their lives in new communities in Israel. Disengagement also stands to cost the state hundreds of millions of dollars in an already strapped economy, which got that way almost entirely due to the effects of Palestinian terrorism over the past four years.

Yet, the vision of two states for two peoples stands upon the chance to take a giant step forward with disengagement.

Israel is relinquishing exclusive control of the Gaza Strip and the northern West Bank to the Palestinian Authority, which now has the opportunity to govern responsibly and prove that it is ready to accept living permanently alongside Israel, thus ending the conflict.

The vacuum that will be created through Israel’s departure from these areas must be filled by real actions on the part of Mahmoud Abbas to reform Palestinian society and prepare it for a durable and genuine peace with Israel. Disengagement must now be met by the willingness and capability on the Palestinians’ side to fulfill their obligations.

Abbas must do more than simply coax Palestinian terrorist groups into accepting a nonbinding ‘temporary lull’ in violence.

Instead, he must act decisively to unify the Palestinian security forces and use them to dismantle these terrorist groups’ capacity to carry out attacks by collecting illegal weapons, destroying bomb-making factories and closing the tunnels used to smuggle weapons in from Egypt to Gaza. He also must work to end incitement in state media and schools.

These are the basic requirements agreed upon for the ‘road map’ to peace. Both Sharon and Bush are anxious to use disengagement as a springboard for progress on the road to peace. The president recently asked Congress for a $350 million assistance package for the Palestinians over two years to help rebuild their infrastructure and improve their economy.

The Europeans and the Arab states should be expected to increase their involvement in the economic arena as well. Egypt and Jordan have vital roles to play in helping the Palestinians to fulfill their security responsibilities and to undertake government reforms. Other Arab states should commit to normalizing relations with Israel as the environment improves.

If the Palestinians and Israel’s other Arab neighbors are ready at long last to end their conflict with Israel, disengagement will represent a start on the path toward two states living side by side in peace.”

Context added by this archive

A guest column on the Gaza disengagement, and the arithmetic of whose displacement counts. The 8,000 Israeli settlers to be moved are uprooted communities who will face hardship and trauma in remaking their lives; the word for what happens to them is

sacrifice. The 1.3 million Palestinians already in Gaza appear as an entity with obligations — to reform, to dismantle, to collect weapons, to end incitement in schools. Not one of them is named or quoted.

The column also assigns the cause of Israel’s economic difficulty in a single clause: an economy which got that way almost entirely due to the effects of Palestinian terrorism over the past four years. The writer is identified at the foot as chairwoman of the Sarasota-Manatee Jewish Federation’s Community Relations Council, so the page is doing what an opinion page should: printing an argument with its source attached.

Cite this item

"Disengagement from settlements a crucial step toward peace," Sarasota Herald-Tribune, 8 April 2005. Covering Palestine archive, CP-2005-008. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-2005-008