On unilateral withdrawal

Things have gotten fairly busy for me here in Beirut. One project I’ve been pursuing a little is on the whole concept of “unilateral” withdrawals, such as Sharon currently espouses for Gaza. The Israelis undertook an earlier such withdrawal, back in May 2000, from the occupied zone they’d held inside South Lebanon since 1978. And that withdrawal brought a good measure of stability to the border between the two states.
But Gaza is different from South Lebanon in at least two key respects. So why is Sharon so intent on making the withdrawal from Gaza unilateral, I wonder?? Especially since keeping it unilateral will without a doubt mean it’s a very ragged withdrawal under fire.
The withdrawal from South Lebanon was different from the one Sharon’s envisaging for Gaza in these vital ways:
(1) There was a government in Lebanon that was ready and eager to reassert as much control as possible over south Lebanon after the Israeli withdrawal, and
(2) The population of the occupied zone here, though it had risen strongly against Israel’s continued occupation, nevertheless has its roots and family landholdings here. So these people so could be expected to consider the reclamation of those lands after the withdrawal a real gain that should not easily be put in jeopardy thereafter by, for example, continuing to lob missiles over the Israeli border.
Neither of these factors applies in Gaza. There is no government there… and Sharon’s stress on not negotiating the withdrawal with any Palestinian party means that it would be almost impossible for the PA or any other governing body to take root there, post the withdrawal.
And neither does most of the population of Gaza have any longheld family landholdings or other vested interests in the Strip. Eighty percent of the people in Gaza are refugees from 1948, from inside Israel. Israel has completely refused to listen to their claims for return or compensation. And most of them only have mean hovels to eke out a living in, in the sprawling refugee camps of Gaza. They have almost nothing left to lose, and their longstanding claims against Israel are still outstanding. Why should they be content weith “merely” reclaiming a small degree more control over their very unsatisfactory current living environment?
And actually, the degree of control they gain will not be large. Sharon is insisting on retaining control over all the entry and exit points around Gaza, and over the air-space; he also insists on retaining the right to re-enter any point of Gaza he wants, post the so-called “withdrawal”… So what kind of self-government does that allow the Palestinians of Gaza? Far, far less than the Black South Africans got in their Bantustans… and nobody anywhere else in the world (except Israel and South Africa) expected them to be able to live with that.
Indeed, that form of apartheid was deemed by the UN to be a “crime against humanity”.
So why, I ask again, is Sharon so intent on making his planned withdrawal from Gaza “unilateral”?
I think I have one part of the answer…

The best explanation I can come up with is that, with or without the continued presence of Israeli settlers inside the Gaza Strip he intends to keep right on using the Strip as a free-fire zone.
You see, if the “withdrawal” of Israeli forces– which in any case, as he has promised, will not be a full and final withdrawal– takes place under any form of a negotiated agreement, the terms of that agreement will necessarily place some constraints on his ability to send Israeli forces back in again whenever he should please.
If it didn’t place any such constraints, it would not be worth the paper it was written on… (Of course, you could say exactly that about the Oslo Accords, from the Palestinian point of view, since he over-rode the territorial provisions of Oslo in just that same way, back in 2002.)
But Sharon can’t bear the idea of being constrained in any way by outsiders, at all!
So that, I think, is the main reason he’s continuing to insist that the “withdrawal” he proposes from Gaza be unilateral: so he can keep on using Gaza as a free-fire zone.
So if he’s going to be sending Israeli troops back into Gaza on a regular basis, and continuing to bomb the Strip from air, sea, and air whenever he pleases, what kind of a “withdrawal” is that, you might ask? Not much of one at all, in military terms… I do think, however, that he may be a little more serious about withdrawing the 8,000-some Israeli settlers from Gaza, than the troops.
This makes great sense for him, from several points of view:

so for G-d’s sake don’t even ask us to withdraw them from the West Bank, as well!

Well, anyway, that’s some of what I’ve been thinking about.
What I’ve also been thinking about but haven’t had time write here yet is, of course, the whole effect of Arafat’s decline on Palestinian leadership politics, and especially in the context of Sharon’s Gaza “withdrawal” proposal.
Let me just leave it at this. Arafat’s mental functioning has been in a very poor shape for several months now, already. In essence, the political transition to a post-Arafat era has beern underway for all of that time… Now, we are still obviously in the midst of it.
Abu Mazen is a decent placeholder. Can he be more than that? Only if this time around–unlike in 2003– the Americans give him a LOT more help in realizing at least some basic political gains for the Palestinian people.
At this point, I’m not holding my breath thinking that this is going to happen. But who knows?