What went wrong? No simple answers

BY MATTHEW McALLESTER | Newsday Staff Correspondent

July 17, 2006

GAZA CITY - Like a hyena picking over the last, dry bones of a carcass, Mohammed Silme was still trying to extract scrap metal from the rubble of what was the Israeli settlement of Kfar Darom.

With a hacksaw in his calloused hand, he spent about 10 minutes cutting through each gnarled piece of rebar, metal that only a year ago held together the homes, shops and synagogue of this most severely contested of the Gaza settlements.

At the end of the day, he said, he would sell the twisted steel for a maximum of $6. With that, he supports 10 members of his extended family.

Silme, like most of the 1.4 million people in Gaza and the 7 million in Israel, had higher hopes than this for the withdrawal of Israeli settlers and soldiers from the Gaza Strip last August. With no Israelis left in Gaza to disrupt daily life, with no apparent reason for the Palestinian militant groups in Gaza to continue fighting, he expected there would be more jobs. He expected peace. What he got was a diminishing supply of twisted metal with which to feed his family, a paralyzed and isolated Islamist government, and the sound of Israeli shelling in the distance as a reminder that Gaza has not blossomed in the past year but has been the epicenter for a conflict that has now drawn in Lebanon.

'From bad to worse'

"It's going from bad to worse," said Silme, 43, who had brought along his two young sons to help. "I had the hope that things would get better."

Most Israelis and Palestinians barely have time right now to wonder what went so terribly wrong. They're hiding from rockets, scratching a living and wondering whether a full-scale war in the Middle East is hours or days away.

But below the noise of daily panic is a continuing debate about the Israeli disengagement from Gaza last year, the Palestinian response to the withdrawal and the future of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's stated plan to pull out of most of the West Bank.

As with most political questions in the Middle East, there are almost as many interpretations of what went wrong as there are people living there.

Withdrawal shows weakness, many on the Israeli right argue, and is interpreted by the Palestinians and Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon as defeat for Israel. That invites more violence, the argument goes.

Withdrawal from southern Lebanon, in 2000, and Gaza were not enough to bring about any cease-fire, many in the Arab world argue, because Israel continued to occupy Palestinian land in the West Bank.

Among those who consider themselves centrists, however, there are illuminating views that are not as simple as the blame game those on the extremes of Israeli and Palestinian society usually play.

In Israel, there is a growing sense that the failure in Gaza shows that most of the country's Arab neighbors will always be implacable foes of Israel and the sooner the government and the rest of the world understands that, the better.

"The expectation of those of us who supported the unilateral withdrawal wasn't that the Palestinians would reward us with a peaceful border, but that we would be able to defend ourselves more effectively from an internationally recognized border and we would gain greater international understanding for whatever security measures we would need to take to fight against terrorism," said Yossi Klein Halevi, a senior fellow at the Shalem Center, a Jerusalem think tank.

"What went wrong with the disengagement wasn't that the Palestinians sent rockets and terror squads against Israel," he said. "What went wrong was that Israel didn't initially respond and the international community didn't offer the understanding that it should have and continued to see the Palestinians as victims."

Relatively moderate figures in Palestinian society reject that interpretation, saying the unilateralism of Israel's withdrawal from Gaza is one of the root problems. If Israel had reached deals with the Palestinians about ceasing hostilities and improving the economic situation in Gaza, the militant groups would not have continued firing rockets into Israel.

Former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon "was so keen on the idea of unilateralism he even did not want to go into the idea of a military truce," said Qais Abu Layla, a member of the central committee of the Palestinian Liberation Organization. "This is the problem with what you may call a unilateral solution. Unless you have an arrangement that covers all the possibilities ... you're liable to have all kinds of misunderstandings on both sides. This is what happened."

Intertwined territory

Abu Layla said there was one key failing of the Israeli plan to withdraw from Gaza before pulling out of the West Bank: The two territories are politically and psychologically contiguous for Palestinians even though they are geographically separate.

"You cannot completely isolate the West Bank from Gaza," Abu Layla said. "When Israel continues offensive acts against at least some factions in the West Bank, these factions will try to retaliate in Gaza."

Abu Layla and other leading Palestinians said the other major mistake Israel and the international community made after last year's withdrawal was not reacting creatively to the election of the Hamas government earlier this year.

Instead of isolating the Islamist hard-liners, say Palestinian moderates who personally have no affection for Hamas, Israel should have seen an opportunity to negotiate.

But Israel, the United States and the European Union cut off tax revenues and aid to the Palestinian Authority and the already flaccid economy weakened, leaving many families without any financial support. That contributed, Palestinians say, to the tensions that erupted in violence months ago between Hamas and the more-secular Fatah faction. Halevi says Israel could not have negotiated with Hamas the way hard-line foes have done.

"You can't deal with religious hard-liners because the change that you're expecting them to make is not just a tactical shift but a theological shift," Halevi said.

Olmert's government is adopting a strategy many centrists in Israel have been advocating since Sharon began his unilateralist drive: Continue to withdraw from occupied land, but when attacked from beyond those borders, hit back harder than before.

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