The Herzliya Conference opened on December 18. Various groups, including the People’s Voice, were asked to present plans to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Conference participants would then vote on the various proposals before breaking for lunch.
The first people on the stage, the Israeli Yossi Beilin and the Palestinian Yasser Abed Rabbo, presented their Geneva Accord, a plan similar to ours, though without the grassroots component. The next presenter was Avigdor Lieberman, a former director of Netanyahu’s Prime Minister’s Office, founder of the right-wing Yisrael Beiteinu Party, and eventually the Israeli minister of defense from 2016 to 2018. His scheme was what you’d expect from someone who once proposed drowning Palestinian political prisoners in the Dead Sea:57 Lieberman called for the annexation of all the empty land in the West Bank while dealing with the demographic time bomb inside Israel in a straightforward apartheid arrangement. Areas within our pre-1967 borders with a large Arab population were to be handed over to Arafat, while Arabs remaining in Israel would have to take a loyalty oath to the “Jewish-Zionist country”; otherwise, they’d be expelled. Simple.
Sari and I presented last. When the organizers tallied up the votes, we got 65 percent; the Geneva Accord 25 percent; and Lieberman’s annexation scheme, 10 percent. The results didn’t get Sari and me patting each other on the back, because the people in the room were from the elite, not the grassroots. But the vote still had value, especially given what was about to happen in the afternoon session.
No one outside his inner circle knew when Prime Minister Ariel Sharon lumbered up to the stage after lunch that a week earlier a group of American Jewish leaders had visited Sharon in his office brandishing a copy of “The Spooks Speak: Former Shin Bet Chiefs Talk of Peace,” a translation in The Jewish Forward of the Yedioth article. “After this interview,” they told Sharon, “we will find it harder to defend you on the Hill.” Together with the growing international support for Beilin and Rabbo’s Geneva plan, along with a group of conscientious objectors, officers and pilots refusing to serve in the occupied territories, the meeting convinced Sharon to take drastic action to keep American Jews on his side in his war against the Palestinian government.58
For the prime minister, dressed in a dark suit and bright-red tie, the Herzliya speech was the political equivalent of crossing the Suez and encircling the Egyptian Third Army during the Yom Kippur War. He began with a discussion of Israel’s role in the world, how we needed an open society if we were to compete in the new global economy, how Israeli security depended on our relationship with Western democracies, and how we needed to be an attractive destination for American and European Jews accustomed to living in free societies governed by laws. I could have written and delivered that part of the speech myself.
In a confident, steady voice, Sharon next detailed a vision for the future that also could have come from a People’s Voice pamphlet. Israel, he said, desired to coexist with a “democratic Palestinian state with territorial contiguity in Judea and Samaria and economic viability.” No one had ever heard such dovish language from the general.
Sari, wearing earphones for the instant translation, turned to me with eyes wide open.
“Just wait.” I motioned with my hand. I knew Sharon far too well to be taken in by him. Something smelled fishy.
Sure enough, in a flash the human bulldozer was back. “Only security will lead to peace,” Sharon declared, “and in that sequence.” As Shabak director I had told three prime ministers unequivocally that peace and security were intertwined. Security cooperation with the Palestinians was key to combating terror, and this cooperation was only possible in the context of genuine hope among the Palestinian public that our occupation would end. Sharon’s message headed in the opposite direction, with a dig at those of us who “deceive the public” and create “false hope”:
Without the achievement of full security within the framework of which terror organizations will be dismantled it will not be possible to achieve genuine peace…The opposite perception, according to which the very signing of a peace agreement will produce security out of thin air, has already been tried in the past and failed miserably. And such will be the fate of any other plan which promotes this concept. These plans deceive the public and create false hope. There will be no peace before the eradication of terror.
It was an impossible standard — “full security” and the complete “eradication of terror” — that, given ongoing settler and army violence, no government, not ours and certainly not the badly crippled Palestinian Authority, could achieve.
Then Sharon dropped his bomb: He proposed evacuating settlements “which will not be included in the territory of the State of Israel in the framework of any possible future permanent agreement” while “strengthening our control over those same areas in the Land of Israel which will constitute an inseparable part of the State of Israel in any future agreement.” Presumably, only the settlements on our side of the security fence that our government was building with such gusto would remain under Israeli sovereignty.
Sharon was a strategist, his steps carefully calculated. What was he up to? The general public perception was that the prime minister proposed swinging a wrecking ball at his life’s work by taking Israel’s first ever concrete step toward ending the occupation by removing settlements. I wasn’t so sure.
It was only weeks after the conference, once the details of what came to be called the Sharon government’s “disengagement plan” were made public — a full withdrawal from Gaza and from four small West Bank settlements, leaving the vast majority of settlements in Judea and Samaria in place — that I started to grasp some of the nuances of Sharon’s proposal. The Strip, with its teeming refugee camps, had always been a headache for Israel. From Sharon’s point of view, the disengagement was an opportunity to wash his hands of this liability while collecting credit for moving the peace process forward. Was Gaza to be a trial run followed by the evacuations of major West Bank settlements, or by leaving Gaza was Sharon sacrificing a pawn to save the queen, Judea and Samaria?
I polled my friends to get their opinions. Pinchas Wallerstein surprised me with his mixture of pragmatism and opposition. Many settlers, he told me, were resigned to leaving Gaza — for them, too, it had become a nightmare. Still, Pinchas believed Sharon had “sold his soul to the devil.” In earlier political speeches Sharon had attacked Labor for any hint of pulling out of Gaza. The settlements, he said, were as much a part of Israel as Tel Aviv. And now with no discussion and barely a nod to the democratic process, he intended to pull out the settlers, by the ankles if necessary. “Sharon is dangerous,” he said, “because we thought we were getting one thing and now it seems we have something else.” Pinchas had a point.
Matti Steinberg’s assessment was just as scathing. Sharon’s “crass unilateral format,” he said, ran a Sherman tank over secular, moderate Palestinians like Sari and Mahmoud Abbas with whom we could reach a settlement to end the conflict once and for all. By crushing hope and elevating suspicion and fear into core strategic principles, Sharon tipped the balance of power toward Hamas in Gaza, thus fomenting the kind of chaos that could justify additional unilateral steps. Instead of a single Palestinian state alongside Israel, there would be at least two, possibly more, “Palestines” filled to the brim with angry, despondent people.
Sari echoed Matti. Sharon’s plan was an elaborate ruse to crush moderates and boost the very fanatics committing most of the terrorist attacks. The idea, said Sari, was to “contain the animals” — Palestinians like himself — “on the other side of walls.” It was specifically designed to prevent coexistence campaigns like ours.59 But whatever Sharon’s intentions were, his plan became for most people, including the American administration, the only game in town.
Sari and I redoubled our efforts to counter Sharon’s politics of fear; signature by signature, we demonstrated that our peoples could be partners in peace. By early 2004, 350,000 Israelis and Palestinians had joined our campaign. Sari got the head of Fatah in Gaza to come around. The governor of Nablus, whose two sons were killed by the Israelis, also signed. Erratic Arafat refrained from sending goons to drag Sari off to prison, as we had feared, and actually tacitly backed him. When Sari came to a meeting of the Fatah leadership and presented our main points, they shouted that he was a traitor because our plan renounced the right of return. Arafat, ever a master of ambiguity, said nothing, which Sari interpreted as approval.60
The mass killings continued. In January and February, Hamas and the Al Aqsa Brigades, an amalgam of secular armed groups, many affiliated with Fatah, dispatched suicide bombers to murder more Israelis. Sharon decided it was time to take out Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the quadriplegic founder and spiritual head of Hamas. On March 22, as bodyguards wheeled him into a mosque for morning prayers, an Apache helicopter gunship killed him, his bodyguards, and nine bystanders with an American Hellfire missile.
After a previous assassination attempt against him, the sheikh had said with chilling prescience: “Days will prove that the assassination policy will not finish Hamas. Hamas leaders wish to be martyrs and are not scared of death. Jihad will continue and the resistance will continue until we have victory, or we will be martyrs.”
By killing Yassin, Sharon handed Hamas a martyr of the highest profile, guaranteeing that the terrorist disease Sharon was supposedly trying to contain would spread. Two hundred thousand people attended the sheikh’s funeral, and for the first time Shikaki’s PCPSR opinion polls among Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza showed a majority backing Hamas.
The next phase of Sharon’s disengagement plan swung the pendulum yet further toward Hamas and away from secular and pragmatic Fatah. In his April 14 letter to President George W. Bush, Sharon declared, “There exists no Palestinian partner with whom to advance peacefully toward a settlement.” Nor was Sharon going to coordinate the Gaza withdrawal with Palestinian prime minister Abu Mazen’s government in Ramallah; the IDF would just pull out and permit the most violent force in Gaza, Hamas, to come out on top.
While I supported leaving Gaza, and not a day too soon, with Sharon’s unilateralism I wanted to put my head between my knees. Hamas, even before we took down our flags and cleared out the IDF bases and settlements in Gaza, was savoring its victory. Capitalizing on the widespread narrative among Palestinians that peace negotiations with Israel had brought only doom, yet more power shifted to Hamas.
Hamas had begun its campaign of slaughter in reaction to Oslo. Its murder of hundreds of Israelis had helped derail the peace process, and our government was about to reward them by handing them Gaza, free of charge. In an op-ed I dashed off to The Jerusalem Post, titled “The Wrong Way Out,” I wrote, “By being willing to sweep out entire Israeli communities with nothing in return and no final objective defined, Sharon has seemingly fulfilled radical Arab dreams of ejecting us — by force and bit by bit.”61
In May the Labor Party organized what was forecast to be the biggest rally by Israel’s peace camp since Rabin’s death, marching in support of Sharon’s Gaza policy. Peace Now, the same organization that had protested the Sabra and Shatila massacre twenty years earlier, joined the planning. The organizers, who equated disengagement with security, asked me to open the event, speaking just before Shimon Peres.
I agreed because it was clear we couldn’t leave Gaza a day too soon. In the week leading to the rally, Islamists in Gaza, to commemorate Nakba Day, targeted Israeli army vehicles, killing thirteen soldiers. In retribution the IDF hit Gaza hard. Thirty-two Palestinians died in the attacks, and more than three hundred were wounded.
There was another reason I agreed to do the opening act. My Shabak years had turned me into a student of national narratives. For years I’d been warning Israelis about the danger of unilaterally handing Hamas a victory and bolstering their narrative that the Zionists understand only force. Now I saw another deeply worrying narrative taking root.
Disengagement polarized Israel, drawing a line between the majority, who wanted to get out of Gaza fast, and the religious settlers. But if the left hadn’t been stuck in a fog, they would have seen that settlers, the vanguard of frontier Zionism, were a latter-day version of the kibbutzniks, like my parents, who forged Israel’s settlement and security ethos. What secular Israelis failed to see was that we all shared a fierce love of the Land of Israel and had no doubt it was our right to “redeem” it. Since 1967 religious settlers had been pouring their sweat and blood into Judea, Samaria, and Gaza, and their efforts got the Arab world to come to terms with us. Rather than ostracize settlers as aggressive weeds to be plucked by the roots from our carefully manicured secular gardens, we secular nationalists should be carrying them on our shoulders as national heroes returning home.
I finished writing the speech a few minutes before Biba and I jumped in the car and drove to Tel Aviv.
More than 150,000 Israelis packed into Rabin Square on that Saturday evening, May 15. The stage behind me was festooned with a banner that read: EXIT FROM GAZA, BEGIN TALKING, even though “talking” had no role in the prime minister’s chess game.
The secular left-wing crowd was in a festive mood, celebrating what they saw as disengagement from the Palestinians and, no less so, from Jewish “fanatics” in their yeshivas and settlements — the bane of “our” Israel. The timing of the rally, just after Shabbat, incidentally excluded observant Jews; they simply couldn’t get there in time.
When I took the stage and looked down on the Peace Now banners, the balloons, the hooting and hollering, and the festive mood, snatches of conversation with rabbis and settlers came back to me — how right they were to point out the hypocrisies of the leftists living guilt-free on former Arab lands while they pointed accusing fingers at West Bank settlers.
At a certain point in the speech, after supporting disengagement, I asked, “Where are our brothers the religious settlers of Judea, Samaria, and Gaza?” Silence spread over the crowd. The lights were blinding, and I could barely recognize my own voice, as it was amplified a thousand times to fill the square. “Are they not here because we didn’t want them to be?
“We never created a real dialogue with the settlers,” I continued, “because we never really wanted to. We turned settlers into enemies. We arrogantly turned them out. We monopolized the quest for peace. That is why the majority did not come here today, although I know that today of all days they wanted to come…The majority wants to leave Gaza as much as we do. But they want to do so after lowering the national flag to half-mast, observing a minute’s silence, and wiping a tear at the shattering of their Zionist dream. The majority will feel connected to us only when the pain of those slated to be evacuated drowns out the rejoicing of those who will do the evacuating.”
My partnership with Sari had already cost me friends on the right, and with the speech in Tel Aviv that night I now lost friends on the left. “Whose side are you on?” people asked. I wasn’t sure how to answer. I still thought I was merely defending the Zionism on which I was raised.