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Surprise surprise: having said for almost four decades that no Jewish settlement should ever be dismantled, Sharon's plan to dismantle Jewish settlements in Gaza was rejected by his own Likud party members. You can fool all the people all the time – but don't sell them a new folly every week. Sharon was defeated by an effective campaign launched by settlers, and generously sponsored by fundamentalist Jewish anti-peace magnates abroad – the Gutniks, the Moskowitzs, the Kleins.
As Meron Benvenisti writes in an excellent analysis (Ha'aretz, 6.5.04), "The state has given a small group of skilled and fanatic activists immense bureaucratic might and economic resources, which have been invested in a sophisticated manner and transformed the settlements into one of the strongest power bases in Israel" – in spite of being less than 4% of the Israeli population.
Sharon should thank President Bush as well for his humiliating defeat: Likud members understood very well that Israel had nothing to lose by rejecting the Plan. A long list of extremist Jewish-American organizations (ZOA and their ilk) published huge ads in the Israeli press, explaining that the US would not change its Pavlovian pro-Israel anti-Palestinian policy, no matter the results.
In return for the Disengagement Plan, President Bush endorsed the route of the Apartheid Wall, recognized Israel's bigger illegal settlements as irreversible "demographic facts," and dismissed the Palestinian Right of Return. The Disengagement Plan was rejected – but don't hold your breath to hear President Bush renouncing the Apartheid Wall, condemning the "demographic facts" of the settlements, or suddenly supporting the Right of Return. When Sharon and Bush make colonialist deals over Palestinian land and freedom, the name of the game is "heads we win, tails they lose."
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