Next week’s unilateral Israeli withdrawal from Gaza is significant. But instead of applause, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s determination to evict Jewish settlers as a prelude to returning Gaza to the Palestine Authority is being greeted with acrimony and violence.
Palestinians view Israeli withdrawal as a first step in a long march to liberate their ancestral lands from Jewish occupation.
Recent remarks by Ahmed Qurei, the Palestinian Authority’s prime minister, were reminiscent of speeches given by the late Yasser Arafat: “We will proceed from one victory to another until we achieve the big victory—when one of our roses or juveniles will hoist the Palestinian flag on the walls of the Old City (of Jerusalem) and its minarets and churches.”
A unilateral Israeli withdrawal, many Palestinians want to believe, is a forced retreat. On the other hand, those Jewish settlers—of some 10,000 making homes in Gaza where an estimated 1.2 million Palestinians live—who resist eviction orders from their government fear the precedent set will endanger the security of Israel. There might be some truth in both sentiments. But the more important reality is that Sharon, an architect of the Jewish settlement movement, unilaterally decided to reconsider the parameters of Israeli security interests.
Since the 1993 Oslo agreement between the Israeli government headed by the late Yitzhak Rabin and the PLO headed by Arafat, much of the discord in Israeli politics has been over the requirements of returning the West Bank and Gaza (with attendant consequences for Jewish settlements there), to a representative Palestinian authority in exchange for an end to violence against Israel.
The Oslo agreement was effectively nullified when Arafat, refusing to reach a final settlement on the shape of the putative Palestinian state with then-Israeli PM Ehud Barak, as brokered by U.S. President Bill Clinton, launched an uprising (intifada) in September 2000.
Between then and now, however, regional and global politics were radically altered by the events of 9/11 and what followed.
In this context, Sharon’s decision over Gaza is a reassessment of Israeli security interests. As Ehud Olmert, Israel’s deputy prime minister, recently explained, the decision arose from asking “why we had to hold 10,000 soldiers to protect 10,000 people in an area without any future other than war and confrontation and terror forever.”
Furthermore, the unilateral pullout, in Olmert’s words, is based on “the commitment to the security of the state of Israel, to the Jewish nature of the state of Israel and to democracy in the state of Israel.”
But the unstated premise of the Gaza pullout is a test Sharon has devised for the Palestinian Authority on its commitment to root out terrorist operations against Israel by extremists belonging to organizations such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
In the road map set forth following 9/11 by U.S. President George Bush for the establishment of a Palestinian state, there is an explicit demand—as there was in the defunct Oslo agreement—that an end to all forms of terror by Palestinians against Israelis must precede a final settlement over the West Bank and Gaza, which have been occupied by Israel since 1967.
Should Sharon’s unilateralism be reciprocated by an unequivocal ending of Palestinian-directed violence against Israelis, and an unqualified acceptance by Palestinian people of Jewish historic rights, then this unprecedented decision to pull out of Gaza might well be the prologue to the final settlement scuttled by Arafat in 2000.
Palestinian failure, however, to reciprocate in kind to Sharon’s decision will make future Israeli withdrawals less likely, and Palestinians will continue to remain victims of their own failure of politics and imagination.
He is a member of the Board of Directors for the Center for Islamic Pluralism based in Washington, D.C., a Senior Fellow with the Canadian Coalition for Democracies, and an academic-consultant with the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C. He has been a consultant with CIDA on development issues and has published widely in academic journals on foreign policy matters and area studies of the Middle East and South Asia.
Mansur is featured on the documentary Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West produced by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He also unsuccessfully ran for the Canadian Alliance party in 2000.
Mansur has been accused by Canadian Islamic Congress of using "provocative, self-serving rhetoric", and for "promoting an anti-Arab and anti-Muslim agenda".
He is an Ismaili Muslim.
At a press conference on October 2, 2008, Mansur stated that "Islam is my private life, my conscience...[but] my faith does not take precedence over my duties...to Canada and its constitution, which I embrace freely;" "I am first and most importantly a Canadian;" "only in a free society will you find Islam as a faith and not a political religion." Mansur also criticized New Democratic Party Leader Jack Layton, whom Mansur said "has gone to bed with Islamists", because he is running candidates in Ontario and Quebec who are closely identified with the push for Sharia law.
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