A Gaza without settlers?

It has been nearly a quarter century since Israel physically uprooted a settlement built beyond its pre-1967 borders. But Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, a chief draftsman of Israel's drive to settle lands occupied during the 1967 Six Day War, says he is now prepared to up stakes throughout the Gaza Strip - part of his plan to unilaterally disengage from the Palestinians.

"This is the first time of evacuating settlements - not illegal ones, and not outposts, and not just one," says Menachem Klein, a political scientist at Bar-Ilan University, near Tel Aviv. "Perhaps one day we can look back and say here the reverse began."

Mr. Sharon's proposal to create peace without partners could implode from the pressure on it by nearly all sides. Although the 7,500 Israeli settlers in Gaza are a small contingent relative to the more than 200,000 in the West Bank, Sharon faces outrage from the pro-settlement right-wing parties; their withdrawal from government could trigger new elections. He faces skepticism from the Israeli left, which says Sharon is just trying to distract attention from his mounting legal woes.

And he faces resistance from the US, which can't decide what to do with a plan that ignores reciprocal formulas built into Washington's moribund road map plan for peace.

Despite the skepticism about the plan to remove the 17 settlements amid some 1.2 million Palestinians, some people here say Sharon is dead serious.

"He knows that if he is understood as the only Israeli politician who can withdraw from Gaza, then the encouragement to take a step against him will diminish: Anyone who does will be seen as standing in the path of the historical bulldozer who is ready to take the Israeli people out of the Gaza Strip," says Mr. Klein.

The last and only time Israel evacuated a settlement was in 1979, when Yammit was removed from the Sinai, which Israel returned to Egypt as part of the Camp David Accords. Since his election three years ago, Sharon has been promising settlers that he would never agree to evacuate them. He has also refused attempts to negotiate with Palestinian leaders while acts of terrorism against Israelis continue, which makes his decision to float his evacuation plan now - days after a ghastly suicide bombing - all the more remarkable.

Sharon's calculations, says Klein, are not tied to the latest events - but the broader outlook in Israel and the sense of failure to quash the Palestinian intifada, ignited in September 2000. "Senior members of the Israel establishment, including the security services and the military, have put pressure on Sharon to do something," says Klein.

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