Sharon tweaks withdrawal plan
Israel's leader is expected to seek cabinet approval Sunday for a Gaza plan that some say has changed little.
The Israeli army began withdrawing tanks, soldiers, and heavy weaponry from Rafah, at the southern end of the Gaza Strip, nearly a week after it launched a penetrating campaign to root out Palestinian militants and destroy the tunnels Israel says keeps them flush with weapons.
While Palestinians are still grappling with immediate damage caused by the operation - 42 dead, at least 35 homes demolished, and much destroyed local infrastructure that provided basic utilities - many Israelis are already focused on the longer-term aftermath of "Operation Rainbow" and wondering where it leads them.
The military offensive followed Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's failed attempt to get approval from his right-wing Likud Party for his disengagement plan, which would have Israel withdraw from most of the Gaza Strip and some settlement outposts in the West Bank.
Mr. Sharon is now planning to submit a revised disengagement plan to his cabinet, and is expected to ask them to vote on it Sunday. The changed plan would aim to achieve some of the same objectives by making the withdrawals in stages. But many observers here are wondering what difference that actually makes - and what, if anything, has changed since the plan was defeated earlier this month in a referendum by the Likud Party.
"It's basically a watered-down version to persuade some of the naysayers that, even if they couldn't go along with the last one, they will go along with the next one," says Mark Heller, a political scientist at Tel Aviv University. "Most of those who opposed did so on ideological grounds, being opposed to the concept of unilateral withdrawal, and not the specifics."
On the one hand, many Israelis view the military drive into Gaza Strip as justifiable, given the recent shooting deaths in Gaza of an Israeli mother and her four daughters and the deaths of 13 Israeli soldiers during attacks by Palestinian militant groups. But the stated goals of the operation have been inconsistent - from what the military says is a need to destroy tunnels to plans to widen the corridor between the Strip and Egypt.
In the hawkish view, Israel wanted to show Palestinians how Israel will respond to any attempt to use a Gaza Strip withdrawal to launch fresh attacks on Israel. Or, as Ze'ev Schiff, a military analyst with the Ha'aretz newspaper, puts it: "Rafah will be a reminder to them what will happen if they go on with the terror war after the withdrawal."
Israel may also have gone on the offensive to preempt Hamas claims that the army is leaving Gaza "under fire," as Hizbollah claimed in Lebanon.
The shifting and varied reasons to justify the Rafah operation have left many here baffled, and the new and improved disengagement plan according to an editorial in Ha'aretz, "arouses both concern and puzzlement."
Says Mr. Heller: "We always proceed on the assumption that someone up there in the leadership has a clear idea of what they're doing, and we just need to figure it out. But in this case, i'm not sure if they had a clear idea.
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