As Gaza empties, Israel looks ahead

After a week of seeing Jews drag Jews from their homes, Israel is waking up to a new reality. Evacuating settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip is no longer a peacenik's dream, but an inevitable, if painful, possibility.

While coaxing and carrying nearly 8,500 Israeli settlers in Gaza from their homes, no Israeli fired a shot against another. Despite reports that significant numbers of Israeli soldiers would refuse orders, only two did.

The alacrity of the pullout and its relatively minimal levels of violence showed that dismantling settlements is doable for one main reason. Even if many settlers and their supporters found the idea of forced removal abhorrent, turning guns against one's own troops was even more unfathomable.

"The victory for both sides is that we maintained an open dialogue with the settlers and their leaders," says Major Sharon Finegold, a spokeswoman for the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). "The restraint that we showed led to the fact that most people left without a major struggle."

Still, disengagement is hardly over, and formidable challenges lie ahead. And even though the withdrawal is moving ahead of plan, Israel says it does not want the world in general - and the Palestinians in particular - to get the wrong impression.

"We've finished making unilateral, painful concessions," says Ranaan Gissin, a spokesman for Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. "After the euphoria dies, the Palestinians will have to get down to taking real steps to show that they can stop terrorist activity.

"I would suggest to the Palestinians to hold your horses, because we are much stronger than we were when we sat in Gaza," Dr. Gissin says. "So if anyone has illusions that this means they can force Israel into making further concessions under pressure of violence, they're in for a big surprise."

Gissin's assessment that Israel will become stronger by becoming smaller is based on several strategic conclusions reached by supporters of the pullout.

By no longer having citizens in Gaza, Israel decreases soldiers' and settlers' vulnerability to attacks by Palestinians. But if Israel is attacked from Gaza in the future, it will likely respond with more firepower than before, because it will no longer be facing the complication of fighting people living under Israel's military rule. Palestinian militants, in turn, will find it harder to argue that they are simply struggling against an occupation.

Another important consideration is calculated purely in terms of demographics, which have always been an important factor in the conflict, but have recently become more pressing.

Palestinians have a higher rate of population increase than Israelis. And when the entire population of Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip is calculated, non-Jews now outnumber Jews. But according to a new study published in the left-wing Haaretz newspaper, after the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip Israel can be assured of a Jewish majority for the next 20 years.

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