JERUSALEM – Opposition leader Joseph "Tommy" Lapid recently bragged that he had been receiving calls from senior U.S. officials asking him to throw the weight of his 14-member Shinui party behind the government’s budget for 2005. "I don’t know whether this pressure is from the U.S. administration or if Sharon’s office asked the U.S. to put pressure on us," Lapid said, referring to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
Either way, the U.S. behavior appears at first glance to be a case of outrageous meddling in the domestic politics of another country. But in Israel, the passage of the budget, this time around, has very little to do with the budget itself: it has become inextricably linked with the fate of Sharon’s plan to withdraw from the Gaza Strip this summer.
If Sharon fails to pass his budget by March 31, the country will automatically go to elections, which would be held only days before the withdrawal is scheduled to begin in mid-July. Elections would therefore delay the plan and maybe even derail it.
With the budget now possibly the last main parliamentary obstacle to a pullout, for the prime minister and for the opponents of withdrawal the stakes are higher than they have been since Sharon announced his plan to leave all 21 settlements in Gaza and four in the northern West Bank over a year ago.
Hence the pressure on Lapid, and Sharon’s increasingly energetic efforts in the last few days to court him. For now, the 120-seat Israeli parliament is split more or less evenly on the budget. With at least a third of the ruling Likud party in open rebellion against him over his withdrawal plan, Sharon finds himself having to rely on the support of the opposition. That includes left-wing lawmakers – among them possibly even several Arab parliamentarians – who have long been bitter opponents of his, but want to see Israel exit Gaza.
If Sharon does navigate the budget successfully, he could yet find himself facing one more parliamentary obstacle – attempts to pass legislation requiring him to hold a national referendum on his plan. The recalcitrant lawmakers in his ruling Likud party have told him they will support the budget if he agrees to a referendum.
But Sharon has vehemently opposed this idea, arguing that such a decision-making mechanism is foreign to Israel’s system of parliamentary democracy. What is more, he says, his opponents have a hidden motive – to delay the pullout from Gaza, which could be accomplished by forcing Sharon to accept a national plebiscite.
Such a move would require new legislation, which could take months. Sharon also suspects that those calling for a referendum – they invariably oppose his pullout plan – will demand a special majority, maybe even two-thirds, in a bid to neutralize the Arab electorate, which would likely back the prime minister’s plan. Many of the rightist opponents of withdrawal do not believe the Arab citizens of Israel, who number 1.2 million out of a population of six million, should have the right to vote on issues of national importance.
But Sharon also fears that despite opinion polls which show two-thirds of the public consistently supporting his plan, his highly motivated opponents might do to him what they did when he held a referendum on Gaza withdrawal inside the Likud in May last year. Just three weeks before the vote, the Israeli leader held a seemingly unassailable double-digit lead in the polls, only to lose by 20 percent in the real vote, thanks largely to a successful campaign blitz by Jewish settlers.
Ultimately, the settlers – once Sharon’s firm allies when he was covering the territories in settlements, and now his sworn adversaries – are likely to be the prime minister’s greatest obstacle as the date for the evacuation draws nearer. Just last week, they gave Israelis a small taste of what is to come when the withdrawal gets underway: about 100 far-right protesters used burning tires to block a major highway near Tel Aviv during evening rush hour. It took the police 40 minutes to clear the road, during which time traffic was backed up several kilometers.
Some settler leaders have promised a widespread campaign of civil disobedience, including the blocking of major traffic intersections in a bid to stymie a Gaza pullout. By concentrating their actions in the center of the country, they believe the army and the police will be spread so thin that it will hamper the evacuation of the Strip. There have also been reports that some opponents of disengagement, as Sharon’s plan has been dubbed, might try to damage the country’s electricity grid.
Moshe Feiglin, a settler who led a campaign 10 years ago to block highways in protest against the Oslo Accords said the action on the Tel Aviv highway "just an appetizer."
"I am not trying to curry sympathy. I am trying to wake up a sleeping public," he said in a statement. "The simple man, even one who’s sitting there getting angry in his car, if this man is made to see that the house is burning, he begins to see that there’s a problem."
For weeks already, the settlers have been waging an increasingly shrill campaign aimed at undermining Sharon’s plan. Petitions urging soldiers to disobey evacuation orders have been circulated, with the backing of key settler rabbis.
In some areas, posters have been pasted on walls comparing Sharon to Stalin. At anti-withdrawal rallies, protesters hold aloft placards with the message: "Sharon The Dictator." Settlers have also donned Orange Stars of David, reminiscent of the yellow patch the Nazis forced Jews to wear during the Holocaust, to condemn the pullout.
Some settlers have relocated to Gaza to beef up the 21 settlements there that are slated for evacuation. In an effort to stem the influx, the military recently issued a decree barring Israelis from moving to the Strip. Even though the pullout is only slated to begin in July, the army is contemplating declaring Gaza a closed military zone as early as May to prevent hardliners from moving into the Strip in large numbers in a bid to block the withdrawal.
Israel’s security services, however, are not ruling out acts that are more extreme – like an attempt on leaders or on a major religious site. When Yigal Amir, an ultra-nationalist Jew, gunned down Yitzhak Rabin almost 10 years ago, he believed he could derail the peace process with a single act. Now security officials have reportedly beefed up the prime minister’s security.
But Sharon’s mind will be focused on the budget. If it does not pass, he knows it could be the end both of his term as prime minister as well as his disengagement plan.
