Hillel Halkin Declares Victory

In today’s Jerusalem Post, Hillel Halkin writes about the Anti-Disengagement movement:

...In this they have succeeded. They have shown us what it takes to move 8,000 Jewish settlers out of a far corner of the land of Israel having no great strategic value or Jewish historical significance. Does anyone care to imagine what it would take to move 60,000 or 70,000 settlers out the biblical heartland of Judea and Samaria, which sits smack in the middle of this country, scant kilometers from Jerusalem?

Just the physical logistics of it would be mind-boggling. Although the Gaza Strip was easily isolable, thousands of protesters have slipped through the army's cordon. Even with its security fence, this is not true of the West Bank. An attempted evacuation of settlements from it could easily result in tens of thousands of protesters flowing to any one of them. The entire Israeli army couldn't handle this, not even if reinforced by the navy and the air force - and if military insubordination has been relatively minor this summer, it could swell to malignant proportions in such a situation.

In a word, it's not going to happen. The settlers can wipe the tears from their eyes and start smiling. The Palestinians giddily celebrating our departure from Gaza might as well make it as big a bash as they can, because they won't have an opportunity for another one soon.

This is an intriguing idea. It might be easier to accept if Halkin didn’t seem so sure about it:

A second disengagement from the West Bank is a dead duck, at least for the foreseeable future - and by the time the foreseeable future is gone, the only politician in Israel capable of carrying out such a step, Ariel Sharon, will be gone too.

What Halkin is less sure about is what to do next.
But in that, at least, he is in the same boat as the rest of us.

But weren’t we also sure, once upon a time, that somehow, some way, the Disengagement from Gaza was not going to happen either?

When the idea was broached back in 2003, the following appeared in Arutz Sheva under the headline Legal Commentator: Heavy Legal Obstacles On The Road To Uprooting Communities:

Relocating towns is not an impossible mission - we remember that it happened before in Sinai following the peace agreement with Egypt - but it is a very hard mission [in that it] requires legislation - possibly even legislation that requires a special majority of 61 MKs. This is a very very long legal process. Let's remember that the evacuation of the towns in Sinai took five years, more or less. And this time it's more complex."

And here we are less than 2 years later.
And no one knows what Sharon really has in mind for the West Bank.