Sharon and Unilateral Democracy

In Now, Forward: Israelis Must Finish What Sharon Began, Yossi Klein Halevi writes in the Washington Post about Sharon and concensus:

But Sharon had also learned from his mistakes and, this time, understood the need for consensus, especially because a long-term war against terrorism requires the nation's patience and fortitude.

Sharon restored consensus, in part, through uncharacteristic restraint, declining to unleash the Israeli army until he was certain that the left would back him. And so he patiently waited, even as buses and cafes were exploding. When he finally ordered the reinvasion of the West Bank following the Passover massacre in March 2002, a year after he took office, some army reservist units reported more than 100 percent response: Even some people who hadn't been called showed up anyway. It was the antithesis of the Lebanon war, when antiwar demonstrators protested in Tel Aviv while soldiers were fighting at the front.

When it comes to fighting the terrorists, concensus here refers to the popular concensus of the people, and in this regard--yes there was a concensus.

But there is another area where Halevi talks about Sharon's concensus:

...Withdrawing from Gaza was likely to be the first phase of a Sharon plan to establish Israel's de facto borders.

...With Sharon's passing from the scene, there is no father to turn to for protection. We're on our own. Yet, because he has steered Israel away from the impassioned excesses he once embodied, his legacy is clear: on the military front, resolve against terrorism; on the political front, consensus in times of threat and a pragmatic approach that replaces the fantasy politics of the left and right.

Here, the concensus is political and not of the people, and the Disengagement falls into this--the political front--and not the military front. And that is a problem. Why is the Disengagement described as a product of a political and not a popular concensus?

Because it wasn't. But was there really a political concensus?

A year ago Aaron Lerner asked:

Is it "democratic" for Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who brought his Likud party a landslide victory in an election campaign that focused on one issue --unilateral withdrawal - to suddenly embrace and implement the very position he explicitly and emphatically campaigned against without going back to the voters?

Is it "democratic" for Likud Party Chairman Ariel Sharon to commit to honor the outcome of a referendum of Likud Party members on unilateral withdrawal - and then ignore the vote when he lost the referendum by a landslide?

Is it "democratic" for Likud Party ministers Netanyahu, Livnat and others who openly say that they know that Sharon's disengagement plan is a terrible mistake that Israel will pay dearly for - but opt to vote for the plan out of personal interests?

Is it "democratic" for Prime Minister Sharon to fire ministers before the vote on the disengagement plan in order to insure the passage of the plan?

The Disengagement was the product of many things, but concensus was not one of them. This is true not only on the popular level, but even on the political level within the Likud the road was far more rocky than implied in Halevi's description. Forever the general, Sharon bulldozed what he saw as the right strategy regardless of the inconvenience of opposing opinion.

Democracy is not a unilateral system. Whether the plan was right or wrong, the Disengagement was carried out in such a was as to sidestep any possible opposition. The creation of Kadima seems like more of the same.

Sharon did not create concensus. He merely bulldozed through--or ignored--the opposition.

Update: Soccer Dad points out that in a post from last year Biur Chametz (Tearing for the purpose of mending?) that not only noted that "In his zeal to push forward the "disengagement" plan, it seems at times as if Sharon is going out of his way to tear Israeli society apart," and lists some of the reasons, but also suggests a reason of his own--namely that Sharon wanted to avoid withdrawing from the West Bank:

How do you withdraw from Gaza without leaving the clear impression that the natural next step is to withdraw from Judea and Samaria? Isn't that the greatest risk of disengagement - that it will naturally be perceived as phase one in a unilateral Israeli Plan of Phases?

The answer: You make the withdrawal from Gaza as painful as possible. You goad your opponents into radical acts of civil disobedience and refusal of military orders. You know some hotheads on the margins will even get violent. You plant - or at least tacitly support others who plant - phony accusations of assassination plots. You let the police preemptively board buses of protestors headed to a demonstration declared illegal. And so on and so on.

And you ask the Americans for a couple billion dollars in aid to finance the massive cost of redeployments, reconstruction and compensation. Let them feel the pain too.

And when, a year or two down the line, the Arabs or the Europeans or the Americans call on Israel to take the next logical step and pull out of Hebron, or central Samaria, you can point to the social devastation left in the wake of the Gaza "disengagement". Impossible, you say. Look what Gaza did to us. We can't take any more, and no government will dare even try.

Is that really Sharon's thinking? I hope so, since otherwise I can't conceive of a rational explanation for his behavior.

Will it work? No, not in the least. At most, it might give us a reprieve for no more than a decade.

I wrote a post last year quoting Hillel Halkin along similar lines:

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.

...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.

Now we know that Sharon had us fooled on this score too, and even Halkin reconsidered the possibility of a second Disengagement.

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