JERUSALEM - Fresh off its election victory, the Kadima Party is already hard at work devising a plan to pull 70,000 of 250,000 Jewish settlers out of the West Bank. But in the absence of negotiations with a Hamas-run Palestinian government, no one should expect a new country called ‘Palestine’ any time soon.
Israel's plan, senior officials say, includes holding onto large swaths of West Bank territory housing tens of thousands of settlers, maintaining a military presence in most of the area and keeping the holy city of Jerusalem for itself.
In his victory speech Tuesday night, Kadima leader and acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said he preferred negotiations over unilateral action, but he would not wait indefinitely for a viable Palestinian peace partner. Israel's final borders, he said, will be set by 2010 with or without a peace deal.
Kadima officials told The Associated Press they will give Hamas a period of time — perhaps a year — to decide whether to renounce violent struggle and enter negotiations before Israel starts withdrawing on its own. During that time, Israel will be in close contact with West Bank settlers to find them alternative housing, said Otniel Schneller, a Kadima legislator who has spent the past few weeks formulating Olmert's pullout plan.
Palestinians fear Israel's unilateral imposition of borders will destroy any hope of establishing a viable, contiguous state, mostly because of Israeli plans to maintain and expand large West Bank settlement blocs. Israel says it has no obligation to coordinate its plans with a Hamas government dedicated to its destruction.
A new Hamas Cabinet was sworn in Wednesday by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, two months after the militant group swept parliamentary elections.
Schneller said Israel wants a future Palestinian state to have ‘territorial continuity.’ But in the next breath, he added: ‘We want to preserve as many settlements and as many residents as possible because just because we give up on land doesn't mean we believe it isn't rightfully ours.’
Olmert billed the election as a referendum on his proposed West Bank pullback. The results, though falling far short of an overwhelming mandate, confirmed that most Israelis now favor withdrawal — aware that holding on to all Arab land captured in the 1967 Mideast war threatens Israel's Jewish character.
But the extent of the West Bank pullout will be very different from last summer's withdrawal from the Gaza Strip because of the proximity of the territory to major Israeli population centers and the possibility that West Bank militants will start firing rockets at Israel.
Hamas, despite honoring a year-old cease-fire, has been working to develop rocket technology in the West Bank while smuggling in light weapons and explosives, in addition to improving communications and training, said an Israeli official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to reporters.
Militants in the Gaza Strip fired a Russian-made Katyusha rocket into Israel for the first time Tuesday, the army said, heightening Israeli fears about increasingly sophisticated weaponry that could also be used in the West Bank.
Moshe Eliasian, an Israeli resident of the Mitzpeh Dani settlement near the West Bank city of Ramallah, is among the thousands of settlers slated for evacuation. He predicted Olmert's plan will bring more bloodshed.
‘None of us are going to be safe, not in Judea and Samaria and not in the rest of Israel,’ he said, using the biblical names for the West Bank.
Israeli officials said the proposed withdrawal, at least initially, will entail the removal of settlers only, with the army maintaining a strong presence to prevent militant attacks.
‘The first stage will not include a disengagement of the military forces from the West Bank,’ said Lior Horev, a strategic adviser to Olmert and Kadima.
Olmert has said Israel's final border will follow the barrier Israel is building in the West Bank to separate itself from the Palestinians, though the path of the barrier could be adjusted. It will incorporate the three major West Bank settlement blocs — Maaleh Adumim and Gush Etzion outside Jerusalem, and Ariel, deep inside the West Bank.
Olmert says Israel will also maintain the Jordan River Valley as a security border. And Israel has already begun building a controversial West Bank project between Jerusalem and Maaleh Adumim, the biggest settlement, despite strong Palestinian and U.S. objections.
On one recent afternoon, bulldozers cleared land for a planned police station in the area, known as E1. In the distance, more land was being cleared at the eastern tip of Maaleh Adumim, jutting into the West Bank toward the Dead Sea and the Jordanian border. Nearby, workers put the finishing touches on freshly built apartment buildings.
‘They want to separate the south of the West Bank from the north and also the Jordan Valley from the rest of the West Bank and to separate Jerusalem from the other cities of the West Bank. So where is the good news for us?’ asked Ghazi Hamad, the editor of a weekly Hamas newspaper in Gaza.
The proposed withdrawal, said Israeli analyst Yossi Klein Halevi, ‘is about uprooting isolated settlements that can't be defended. It's not about creating an ideal Palestinian state.
‘That happens in negotiations, not in unilateralism,’ said Halevi, a senior fellow at the Shalem Center think tank in Jerusalem.