Sharon and others in his government said they are confident a majority in Israel backs such a plan. This new Israeli strategy is being pushed unilaterally by the Zionist rulers to legitimize their long-term grab of Palestinian lands in the occupied territories and make the Israeli state more secure from “terrorist attacks.”

The plan includes annexation to Israel of a number of the largest West Bank settlement blocks, withdrawal of Zionist settlements from Gaza, retention of military control over both occupied territories, and refusal of the right of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees to return to their land. U.S. president George Bush declared support for this proposal in mid-April—a shift from Washington’s previous public stance on the settlements.

Israeli ultrarightists campaigned for maintaining control of all settlements and organized protests against any pullout from Gaza. These forces succeeded in getting a majority in the May 2 nonbinding Likud vote, a result anticipated for weeks by most observers.

On April 27, Sharon had stated in an interview with Israeli TV Channel 10 that his government’s response to Palestinian protests will be even more punishing than at present, once his “disengagement plan” is enacted and settlements have been pulled out of the Gaza Strip.

Sharon claimed that with the pullout completed, Palestinians would not be able to say they are resisting direct occupation. “Since we will not be in their territory, there will be no room for this argument anymore, and the reactions will be much harsher,” he said.

“After this failure, the Israeli government should immediately resume negotiations with the representatives of the Palestinian people,” said an aide to Palestinian Authority president Yasir Arafat, after the May 2 vote.

As the debate has unfolded, Tel Aviv has continued its more than month-long offensive against the Palestinians. The majority of the raids have been targeted assaults aimed at wiping out the leadership and most active cadres of political factions and armed groups that have continued to organize resistance to Israel’s occupation, focused in particular on Hamas and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades—an armed group with ties to the Palestinian Authority.

Eight Palestinians were killed in Israeli raids on the West Bank over April 24-25, among them a lecturer at the Arab-American University in Jenin. Israeli troops said they killed him by mistake because he matched the description of a “wanted Hamas operative.” Israeli forces have assassinated two central Hamas leaders over the past month. On April 28, Israeli soldiers shot and killed Thair Abu Surur, accused of being a member of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, on the outskirts of a Jewish settlement near Jenin on the West Bank. Ali Barghouti, the nephew of the imprisoned leader of the Brigade, Marwan Barghouti, was arrested the next day, less than a week after he and 19 others had been instructed to leave the Palestinian Authority headquarters by Arafat in a bid to avoid an Israeli raid on the complex.

Israeli armored vehicles and troops entered the West Bank town of Tulkarm earlier in the week and began conducting house-to-house searches. Two Palestinians—claimed by Israeli officers to be local leaders of Hamas and Islamic Jihad—were killed in the operation. That week, the Israeli Army also raided the Khan Yunis camp in Gaza, destroying six homes and damaging five others, and the Al-Farah camp near the West Bank town of Nablus, where Subhiya Abu Libada, 50, was killed.

Tens of thousands of Gaza Strip settlers used the April 27 celebrations of Israeli Independence Day to demonstrate their opposition to Sharon’s plan. The day marks the establishment of the colonial-settler state in 1948. Palestinians refer to it as al-Nakba—the catastrophe.

Following the establishment of Israel the Zionist rulers launched a war, extending their grip over 78 percent of historic Palestine and driving hundreds of thousands of Palestinians into exile. A subsequent 1967 war extended Israeli control to include the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The day before the celebrations Israeli soldiers killed a 14-year-old boy and wounded a 15-year-old girl who had wandered near the military cordon encircling the Nissanit settlement in northern Gaza. Some 7,500 Israelis live in the Gaza settlements, or less than 1 percent of Gaza’s population, but cover more than one-fifth of its land. Some 1.3 million Palestinians are jammed into the remaining territory.

The task of maintaining a permanent military cordon around the settlements in Gaza, a center of political and military resistance to the occupation, represents an insoluble security headache for Tel Aviv.

Both Tel Aviv and Washington present the relocation of the Gaza settlers as a magnanimous gesture to the Palestinians.

Sharon’s plan would formally annex five West Bank settlements and the surrounding land, where some 75 percent of the 223,000 West Bank settlers currently live.

According to the plan’s official text, Tel Aviv would control the movement of both people and goods to and from Gaza, and maintain its grip on “taxation arrangements and the customs envelope.”

The Israeli regime would also “supervise and guard the external envelope on land [and] maintain exclusive control in the air space of Gaza, and will continue to conduct military activities in the sea space of the Gaza Strip.” The plan leaves open the possibility that the southern border with Egypt may be turned over to Egyptian border control at a later date. Sharon’s government has also announced plans to build a massive trench along the Israel-Egypt border to counter the construction of supply tunnels by Palestinian fighters, according to an April 28 AFP dispatch.

The “disengagement” plan states that, “Israel will examine, together with Egypt, the possibility of establishing a joint industrial zone on the border of the Gaza Strip, Egypt and Israel.” It added that Tel Aviv may leave in place the Erez Industrial Zone inside Gaza, if “appropriate security arrangements” are established. Employing 4,000 people, the zone is an open-shop, low-wage investment area in which thousands of Palestinian workers toil.  
 
 
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