Crawling from the Wreckage by Gwynne Dyer

who had been prime minister between 1996 and 1999. Their real goals were identical—to preserve the West Bank settlements and prevent the emergence of a Palestinian state—but Netanyahu tried to exploit the gap between what Sharon could say in public and what he actually intended to do in order to paint him as a traitor to the settlers’ cause and a sell-out to the left
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    Sharon saw Netanyahu’s challenge off, but was felled by a stroke shortly before the elections of March 2006. Further intrigues between Netanyahu and the radical settler faction in Likud had driven Sharon to walk out of the party, taking the less extremist members with him, and to found a new centre-right party, Kadima. With Sharon permanently incapacitated, it was Ehud Olmert who led Kadima to victory in the elections—and by then, Hamas had also won the Palestinian parliamentary elections. On both sides, the whole-hoggers were in charge
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March 23, 2006

AFTER THE ISRAELI ELECTION
    “It’s a trade-off,” said Dror Etkes, director of the Israeli organization Settlement Watch, just after Prime Minister Ariel Sharon carried out the dramatic withdrawal from the Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip last August. “The Gaza Strip for the settlement blocks; the Gaza Strip for Palestinian land; the Gaza Strip for unilaterally imposing borders. They don’t know how long they’ve got. That’s why they’re building like maniacs.”
    But they are going to have lots of time: Ariel Sharon may be in a permanent coma but his project is doing just fine. Nor is there any doubtabout what acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert will do once he is prime minister in his own right, with a solid majority behind him. In far blunter terms than Sharon had used in recent years, Olmert sketched out the new government’s policy last month.
    “Reality today obliges us to separate ourselves from the Palestinians and to remodel the borders of the state of Israel,” said Olmert, “and this is what I will do after the elections. This will force us to evacuate [some] territories currently held by the state of Israel [in the West Bank, but] we will hold on to the major settlement blocks. We will keep Jerusalem united. It is impossible to abandon control of the eastern borders of Israel.”
    In other words, there will be no more peace negotiations: the Palestinians will just have to live within the 680 kilometres of tall fences that mark out Israel’s new borders, in a pseudo-state surrounded and almost cut in half by Israeli settlements. The whole Jordan valley will stay in Israel’s hands, cutting Palestinians off from the rest of the Arab world except for one Israel-controlled border crossing into Jordan at the Allenby Bridge and one that crosses into Egypt from the Gaza Strip.
    The two hundred thousand Arabs living in the old city of Jerusalem are already cut off from the rest of the Palestinian territories by a ring of new Jewish suburbs and a maze of gates that they cannot pass through without magnetic cards. New settlements linking the existing Jewish suburbs east of Jerusalem with the settlement block of Ma’ale Adumim will push Israel’s frontier most of the way across the West Bank in the centre, effectively cutting off the northern West Bank from the southern part.
    All the big settlement blocks in the West Bank—Ariel, Gush Etzion and Ma’ale Adumim—will formally become part of Israel, sheltering behind the wall that divides them from the misery and desperation on the other side. Some isolated settlements will be abandoned, and the estimated 60,000 Jews who live in them will be moved to join the 185,000 people who already live in the bigger blocks. The Israeli army will police the areas that remain Palestinian, making incursions as necessary. And there you have it: the permanent solution to the Israeli-Palestinian problem.
    Israelis justify this unilateral “solution” with the argument that there is nobody on the Palestinian side to negotiate with, and with the