Analysis: After Gaza withdrawal

By Nick Thorpe
BBC News, Jerusalem

"We are all Settlers," read the little, hand-printed posters, plastered from time to time across Jerusalem. "Support the Hilltop Youth!"

Some settler leaders have threatened to start a "civil war"

The top line is a reference to the claim that all Jews who have come to live in Israel regard themselves, in one way or another, as settlers.

Whether they choose an embattled caravan on an isolated hilltop surrounded by Palestinian villages, or a luxurious flat in an upmarket district of Tel Aviv.

The "hilltop" youth, in the second line of the poster, are the flower-children of the settler movement, with flowing beards or braided hair, clutching guitars in one hand, guns in the other.

'Civil war'

The Gaza withdrawal looks set to begin on schedule on or around 20 July.

It could take weeks or months, depending on the degree of resistance the settlers and their supporters put up.

Only around 8,000 settlers actually live in 21 communities in Gaza.

Palestinians today in 2005 are living in a prison Mahdi Abdul Hadi Palestinian Academic Society for International Affairs

But they claim the support of nearly 40,000 settlers living on the West Bank, plus a broad band of sympathy which reaches deep into the Israeli establishment, including the justice system, the army and the police. Many settlers - male and female - have served time in the army.

Some of the soldiers who will be asked to carry out the Gaza evacuation live or have lived at in the settlements. The army has already begun training its forces for the operation - both by land, and possibly also by sea.

Settler leaders, gathered in the Yesha Council, swing from calling for non-violence to dire warnings of the danger of civil war.

West Bank

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, after a year blustering and bludgeoning the Gaza plan through choppy parliamentary waters, can now be expected to try to mend some of the rifts which have appeared in his own party, Likud.

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon says Israel will keep 40% of the West Bank

Whether he can do that may depend on how much of the West Bank he can "promise" that the settlers there can keep.

His main rival in Likud, Finance Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, bases his rivalry on his opposition to the Gaza evacuation.

He has been quoted in the Israeli media as saying that Israel should keep 70% of the West Bank.

Mr Sharon is believed to favour over 40% - including the three main settlement blocks, Ariel, Gush Etzion, and Maale Adumin, as well as the Jordan Valley.

But this is totally unacceptable to the Palestinians, who welcome the Gaza withdrawal as a step to reviving the internationally-backed "road map", with its promise of a Palestinian state.

Jerusalem's role

Ariel Sharon and US President George Bush, whom he will visit next month, both agree that the Palestinian state must have "territorial contiguity".

But suggestions of a network of tunnels and over-passes, which would allow an overlap of First World Israel with Third World Palestine, have been dismissed by Palestinian leaders as unacceptable. "We are not mice. We are not moles," is a familiar refrain.

Palestinians will not settle for anything less than their own state

With Israel taking such bold, unilateral steps, the Palestinians have little choice but to take their own, much more limited unilateral steps - to put their own house in order - in both Gaza and the West Bank.

"Palestinians today in 2005 are living in a prison," says Mahdi Abdul Hadi, chairman of the Palestinian Academic Society for International Affairs in East Jerusalem.

"Whether the thousands in Israeli prisons or the 3.5 million living in divided prisons - Nablus is a prison, Jenin is a prison, Tulkarm is a prison... and Jerusalem has been isolated."

All the Palestinians can do in the current situation, he says, is divide up the "prison" roles between.

Palestinian legislative elections will take place in July, by chance just a few days before the scheduled Gaza withdrawal.

What no-one knows, and few dare predict, is what happens on the day after Gaza.

US pressure to end the "natural expansion" of West Bank settlements may return.

If it does, it could focus on the latest major settlement expansion plan - the government's intention to build 3,500 new homes, with a capacity for perhaps 20,000 people, between Maale Adumin and Jerusalem.

Palestinians say that would finally end their dream of a Palestinian state by completing the encirclement of East Jerusalem - their intended capital.

The Middle East road map envisions a freeze of "all settlement activity (including natural growth of settlements)".