The Next Foreign Headache

One of the more implausible sights i've ever seen was a 114-room resort hotel on a beautiful, palm-studded strand of white beach ...

At the edge of a Jewish settlement in the Gaza Strip. The Palm Beach Hotel—the name seemed hilarious—was besieged by a serious fence topped with thick rolls of concertina wire and guarded by Israeli troops in blockhouses. There didn't seem to be many guests. Who on earth would choose to spend a holiday there? I had similar feelings about the Israeli settlers who lived nearby: Why on earth were they doing this? There was a cockeyed rationale for the Jewish settlements in the West Bank: Judea and Samaria were the heart of ancient Israel, and a modern Jewish presence there was a defensive buffer against the Arab hordes.

But there was no historical or security rationale for the Gaza settlements. There were merely 8,000 Jews, fanatics by definition, plopped down amid 1.4 million Arabs, a ridiculously provocative Israeli thumb in the eye of the Palestinians. "This is an ideological hotel," the manager of the Palm Beach told a British newspaper, the Independent, a few years ago. "It is here because this is our land, and we have to keep it."

The settlers will be leaving, involuntarily, this summer. The Israeli government has decided to yank them. That is progress, but movement of any sort in the Israeli-Arab dispute has proved potentially disastrous in the past. Indeed, several prominent U.S. diplomats told me last week that Gaza disengagement is—for the moment, at least—causing them more concern than the pacification of Iraq. That is progress of a sort too. For one thing, it's an implicit sign that things are going better in Baghdad, where the new, democratic, Shi'ite-led government was installed last week. But it is also an indication that the White House, which refused to talk to Yasser Arafat during George W. Bush's first term, may be about to get more involved in the diplomatic scutwork that attends the never ending Middle East negotiations. After all, a viable Palestinian state can no longer be an American afterthought. It is now integral to the Administration's signature foreign policy initiative: the nurturance of Arab democracy. It is no accident that both Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas are scheduled to meet with Bush in the next few weeks.

Why is the Gaza disengagement so potentially perilous? Some of the settlers are threatening armed resistance, but "in the end, we don't think many will actually fire upon the Israeli soldiers trying to remove them," says a high-ranking Administration official. A far more serious concern is what the Palestinians will do when the Israelis depart. "The pictures of the evacuation will be hard enough for most Israelis to swallow," says Shai Feldman, an Israeli security expert at Brandeis University. "But if we also see Palestinians looting and destroying the settlements, and dancing on the rooftops—as they did when we left southern Lebanon—then it will be near impossible to resume negotiations on a final peace settlement." Worse, if Palestinian radicals fire rockets at the Israeli settlers as they leave, it could trigger a resumption of major combat between the two sides.