The late Prime Minister Ariel Sharon must have turned over in his grave on Anemone Hill when he heard Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s declaration at an Aug. 27 news conference about Israel’s victory in the Protective Edge operation. “We would have been happy to see [Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas] enter the Gaza Strip, rather than Hamas enter Judea and Samaria,” Netanyahu said.
Bring the Palestinian Authority (PA) into Gaza? The whole point of the disengagement from Gaza, with the evacuation of every last settler and soldier from the Katif settlement bloc, was its unilateralism. Sharon firmly rejected handing the Gaza Strip to the Palestinian president and committing to make it a down payment on a future permanent agreement between the sides. Sharon insisted that the PA would not be allowed to claim a scintilla of credit for the withdrawal from Gaza. Sharon’s heir to the premiership, Ehud Olmert, upgraded the Israeli disengagement from Gaza with the separation policy that cut Gaza off from the West Bank.
Since Hamas belongs to what Netanyahu defines as the greater Islamic State family, Israel cannot be expected to “give” the organization seaports and airports within the framework of a cease-fire agreement. On the other hand, in an Aug. 29 interview with Israeli TV Channel 10, Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon said the implications of a Gaza takeover were the return of the civil administration and the funding of the neglected services and infrastructure that Israel laboriously destroyed, in addition to the billions that Operation Protective Edge was already costing the Israeli taxpayer. Egypt has no intention of re-entering Gaza, either, and at UN headquarters in New York, no enthusiasm was recorded for Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman's proposal that the organization take the Gaza Strip under its auspices.
We are thus left with Abbas. But reality is far more complex than the story described in Netanyahu’s simplistic formula, “We would be happy to see [Abbas] enter Gaza, rather than Hamas enter Judea and Samaria.” Abbas' goal is not to gladden Netanyahu’s heart. He will not enter Gaza to prevent Hamas from entering Judea and Samaria. The PA will agree to assume responsibility for the welfare of 1.8 million Palestinians in return for a promise that Judea and Samaria, Gaza and East Jerusalem become provinces in a state of Palestine.
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