Less than a week before its execution, disengagement from Gaza is already fracturing Israeli politics and society, writes Graham Usher from Jerusalem In the last week Israel has been rocked by two events that, in different ways, were grimly predictable. One, on 4 August, was the murder in the Israeli Arab town of Shfaram of four Palestinian citizens of Israel by an ultra-nationalist Israeli Jewish soldier. The second, on 7 August, was Binyamin Netanyahu's resignation as finance minister from Ariel Sharon's coalition government. Both were, in their different ways, actions intended to protest against Sharon's disengagement plan, due to commence in Gaza on 15 August. But whereas the first was intended to thwart its implementation, the second was intended to shape Israeli politics in the aftermath. As one Israeli commentator put it, with Netanyahu's departure "the disengagement era ended and the election campaign started." Eden Nathan Zada, 19, executed the killings in Shfaram. On 14 June he went AWOL from the army because (as he wrote in a letter left with the guard at his military camp), "I cannot be part of an organisation that expels Jews from their homes." He had recently moved to Tapuah, a settlement near Nablus known as a base for Israel's fascist Kach movement, with whose activists he was in contact. He was also, apparently, on a Shin Beth file aware. They were aware, apparently, that his was a profile that could explode into anti-Arab violence in the charged atmosphere of the disengagement. Despite this he remained not only "missing" but unlooked for and was allowed to keep his rifle -- before unloading it on bus No 165 in Shfaram's Druze neighbourhood. Zada was eventually killed when an outraged crowd stormed the vehicle. Shfaram was the worst attack on Palestinians in Israel since October 2000, when 13 were killed by Israeli police at the outbreak of the "internal" Palestinian Intifada in the Galilee. It was the worst individual act of Jewish violence against Palestinians since February 1994, when Barukh Goldstein (another disenchanted officer in the army) killed 29 at Hebron's Ibrahimi Mosque. Then the Israeli chorus had been that this was an aberrant act of abomination. Now the analyses were more sober and more realistic: it was an individual act, yes, but one nurtured in a collective, racist ideology the calculated intent of which -- as with Goldstein -- was to draw a Palestinian reprisal and so scuttle the disengagement plan. So far the Palestinian leaderships have refused to rise to the bait. In Israel the Higher Arab Monitoring Committee -- an umbrella grouping on which most Israeli Palestinian groups are represented -- organised a charged but peaceful funeral procession on 5 August and a partially observed strike throughout the Palestinian commercial sector. In the West Bank Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas urged calm while a cell from his Fatah movement ambushed a settler car near Ramallah -- and left a 10-year boy wounded -- in retaliation. But in general most Palestinians, inside Israel and out, want the storm to pass. They know there will be others. On 14 August, for example, mass rallies are planned at Jerusalem's Wailing Wall, by Israeli Jews to mourn the destruction of the first and second temples and to protest against the disengagement plan and by Palestinians to defend the sanctity of the Haram Al-Sharif. Unlike Shfaram, a Zada here would spark not only a national conflagration but also a religious one. And Netanyahu -- as he has done in the past -- has ratcheted up the temperature. In a characteristically dramatic move he submitted his resignation letter just as the Israeli cabinet was about to vote on -- and pass -- the first round of settlement evacuations in Gaza. "There is a way to reach peace and security," he wrote, but "a unilateral withdrawal under fire... is not the way. I am not willing to be a party to a move that ignores reality and blindly advances towards the establishment of an Islamic terrorist base that threatens the state. I am not willing to be a party to an irresponsible move that endangers Israel's security, divides the nation, entrenches the principle of retreating to the 1967 lines and will in the future eventually endanger the unity of Jerusalem". Netanyahu admitted that his departure would not stop the withdrawal, "since there is an automatic majority for it". It was, rather, driven by three readings of the post-withdrawal political landscape. The first was that his economic reforms for 2006 would not survive the political horse-trading that accompanies every Israeli budget, especially in an election year. The second was that internal Likud polls showed a decline in support for disengagement and an increased aversion to Sharon being the party's prime ministerial candidate. And the third is Netanyahu's belief -- and perhaps desire -- that both trends will be strengthened by renewed Palestinian violence, either during the withdrawal or in the aftermath. Netanyahu is not just expecting new Israeli elections and a third Intifada, he is banking on them. He may be right in his prognoses. But that violence may not be so much a Palestinian decision as a Palestinian response to those of Netanyahu's compatriots who, like Zada, are less concerned with the day after disengagement than the days still to come.
