The politics and economics of Israeli disengagement, 1994–2006

Abstract

During the last decade a new lexis of vocabulary has entered Middle Eastern politics. From separation to disengagement, and from security fence to barrier or wall, we have grown accustomed to using this new terminology of peacemaking in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. In civil terms, this process could be characterized as arranging the terms of a divorce for two parties who no longer show any signs of being able to reconcile their differences through mediation.' Failure to agree even on the basic framework of the separation, however, has led one party Israel to prefix 'disengagement' and 'separation' with the word 'unilateral'. This article, as a result, aims to trace the roots and history of the Israeli policy of disengagement or separation, and examines how it developed into the dominant peacemaking policy of the post-Oslo era. It also looks at how separation became so significant despite initial scepticism about its workability from three of Israel's five prime ministers who served in the period from 1992 to 2006.2 The Israeli rationale for its unilateral policy of disengagement from the Palestinians has been consistently driven by its self-determined physical and demographic security needs. In other words, support for the implementation of disengagement within the Israeli political elite, and the wider general public, increased as the number of attacks from Palestinian groups on Israel rose, and the perceived threat to the Jewish majority in the land from the West Bank to the Mediterranean grew.3 However, the major impact of the policy on both Palestinians and Israelis has been, and will be, felt in the economic sector. The article argues that the policy of disengagement, while improving the personal and demographic security of Israelis in the short term, is damaging both the Israeli and Palestinian economies. This, in turn, could lead to an intensification of the political conflict. As we shall see, disengagement is likely to fail to achieve its basic goal of separating Israelis and Palestinians, and ending the points of friction between the two sides.