One of Ours

...Sharon hopes to guarantee from a troubled and violent disengagement two big prizes: the first, a territorial windfall in the West Bank underwritten by generous US compensation for "losses" in Gaza; and the second, a power vacuum in the Strip that should ensure civil war among Palestinian factions for generations...

...If Sharon is to persuade the US, and later the world, to buy his annexation of large swaths of the West Bank under cover of a "security fence", he has to use the seemingly benign withdrawal from Gaza to reinforce the message that the Palestinians know no other path than terror. As Ha'aretz 's veteran Palestinian affairs correspondent Danny Rubinstein observed, the killing of Yassin was less a blow to Hamas than "the final nail in the coffin of the Palestinian Authority in Gaza"...

...no PA policeman will dare lift a finger against Hamas. The Islamic militants will have free rein.

This is a recipe for anarchy and civil war, and there can be little reason to suspect that Sharon does not understand this.

The prime minister's disengagement -- should it ever come about -- would be the end of the occupation and its transformation into a military siege by land and water of a beleaguered, destitute and angry nation trapped behind a fence. Palestinian resistance, either as Qassam rockets fired at Israeli cities or the occasional suicide bomber slipping out, would doubtless be greeted by Israeli air strikes or land invasions.

By Sharon's reckoning, if Gaza can be promoted as the image of Palestinian statehood, a state in the West Bank will be stillborn.