Sharon's Disengagement Plan: Why Not Vote?

Mark Seal noted in Friday’s edition of Ha’aretz that "the organized American Jewish community is strangely silent" about Ariel Sharon's disengagement plan:

After the cabinet endorsed the Gaza withdrawal, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, American Jewry's central political body in its relationship to Israel, declined to take a position in support of the effort.

Even after the Knesset ratified the plan, there are virtually no American Jewish voices enthusiastically supporting Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's vision.

If Seal read the articles by Caroline Glick and David Horovitz in Friday’s Jerusalem Post, he might better understand why.  Glick opposes the plan on both practical and moral grounds:

Like Hizbullah in Lebanon, the terrorists in Gaza will be viewed by the entire global jihad network as having defeated Israel. The price we paid for our precipitous withdrawal from Lebanon was the Palestinian terror war. What should we expect after we have Hamas, Fatah and Hizbullah terror cells operating openly five kilometers from the power station in Ashkelon? . . .

[T]he plan, if enacted, will provide a precedent for the destruction of all or most of the remaining Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria with their population of some 250,000 Israelis. . . . This week, the public debate shifted its attention . . . to the question of whether it is moral to ethnically cleanse the territories of their Jewish residents . . .

Horovitz’s article is an interview with Israel Harel, former secretary-general of the Council of Jewish Communities in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, in which Harel notes that Sharon has not come to the settlers to make the case for disengagement:

Even today, Harel argues at one point, the pioneering spirit among Gaza settlers is such that, had Sharon come to Netzarim and Kfar Darom, and persuasively explained to residents why their presence was no longer beneficial and shown them where they were truly needed now, "they'd have cried, but they'd have packed up." . . .

"Two months before he unveiled disengagement, Sharon declared Netzarim to be as important as Tel Aviv. By which he meant that leaving Netzarim was as dangerous as leaving Tel Aviv -- in terms of the impact it would have on the mindset of the enemy. The chief of General Staff said the same thing . . . .

[The settlers] see a weak country and a weak prime minister, and they feel that if they don't hold firm, the whole country will fall. The terrorists will know they have won. That's the raison d'etre of all the opposition. . .  The PA Web sites are already celebrating victory."

And now, if he had something real to say to justify disengagement, "he would have come and said it, and succeeded in convincing them [the Gaza settlers]." But he hadn't, so he couldn't, and he didn't.

Sharon's previous position of "Netzarim as important as Tel Aviv" was justified and real, Harel insists. "He won the elections on it. And laughed at [Labor's leader Amram] Mitzna for saying the opposite. And then he became Mitzna."

Yossi Klein Halevi, who supports the disengagement plan, also wrote about it in last week’s Jerusalem Post:

Those of us who support unilateral withdrawal need to be honest: The settlers' rage against us is understandable. Yes, we believe that leaving Gaza and its demographic and moral nightmare is an existential Jewish interest. But our decent motives are understandably irrelevant to the settlers. We are, after all, about to destroy their life's work, their love offering to the state.

No democratic society, as far as I can tell, has ever initiated the destruction of its own thriving communities -- which Israel's democratic governments had not only established and encouraged but upheld as models of the national ethos.

The settlers have every right to nonviolently resist their evacuation. They also have the right to block the streets and the entrances to our cities, just as the state has the right to arrest those who violate the law. . . .

For the settlers, withdrawal isn't just a personal but a national hurban [destruction]. They warn -- reasonably -- that the Kassam rockets now falling on Gush Katif will be redirected at Ashkelon, with its oil refinery and port.

More intangibly but no less compellingly, they warn that uprooting Jewish communities, especially under fire, will signal the unraveling of our national will and, perhaps, even of Zionism itself.

Shouldn't there be a referendum on this -- especially since Sharon was elected on a platform that opposed disengagement?  Should'nt these issues be debated and voted upon by the public, to provide a moral and practical endorsement of the plan -- especially if (as reported) the plan commands the support of more than 60 percent of the Israeli public?

I put this question earlier this month to one of Israel's leading commentators, someone who supports disengagement but strongly opposes a referendum.  His answer surprised me. 

It is true, he said, that nearly two-thirds of the public supports the plan, but 20 percent of that public consists of Israeli Arabs (nearly all of whom support it).  In terms of the Jewish vote, the plan does not command a majority, and a referendum would make that clear.