Good news for Israel and Palestine. _______ "I did not expect my leaving the government would stop the unilateral move," he said. "I understand the ambition to leave Gaza. I can't be part of a move that I believe is wrong, a move that will endanger security and divide the people." Netanyahu quits as Israel approves Gaza pullout ERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israeli Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu resigned in protest on Sunday as the cabinet approved the first phase of evacuations from settlements in the occupied Gaza Strip. The resignation of Netanyahu, Sharon's main rival in the right-wing Likud party, sent local markets reeling and showed the depth of division in the cabinet over the plan for "disengagement" from conflict with the Palestinians. But the departure of the highest-ranking minister yet to go over the pullout was too late to prevent approval for the forced evacuations of settlers, due to start after Aug. 15. The cabinet voted by 17 to five to back the first phase of the initiative -- removal of the settlements of Kfar Darom, Netzarim and Morag, isolated enclaves where resistance is likely to be among the strongest. Netanyahu said his resignation letter counted as a vote against the pullout plan and told reporters that the plan would harm Israeli security and could intensify Palestinian attacks. "I did not expect my leaving the government would stop the unilateral move," he said. "I understand the ambition to leave Gaza. I can't be part of a move that I believe is wrong, a move that will endanger security and divide the people." Sharon later named Vice Prime Minister Ehud Olmert as the new finance minister. Olmert, a long-time Sharon ally, has long supported the pullout plan. Right-wing opponents see the withdrawal as a capitulation to a Palestinian uprising, as well as setting a precedent for ceding land captured in the 1967 war, which also includes the West Bank and Arab East Jerusalem. The hawkish Netanyahu had long opposed removing all 21 settlements in the Gaza Strip and four of 120 in the West Bank despite the fact that it has the support of most Israelis. link
I read it here http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4390275.stm whether or not it will happen is in the hands of the settlers.
What a crazy place to live. I wonder where these people will go after they are 'evicted' they can't all move to government apartments ~ can they? ________ Gaza draws outside extremists into fray NETZER HAZANI, GAZA – The M16s were piled like firewood. Every man in the community had set his Israeli army-issue rifle and ammunition on a table to send a message: We will not train our guns on our own soldiers. But the image of nonviolence this settlement of 80 families hoped to send quickly faded when a Jewish extremist AWOL from military service opened fire last week on a busload of Druze citizens whom he presumed to be Arab. After the shooting that killed four, Eden Natan-Zada was beaten to death by a mob. The attack fed what some settlers see as an emerging gap between what they will do to stop disengagement, and what ultranationalist extremists may do to reignite the Arab-Jewish conflict in an effort to halt Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's withdrawal of settlers. The bloodshed, as well as the tension pitting protesters against policemen, shows Gaza's place as a battleground attracting footsoldiers who are from somewhere else. Gaza, it seems, has become the proxy war for the survival of the settlement enterprise in general - and the West Bank settlements in particular. Underscoring how precarious Israel's political situation is, Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu - a controversial prime minister in the 1990s - quit Mr. Sharon's government Sunday, citing opposition to the pullout plan. To people in some southern settlements, last week's shooting on the bus in the Druze village of Shfaram is a disturbing sign of what could lie ahead. "What he did with this shooting, it's a bullet in all of our heads," says Gavriel Yitzhak, a farmer and father of four who lives in the small settlement of Morag. Netzarim, Kfar Darom, and Morag are the first settlements to be authorized for evacuation after a vote Sunday by Sharon's cabinet. "If disengagement happens, there will be violence," says Mr. Yitzhak's wife, Nurit, frying up the eggplants from her husband's greenhouse, "but it won't be coming from us." For many settlers here who consider themselves the mainstream, the leadup to the disengagement is sparking a sharper sense of distinction between us and them. "Us" is the people who live here, the real residents who came mostly for a better life, who would like to stay but not if it means an outbreak of violence. "Them" is the people coming from outside, infiltrating Gaza and camping out in settlements where they're not always wanted. "Them" means the people going to the demonstrations, the people breaking the law, the people acting illegally, and in the worst-case scenario, the people ready to resort to violence. "All the protesters? They're from the outside," says Yitzhak. "The people who are from here don't go to those things." He doesn't support Sharon's plan either. The Yitzhak family hasn't packed anything in their spacious two-story home, and they don't plan to do so. If Israeli soldiers come to their door, they say, and order them to get out, they'll leave their things behind and let the army pack them up in a statement of protest. But they do not, they say, dream of physically resisting evacuation. "I have two kids in the army," says Mrs. Yitzhak. "How can I resist our own soldiers? But these guys," she says, with a tilt of her head to indicate other people, "they will fight until the last minute, and then maybe they will fire." Just a few houses away from where the Yitzhak family lives is a group of tents where activists from Yesha - the political organization that represents all Israeli settlers in the West Bank and Gaza - have set up shop. But the neighbors have begun to complain that these activists in the tents, most of them here illegally, are young and much more hard core in their politics than most of the settlers who arrived here 20 years ago. What's more, many of "them" have come unprepared, and have turned to asking the long-established settlers for food and other provisions. Many of the residents, already under the stress of not knowing where they'll be living this time next month, are growing resentful of having to help house or feed people they've never met before. Ruth Lieberman, a spokeswoman for Yesha, says that it has at least 2,000 activists who have managed to base themselves in Gaza to oppose disengagement. Gaza is now closed to nonresident Israelis. "We're telling everyone they should come in however they can without using violence, and if they get in, they should stay there," Mrs. Lieberman says. "If their presence helps the local people, great. And if it helps to prevent the disengagement, that's a positive thing." The typical profile of an activist ready to smuggle himself into Gaza is, analysts say, from a very different demographic than the actual people who live there. The activists - whether they lean toward civil disobedience or outright violence - are generally young men from national-religious backgrounds who grew up in the settlements in the West Bank. Men who are newly religious or messianic - those who think that the great struggle they're participating in could hasten the coming of the Messiah - are, according to security experts, more likely to resort to extremist behavior. In contrast, says Prof. Yossi Katz of Bar-Ilan University near Tel Aviv, the Gaza settlers generally come from so-called development towns in the south: places where immigrants from Eastern countries were sent. They went to Gaza, he says, mainly in search of a better quality of life, and not out of any core beliefs about Gaza being part of the Promised Land of "Greater Israel." "This is a real gap," says Mr. Katz, a geopolitics expert. "The people who are coming to Gaza from Judea and Samaria [the West Bank] and from inside the Green Line [Israel's pre-1967 borders], are people who think this is the first stage before the next stage of withdrawals. They're trying to cope with this issue from an ideological point of view ... but people in Gush Katif are not there for such strong ideological reasons." For these activists, he says, the disengagement plan is a "real threat" against everything they hold dear. "This is a real battle against the ideology that Sharon has adopted, in contrast with theirs." The result, he expects, will likely add up to more violence - and more trouble for Sharon's disengagement plan, with incumbent effects on Israeli-Palestinian relations. "There is a real ideological crisis going on ... and in a deep mental crisis you never know what people will do," he adds. "It's like the end of the world for some people." Of course, not everyone is acting as if the end is near. Some of the neosettlers who have moved into Gaza to oppose the pullout say they are making a statement - a nonviolent one - with their very presence here. "We came just last week," says Rivka Deutsch, a Jerusalemite who was watching the weapon-return ceremony. She, along with her husband and small children, moved to a bomb shelter in Netzer Hazani to protest the disengagement. About half of the settlement, she says, is now populated with people from somewhere else. "We'll stay, for however long it takes," she says. At the same time, she feels bad for the people here, she says. After all, she'll probably be back in her apartment in Jerusalem next month. That means that some, perhaps many people, realize that disengagement will happen regardless of how many activists show up. link
Bibi was the finance minister, and probably one of the only people in the Knesset who has a good grasp for capitalism. He's spearheaded a gradual change in Israel's economy away from socialism, and so far its been a success. His resignation caused Israeli investors to crap themselves. The economy here took a big dump. Bibi is first and foremost an economist, and very American in outlook. He's managed to do some good things in his tenure (economically speaking), but there is pressure from within the anti-disengagment wing of Likud to quit the government in protest. Bibi was the last holdout. I think for him staying would be damaging for his core constinuency. It says more about his political longevity than anything else, and ultimately it was bad for the country. Having said all that, I'm glad he's not Prime Minister.
