A Peaceful Evacuation Building a Multi Project Battalion by Leading Upward推荐.pdfVIP

6 A Peaceful Evacuation: Building a Multi-Project Battalion by Leading Upward by Alexander Laufer, Zvi Ziklik, and Dora Cohenca-Zall The Turbulent Birth of the Unilateral Disengagement Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon shocked the entire political spectrum on December 18, 2003, when he announced: “...if in a few months the Palestinians still continue to disre- gard their part in implementing the Road Map, then Israel will initiate the unilateral security step of disengagement from the Palestinians... The Disengagement Plan will include... a change in the deployment of settlements, which will reduce as much as possible the number of Israelis located in the heart of the Pal- estinian population... This reduction of friction will require the extremely difficult step of changing the deployment of some of the settlements...” Then, on February 3, 2004, Sharon clarified that the disengage- ment would primarily be from the Gaza Strip: “It is my intention to carry out an evacuation—sorry, a relocation—of settlements that cause us problems and of places that we will not hold on to anyway in a final settlement, like the Gaza settlements.” 149 150 Mastering the Leadership roLe in project ManageMent Sharon, who was one of the settlement movement’s staunchest allies, outraged and alienated many of his right-wing nationalist sup- porters, while eliciting startled disbelief from his left-wing opponents in Israel. He had been elected on the mandate to protect the settle- ments, which he described as being “no different from Tel Aviv.” He applauded the strategic value of Jewish communities such as Net- zarim in the Gaza area, declaring that “th