Something creaked this week in the government apparatus. Differences of nuance, if not greater tension, are evident between the bureau of the acting prime minister and that of the defense minister. This is not just Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz's position, in favor of a second disengagement in the West Bank in light of the rise of Hamas, a position that was not coordinated in advance with Acting Prime Minister Ehud ("zero mistakes") Olmert. The evacuation by agreement of the market in Hebron and the violent evacuation of the nine houses in Amona were accompanied by short circuits in communication, different versions and mutual criticism among all branches of the administration. Among senior IDF people, there was evidence of a cynical approach that expressed a lack of confidence in the probity of both Olmert's and Mofaz's intentions with respect to the timing of the struggle against the settlers. As far as the General Staff is concerned, Olmert is still not Sharon and has yet to win the extent of trust and admiration that his predecessor enjoyed before his illness.
In Amona, the administration's exaggerated fervor came together with failures in planning and implementation on the part of the military and the police. The result, with the settlers' enthusiastic contributions, was a far bloodier incident than anything experienced in the disengagement. The clash had barely ended when the finger-pointing began: The Prime Minister's Bureau "took no delight," as was leaked, in the scenes and the planning, and the army believed that the police made excessive use of their truncheons.
The commanders of the operation clung to the pictures of the youngsters' violence (iron bars, cinder blocks, barrages of rocks) to justify the police response. But this does not explain why they did not go to the trouble of bringing the General Staff negotiating team to Amona and making use of the experience of officers like Brigadier General Gershon Hacohen, who quietly and successfully evacuated Gush Katif. Overall, the General Staff disappeared from the picture (where were all the senior officers from General Staff headquarters at the Kirya in Tel Aviv who had rushed to get their pictures taken next to the fortress in Sa-Nur?) while the Shai (Samaria and Judea) District was again revealed as the weakest of the police districts when it comes to putting forces into operation.
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At Amona, the police used intentional, and in part even malevolent, violence. Perhaps there was revenge here for harassment in the past, during the disengagement and in the recent events in Hebron, and perhaps violent release after hours of forced waiting under barrages of curses and stones from the settlers. At the end of the operation, while the dazed teenagers from the right were comparing the bruises they had received, a smiling group from the police special forces posed for a souvenir picture against the background of the demolished houses. The settlers were infuriated. But the police displayed total indifference. When two religious girls insulted a border policeman, he responded with an obscene gesture, which the girls did not even understand.
It is possible to see the reciprocal hatred as a result of prior clashes, but it seems that there is another explanation: The ethnic and status gap between the evacuators and the evacuees in Amona was deeper and more obvious than in Gush Katif. At the disengagement in Gush Katif many of the police felt sorrow and pity for the settlers, who were uprooted from homes they had nurtured for years. Many of the inhabitants of the Gush came from families that had immigrated to Israel from North Africa and had previously lived in the peripheral towns and moshavim of the western Negev. Among the religious settlers in the West Bank (and at Amona hardly any secular demonstrators were visible) there was a definite Ashkenazi majority. The police - Druze, Bedouin, immigrants from Russia and people of Moroccan origin - did not have a drop of sympathy for them, in addition to the fact that they perceived the entire confrontation as duplicitous and inflated. After all, it was a matter of demolishing empty houses, in which no one lived.
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