many others will resist. According to an informed estimate, some 5,000 soldiers and policemen will be needed to remove just one small "outpost," Migron, near Ramallah, which Sharon was supposed to have removed long ago according to the Roadmap. When dozens of bigger and more established settlements have to be removed, it will need a giant, quasi war-like operation, requiring a general call up of reserves, with all the political implications.
The army cannot just leave these territories with the settlements remaining behind. As long as the settlements are there, the army will be there. In other words, the implementation of the plan will not be quick and tidy, like the last night in south Lebanon, but a process of many months, perhaps years.
While the deployment in the areas that will be de facto annexed to Israel will be quick and effective, the transfer of the territories that will be turned over to the Palestinians will be very slow.
It is a complete illusion to believe that all this time the Palestinians will quietly look on. They will see the execution of a plan that they believe, quite rightly, to be a device for the destruction of the national aims of the Palestinian people. Clearly there will be no place in the Palestinian enclaves for returning refugees (not to mention any return of refugees to Israel itself). To call this structure a "Palestinian state" is a joke in bad taste.
If Sharon succeeds in executing his plan, a new chapter in the 100-year-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict will be opened. The Palestinians will be crowded into territories that will constitute about 10 percent of the original territory of Palestine before 1948. They will have no chance of enlarging this territory. On the contrary: they will be afraid of Sharon and his successors trying to remove them from what is left, completing the ethnic cleansing of Eretz Israel.
Therefore, the Palestinians will fight against this plan, and their struggle will intensify the more it progresses. All possible means will be employed: firing missiles and mortar shells over the separation barrier, sending suicide bombers into Israel, and so on. Probably, the violent fight will spill over into many other countries around the world, both on the ground and in the air. There will be no peace, no security.
In the end, the basic factors will be decisive: the endurance of the two peoples, their readiness to continue the bloody fight, with all its economic and social implications, as well as the willingness of the world to look on passively.
The idea of "unilateral peace" is strikingly original. "Peace without the other side" is a contradiction in terms. Learned people will call it an oxymoron, a Greek term meaning, literally, a sharp folly.