Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak on Wednesday said that while it is important that Israel tries to reach an agreement with the Palestinians, should these attempts fail Israel might have to act on its own.
"If it turns out not to be possible, we need to think about an interim agreement, or even unilateral steps. Israel does not have the luxury to remain in a stalemate," said Barak, according to The Jerusalem Post.
Dr. Mark Heller of Tel Aviv University told Xinhua Thursday that Barak's remarks were "probably a trial balloon," and that he would be quite surprised if Barak would be able to mobilize much support for this position in the cabinet or in the coalition government.
"He is the defense minister; nothing he says is absolutely irrelevant but I don't believe that on this issue he's representing a dominant position in the government," Heller said.
"I would be really surprised if there were followers in this direction," Heller added.
There has been near zero progress in the last couple of years in Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations, and many of the core issues that Barak referred to, such as a possible division of Jerusalem, the borders of the future states or what would happen to the Palestinians and their relatives that left or fled when Israel was established, have hardly been dealt with.
Prof. Barry Rubin of the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya said that what Barak was trying to do was to keep all options open in regard to the negotiations, but added that the current perception is that unilateral withdrawal does not work very well.
"Of course there is always the opportunity to change the deployment of forces, to dismantle outposts that were created but I don't think that this government is going to introduce a new withdrawal," Rubin added.
Prof. Benny Miller of the University of Haifa said the idea of a unilateral withdrawal has been tried on two previous occasions: in Gaza in 2005 under former prime minister Ariel Sharon, and in 2000 by Barak in southern Lebanon when he was prime minister.
The withdrawal from southern Lebanon was a purely military operation in which Israel pulled out its forces from a "security zone" that it had held since the first Lebanon war in 1982.
While the zone was established to prevent attacks on communities along the border, with the advancement of rocket technology over the intervening years, its strategic importance decreased.
In the 2005 unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, Sharon pushed through a pullout of not only Israeli military forces stationed in Gaza, but also of 8,000 settlers who lived there in small communities, in what was called the disengagement plan.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who served then a finance minister under Sharon, proved to be one of the move's harshest critics. The tension between them was one of the main reasons why Sharon decided to split from the Likud party to form the Kadima faction.
The basic argument behind Barak's latest idea, according to Miller, is that on the one hand, Israel cannot really maintain control over parts of the West Bank because of international criticism. On the other hand, Israel does not have a reliable partner for negotiations and agreement, so it needs to act on its own.
Miller argued that while there was substantial political support for both Sharon and Barak's actions in the past, the military, political, social and economic repercussions of the two previous withdrawals meant that such support would be hard to rally round this time.
Since the withdrawal from Lebanon, a cross-border raid and kidnapping of army troops by Hezbollah in 2006 sparked the second Lebanon war.
Following the 2005 Gaza withdrawal, Hamas and other militants rained more than 10,000 rockets on Israeli cities and towns, engendering Israel's Operation Cast Lead in December 2008.
"If it involves abandoning settlements it will lead to major resistance, especially in the West Bank," Miller said.
"In the West Bank, there is a much larger settler population ( than in Gaza) that is much more ideologically committed and has allies in the Israeli political system, including the Likud Party, " Miller added.
However, he pointed out that before Netanyahu was elected prime minister in 2009, he opposed the two-state solution. But a short while afterwards, Netanyahu declared his formal support for two states living side by side, in an unprecedented speech at Bar-Ilan University near Tel Aviv.
Miller said that Barak's idea might also get some support from the United States, in the sense that Israel is doing something concrete and moving ahead.
"If President (Barack) Obama is reelected in November, he might exert some pressure on Israel, so maybe it's in preparation for the day after the elections so that Israel will have a policy or strategy to move forward and not stay in the same place," Miller said.
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