'Sharon was about to leave two-thirds of the West Bank'

By Elhanan Miller, Times of Israel, February 19, 2013
US President Barack Obama is due to arrive in Israel for his first presidential visit in March, and speculation abounds surrounding the true intent of his trip. Rafi Eitan, a former high-ranking Mossad official and government minister under Ehud Olmert—banned from the US since the capture of his most famous agent, Jonathan Pollard—says Netanyahu should await the president with a diplomatic proposal of his own: unilateral disengagement from the West Bank.

Former prime minister Ariel Sharon, who was advised by Eitan for years, was engaged in drafting exactly such a plan, which would include the annexation of roughly one-third of the West Bank to Israel, when he suffered a debilitating stroke in January 2006, Eitan told The Times of Israel.

At 86, Eitan—a long-time intelligence operative who oversaw the capture of Adolf Eichmann in 1960, and had a late-life improbable career as a cabinet minister and head of the Gil Pensioners party in the Knesset from 2006-9—is as sharp and eloquent as ever. This slight man, with his trademark thick-rimmed glasses, did not mince his words when speaking of what he perceives as fatal American mistakes in handling the “Arab Spring”—particularly at that crucial moment in June 2012 when the administration could have imposed a secular president on Egypt, Ahmad Shafiq—and by doing so change the course of that country’s history.

Relating to the Ben Zygier Mossad suicide scandal, Eitan said he believes that holding prisoners in solitary confinement may be justifiable if the secrets they divulge can potentially harm Israel’s national security. He refused to address the specifics of the Zygier case, but said that a number of prisoners have been held in similar conditions in the past; their names have all since been revealed by the media.

Israel should withdraw from the West Bank, even without a Palestinian partner. A month before prime minister Sharon suffered a stroke, in January 2006, he was on the phone with Eitan. Four months after Israel’s unilateral disengagement from the Gaza Strip, the two discussed a preliminary plan to leave the West Bank as well, while maintaining the maximum number of Israeli settlements under Israeli control.

“Sharon knew that we must disengage from the Palestinians in the West Bank too; that we can’t continue occupying a foreign people,” Eitan told The Times of Israel.

Sharon dubbed his plan “the mosaic separation,” because it left most Israeli settlements intact, allowing isolated Palestinian villages access to large urban centers through an intricate system of underpasses and tunnels.

“Arik [Sharon] said: Let’s divide Judea and Samaria and take roughly one-third for ourselves, leaving two-thirds for the Arabs,” Eitan said. “Under this plan, the Jordan Valley and the Judean Desert would remain ours.”

With the Palestinian body politic divided today between Gaza and the West Bank—while internal rifts within the PLO prevent “even the signing of an interim agreement”—Eitan said he would advise Netanyahu to implement the Sharon plan immediately.

“We must disconnect from them [the Palestinians] as much as possible,” Eitan said, adding that he would even favor a plan attributed to former foreign minister Avigdor Liberman of handing over the area known as “the Triangle” in northwest Israel—with its 300,000 Arab citizens—to the future Palestinian state.

Allowing Morsi to win in Egypt was ‘stupidity that will resonate for generations.’ “The military unequivocally decided that [Ahmed] Shafiq will be president, not [Mohammed] Morsi,” Eitan told The Times of Israel. “But the Americans put all the pressure on. The announcement [of the president] was delayed by three or four days because of this struggle.”

Immediately after Egypt’s presidential elections in June 2012, Eitan spoke to unnamed local officials, who told him that with a mere 5,000-vote advantage for Islamist candidate Morsi, the military was prepared to announce the victory of his adversary Shafiq, a secular military man closely associated with the Mubarak regime.

But secretary of state Hillary Clinton, Eitan said, decided to favor democracy at all costs and disallow any falsification of the vote.

“This is idiocy. An act of stupidity that will resonate for generations,” Eitan said. “I also thought Mubarak should be replaced, but I believed the Americans would be smart enough to replace him with the next figure. Mubarak would have agreed to that, but the Americans didn’t want that; they wanted democracy. But there is no real democracy in the Arab world at the moment. It will take a few generations to develop.

“The United States is a real democracy. But for the past 50 years I’ve been saying that when it comes to dealing with small nations, the Americans are a foolish nation.”