AS Israel braces for a long-term operation in the Gaza Strip, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's election promise to withdraw from large chunks of the occupied West Bank by 2010 seems dimmer than ever. The months that followed last summer's evacuation of the Gaza Strip, when Israel unilaterally withdrew from the coastal area after a 38-year occupation, served as a test case for a far more complex and wider West Bank pullout.
Under Mr Olmert's plan, Israel would pull out of 90 percent of the Palestinian area and strengthen its hold on several large settlement blocs. This plan, Mr Olmert has said, would be implemented with or without Palestinian agreement.
But a catalogue of dramatic developments since Israel's historic departure from Gaza have since cast a shadow over Mr Olmert's "realignment" plan, the central pillar of his coalition government. As a result, Housing Minister Meir Sheetrit, a senior member of Mr Olmert's Kadima party, said any hopes of implementing the plan have been dashed. "There is no realignment plan," he said. "There is no international support and no public support for it in Israel, without which the plan could never move forward."
The most fundamental change that followed Israel's withdrawal was the rise to power of a Palestinian government led by Hamas after the radical movement won a landslide victory in last January's parliamentary election. Hamas, whose charter calls for Israel's destruction and which refuses to recognise the Jewish state's existence, represents a deeply Islamist ideology inspired and supported by Israel's arch-foe Iran.
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