TOWARDS the end of her premiership, Margaret Thatcher sent a congratulatory telegram for the 75th birthday of the Israeli statesman and polymath Abba Eban, asking rhetorically: “How can one not give Abba Eban his due?” Eban, famous for his unfashionably dovish views and dry wit, remarked: “Actually, there are quite a few people in Israel who think it’s possible.”

Israel’s Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, will be thinking along similar lines after the resignation of his Finance Minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, in protest at Mr Sharon’s plan for unilateral withdrawal from Gaza. Mr Netanyahu worries that Israel’s removal of settlements will encourage terrorism. He declares: “I am not willing to be part of a process that ignores reality and blindly proceeds to establish a base for Islamic terror that will threaten the entire country.” While the Israeli Cabinet has approved the plan, public support for it has been slipping.

Mr Netanyahu’s concerns are not groundless, but they are misguided. The principal threat to Israel from suicide terrorism comes from the West Bank, not Gaza, while the moral and prudential arguments for an eventual Palestinian state are unassailable. The merit of Mr Sharon’s strategy is that he recognises these realities while having a shrewder assessment of how to realise them than his foreign critics generally allow for.

Mr Sharon is typically characterised outside Israel as an obdurate warmonger. When he became Prime Minister in 2001 The Guardian headline ran “Israel gives up on peace with Sharon victory”. Sir Gerald Kaufman, the senior Labour MP, in 2002 condemned Mr Sharon as a “right-wing thug” whose policies were “not only unacceptable in humanitarian terms, but … also seriously unsuccessful in dealing with the terrorism”. Last year Tony Baldry, the Conservative chairman of the Commons Select Committee on International Development, declared: “The construction of a security barrier higher than the Berlin Wall may bring the mirage of immediate security to Israelis, but the level of despair felt by Palestinians at being denied an ordinary life can only increase the supply of suicide bombers.”

Myths die hard. Increased security for Israeli civilians is not a mirage at all; Mr Sharon’s policies have been unambiguously successful in curbing terrorism. With the construction of a security barrier (not a “wall”, as anti-Israel campaigners habitually term it, but for most of its length a chain-linked wire fence that could be taken down within an afternoon) and the assassination of successive leaders of Hamas, the number of successful terrorist attacks within Israel fell by more than 75 per cent between 2002 and 2004. The breathing space that these policies have allowed Israelis has encouraged serious thinking about territorial compromise and the outlines of an eventual settlement with the Palestinians.

The dispiriting fact is that no negotiated two-state agreement is likely in the near future. Western commentators who speak of a two-state “solution” adopt a misnomer. A two-state arrangement, with Israel withdrawing to boundaries approximating the pre-1967 armistice line, is not a solution to the conflict, but an outcome of the end of the conflict. The end of the conflict requires something more deep-rooted: a changed relationship and mutual trust between Israelis and Palestinians. As an Israeli analyst, Dan Schueftan, says: “At this stage, it is extremely difficult to imagine how any amount of European funding or sponsorship could produce a mega-gimmick convincing enough to persuade Jews, except in the hard-core Left, to consider a refurbished version of the Oslo act of faith after that failed so miserably.”

This is the context in which Mr Sharon’s plan should be assessed. Israel within its pre-1967 borders was militarily indefensible. After the Six-Day War, in which Israel captured east Jerusalem, the West Bank, Gaza and Sinai, successive governments kept these territories juridically separate from Israel and treated them as bargaining counters for future negotiations. That consensus ended with the election of Likud governments in the late 1970s and 1980s, but since the collapse of negotiations at Camp David and Taba in 2000 and 2001 the political terrain has shifted again.

Israeli leftwingers have had to acknowledge the failure of the peace process established with the Oslo accord of 1993. Mr Sharon became Prime Minister because Yassir Arafat rejected the offer of an independent Palestinian state made at Taba, demanded a “right of return” for all Palestinian refugees — a course incompatible with Israel’s existence as a Jewish state — and declared a second intifada.

Mr Sharon, meanwhile, has taken the Right an important stage on from merely accepting the need for negotiations with the Palestinians, and has acknowledged that what he explicitly terms the “occupation of the West Bank” is untenable for Israel and for the Palestinians. His security measures have reinforced a consensus among Israelis for a strategy of defensive deterrence, withdrawal from settlements in Gaza, and direct negotiations for a Palestinian state. The prerequisites for a final settlement include Israelis’ confidence in the ability of the Palestinian leadership to crack down on terrorism and to make their administration of Gaza a success. Israel will feel secure enough to withdraw to the pre-1967 boundaries only when it no longer believes they are continuously threatened. On any realistic assessment, this will take time.

That is why Gaza is important. Mr Sharon knows that Israeli security is ill-served by the diversion of effort to protect 8,000 Jewish settlers among 1.3 million Palestinians. To the settlers’ anguish, he is evicting them as part of a wider plan to create the conditions for dialogue. The wisest course for politicians outside the region is to cease attacking Mr Sharon for not being able to create peace by fiat. The cause of confidence-building and direct negotiations has never wanted for meddlesome outsiders; it should be given a chance to flourish unaided.

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