From Geneva to Gaza: Implementing the Endgame Strategy of the Geneva Initiative‪.‬

Supporters of the Geneva Initiative have been more modest than its detractors in assessing this unofficial model agreement's role in shifting policy in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over the past year and a half. The debate stimulated by the Geneva Initiative after three years of post-Camp David policy coma in addition to the local and international support that the initiative received spurred Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to take his first political, non-military move since being elected in 2001. Prime Minister Sharon openly acknowledges that the plan to unilaterally withdraw from the Gaza strip and four settlements in the Northern West Bank (GNWB) came against the backdrop of the challenge posed by the Geneva Initiative. Sharon's senior advisor Dov Weisglass, in a revealing interview to the Israeli daily newspaper Ha'aretz, stated that "The Geneva Initiative is one of the factors leading to the pullout plan." [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]