Why Gaza? Why Now? ... Mark Steyn

‘This pullout is a result of our sacrifice,’ he [Mahmoud Abbas] said, ‘of our patience, the sacrifice of our people, the steadfastness and the wise people of our nation.’

Still, all was not calm among Palestinians. Two Hamas militants were wounded as they carried an explosive device that blew up accidentally near the evacuated Kfar Darom settlement…

Ah, well. Even when Ariel Sharon hands them a great “victory”, some Palestinians can’t stop blowing themselves up long enough to celebrate it. I’ve never subscribed to the notion that this or that people “deserve” a state - a weird and decadent post-modern concept of nationality and sovereignty, even if it weren’t so erratically applied (how about the Kurds then?). The United States doesn’t exist because the colonists “deserved” a state, but because they went out and fought for one. The same with the Irish Republic. By contrast the world deemed Palestinians “deserving” of a state ten, three, six, eight decades ago, and they’ve absolutely no interest in getting it up and running. Any honest visitor to the Palestinian Authority is struck by the complete absence of any enthusiasm for nation-building – compared with comparable pre-independence trips to, say, Slovenia, Slovakia, or East Timor. Invited to choose between nation-building or Jew-killing, the Palestinians prioritise Jew-killing – every time.

So now Ariel Sharon has given them Gaza. On the face of it, this has a certain logic: The Zionist enterprise foundered in this unpromising territory. No more than a few settlers ever showed any gusto for this particular turf and, with their offspring, in the end mustered no more than eight-and-a-half thousand Jews among one-and-a-half million Arabs.

Nonetheless, the Israelis could have held it without much difficulty for many years to come. Instead, in the short term, Gaza will decay even further into a terrorist squat fought over by Hamas and Islamic Jihad. And, in the long run, its strategic value – as the most appealing location from which to launch the more ambitious Islamist rocketry – will likely turn it into a latterday Taliban Afghanistan: jihad central masquerading as a political jurisdiction.

So why would Sharon enable such a move? If you talk to the more deluded disciples of the New York Times school of foreign policy analysis, they’ll tell you the Israelis have been forced into this by the pressure of world opinion and are doing it as a good-faith gesture to the Palestinians, to the broader Middle East and to the bien pensants of the European Union and the United Nations. I doubt the Israeli Prime Minister could even peddle that one with a straight face at an international conference. He knows the government of the Palestinian Authority is not a “partner for peace”, merely a sewer of corruption whose only political opposition is even more deranged and violent. And he knows the international community only have one response to Israeli concessions and that’s to demand more, even as they’re still flaying Israel for having the impertinence to withdraw from Gaza “unilaterally”.

A couple of years ago, I had a conversation with a British cabinet minister who was denouncing Sharon for the usual reasons – his “intractability” and so forth. I replied blithely that, au contraire, I thought he’d dismantle the settlements and withdraw from Gaza. The New Labour bigwig was stunned, and, thinking it over, so was I. After all, Sharon had won the 2003 elections in part because he opposed a pull-out from Gaza. I didn’t quite know why I said what I’d said, and I didn’t really have a rationale for it.

But, with the benefit of hindsight, maybe that was the point - that Sharon has come to understand, as Bush did after September 11th, that the glorification of “stability” invariably favours the bad guys. Under cover of “stability”, the situation always deteriorates. The world’s embrace of the Palestinian “cause” is now almost complete: Blow up a nightclub in Bali full of Aussie tourists and Scandinavian backpackers and within ten minutes someone will have identified the “root cause” as the lack of a Palestinian state. The current intifada has in essence been funded by European taxpayers – and the EU’s auditors don’t seem to care. The withdrawal from Gaza was celebrated with promotional materials bearing the slogan “Today Gaza, tomorrow the West Bank and Jerusalem”, which doesn’t sound awfully like a “two-state solution” but was nevertheless paid for by the United Nations Development Programme, whose logo appeared just underneath the slogan.

Taking their cue from the Palestinians themselves, these various forces have little interest in a Palestinian state itself, only in using the lack of one as a means to undermine Israel and its legitimacy – which in Europe they’ve done very effectively. A continuation of the status quo – whereby the Palestinians are preserved in perpetuity as “deserving” a state without ever having to earn one – would only see further remorseless deterioration for Israel in the world. In that sense, any change in the situation would be for the better – especially a change that makes Gaza not Israel’s problem but everybody’s problem.

Thus, the Egyptians have just deployed their own troops to the strip to replace the evacuated Israeli Defence Force. Why would they do this now the Zionist oppressor has fled and Arab lands are rightfully back in Arab hands? Well, for a very obvious reason: an Islamist squat in Gaza is a far greater threat to the Mubarak regime than it is to Israel. With the Jews out of the way, the Egyptian government can no longer avoid seeing Gaza for what it is. This is one way of re-engaging Arab nations in the grubby reality of Palestinian “nationalism”.

It was my National Review colleague David Frum who came up with the clearest assessment to date of the Israeli strategy: “Could it be that Sharon is calling the bluff of Western governments and the Arab states? By creating the very Palestinian state that those governments and those states pretend to want but actually dread Sharon is forcing them to end their pretense and acknowledge the truth.”

The Frum thesis sounds right to me. In Britain since July 7th, political figures have twisted themselves into pretzels trying to explain how suicide bombers in London are somehow different from suicide bombers in Tel Aviv – unwilling, even as the double-deckers are exploding across Bloomsbury, to abandon their fetishization of the Palestinian cause, and unable to see that in an ever more Islamified continent the Europeans are the new Jews. Maybe an Islamist statelet on the Mediterranean will concentrate even European minds.

This then is the audacious gamble of the Gaza withdrawal: the best way to demonstrate that the Palestinians are undeserving of a state is to force one upon them. It’s a dangerous move, but in a tough neighborhood there aren’t any other kinds. The Irish Times, August 22nd 2005

The Palestinians have never been interested in statehood. No one asks why they never created a state between 1948 and 1967 when Israel wasn't in the West Bank and Gaza. Or why the Palestinians haven't taken advantage of the Oslo Decade to establish the foundations for an independent existence. Its much easier to live off the dole of international charity and blame the Jews for your backwardness and then mass murder them out of sheer spite. Israel has called the world's bluff. The Palestinian issue is just another of the many guises of anti-semitism that have existed since Time Immemorial.

(Denny Crane: "Sometimes you can only look for answers from God and failing that... and Fox News".)

" It is simply surrender and craven appeasement of implacable murderers,"

- I cannot agree. It seems to me that, rightly or wrongly, Israel was losing the propaganda war to the terrorists and for what? For the sake of about 8,500 settlers who themselves are no slouches when it comes to fanatical beliefs that the Gaza was "theirs" - having been given to them by God some 4,000 years ago.
The costs for the Israeli army to protect these people from attacks must have been horrendous and, in the long run, could not be sustained.
By removing the Palestinians biggest argument to support their terrorist attacks against Israel, Sharon may have changed the whole political situation on the ground with one stroke - we will have to wait and see if his gamble works.

No one asks why they never created a state between 1948 and 1967 when Israel wasn't in the West Bank and Gaza.

Because. And how DARE you ask such an impolitic question! You You...Euro-centrist!

(Seriously) I don't think this will work & the IDF will be back in there shortly. But it's worth a shot, of course it's easy for me to say that sitting here in Mpls Mn. I will say this however...this far and NO FARTHER.

The Palis don't need anything to support their "argument", their argument is "death to the Jews".

What you fail to see is that the Israelis aren't arguing with the Palistinians. At any point in the last 40 years Israel could have quickly and efficiently driven all of the Palis into the sea. Israel's argument has always been with the few allies that believe in its right ot exist (forget Europe... think Britain and the US). It is an argument based on how Israel should respond to the Palis. The weak-kneed liberals in the State Dept have always asserted that Pali violence is a product of Israeli expansion, and they have used the plausibility of this to sway government and public opinion. What Sharon's actions do is remove the plausibility. When Cindy Sheehan says that the Iraq war is for oil and Haliburton, no one believes her, because simply observable facts contradict her points. Now the State Dept finds itself in the same place: they won't stop claiming that Israeli expansion is what "causes" Pali violence, but it will be as unbelievable as Cindy Sheehan.

You're mistake is in assuming that the Palis matter. They don't, and never have. No sensible Israeli gov't would take a moment to consider whether Israel's actions will reduce Pali terrorism, because nothing will. They must focus on what will give them a free hand to deal with it. That's the argument that matters, and it is the one that is being won with this move...

I don't think this will work & the IDF will be back in there shortly.

This is being done specifically so the IDF can go back in in a better strategic situation. When the IDF goes in now, they are a police force attacking subjects in "conquered" territory. When the go in in the future, they will be an army responding to invasion by another nation. It's a far better position to be in...

You could be right.

Personaly I'd like to see Abbas "do something" about terrorism in the PA. But He can't, and I suspect he doesn't really want to. The problem with the PA is by this stage of the game anyone who wants too make peace with Israel is at room temp., and has been for a while now.

Personaly I'd like to see Abbas "do something" about terrorism in the PA. But He can't, and I suspect he doesn't really want to. The problem with the PA is by this stage of the game anyone who wants too make peace with Israel is at room temp., and has been for a while now.

As my students would say, "True 'dat!"

The problem has always been that Israel is expected to behave towards terrorists the way that we would treat honest partners. That's not a problem with the Palis... it's a problem with Israel's allies...

" They must focus on what will give them a free hand to deal with it. That's the argument that matters, and it is the one that is being won with this move..."

- I agree 100% with your assessment. The argument that the Palestinians don't matter and never did (militarily at least) is correct. However, their "cause" has been a rallying cry for Islamofascists in every mosque worldwide for years now and their anti Jewish closet supporters in Europe have been onside with them every step of the way.
In a pinch, Israel could reoccupy the Gaza in a day if they ever wanted to.
In the meantime, terrorist attacks against Israel can no longer be justified as a "liberation movement" and those who continue to support them can now be seen for what they truly are - racists.
Just as an aside, although the US is keeping very quiet about the whole Gaza situation, I wonder just how big a role the Bush Administration played in convincing Sharon to take the actions he did? I bet it was a hell of a lot more than Clinton did when he brought his daughter Chelsea in to Camp David to help iron out the details of his failed peace negotiations with Arafat.
Throughout 8 years in office, Clinton's foreign policy adventures are now seen to be just delaying actions for matters that Bush is now trying to clear up. I'm convinced that the reason for this is that Clinton governed by polls. Unable to take international polls, he was paralyzed by indecision and opted instead for world apology tours which were highly popular but useless.

The state department is simply reflecting the wishes of the Arab state and European left pressure brought to bear upon them. Israel does not need the approval of Saudis to deal with the Palis any way they choose. Nor does our president need the approval of the European left to instruct his secretary of state to take whatever position he chooses. They are not in fact taking sensible positions, and the reason they aren't is pure pressure for appeasement, nothing else. You can wriggle into pretzels all you want. None of the actors opposed to Israel's existence are appeasable. None of the rhetoric matters. When you surrender, you are asked to surrender more, that is all. We are paying the murderers hundreds of millions a year, it is ridiculous to claim we are cleverly manipulating the situation. Transparently, we are the ones being manipulated.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.