Posted on 08/22/2005 8:13:21 PM PDT by Rummyfan
WHY GAZA? WHY NOW?
From Newsday’s report of the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza:
Palestinians Friday celebrated what they consider their victory over Israel...
‘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
Steyn's brilliance shows through again!
Thanks for posting.
Ping!
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.
Yup
Steyn, Victor Davis Hanson, and Ann Coulter are my three favorites. I learn so much from them and can only dream of writing like them, so I'll just say thanks.
Steyn brings pointing out the obvious into an art form. Bravo.
Beautiful! Thanks for posting this.
Such a true statement, and can be applied to nearly everything.
Ping...
Eureka! Finally I see it!
Give the Arabs FRANCE. When they have their own nation in Europe they will stop all terrorism.
As much as I enjoy Ms. Coulter, she doesn't belong in the same sentence as Mark Steyn.
Entropy... it's not just for science class anymore.
Good one.
Maybe the Frum thesis is dead on. What a great column Mark Steyn puts out on a regular basis.
I heartily agree. Nobody writes like Steyn.
I can see nothing close to sanity anywhere in the Middle East.
I choose to stand with Israel, despite the fact that Israel is not really an ally of the USA.
Israel is not a bastion of human freedom.
They are just a less obviously violent and virulent strain of a theocratic enemy than the Islamics of that loathesome, barbaric region.
If the numbers were reversed, and if the Jews were the majority population in the middle east...
But even thinking such thoughts is forbidden.
true, i don't need gaza handed over to see that the palestians don't want a state. To think that this is neccesary is to attribute innocence or at least naivete to the supporters of a Pal. state. they are neither. They are EVIL and know exactly what they're doing.
ping.
Thanks for posting this.
placemark
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