Greater Palestine
David Warren Online ^ | September 28, 2005 | David Warren
Snip :
It is also why the recent Israeli evacuation of Jewish settlements in Gaza has proved, and will continue to prove, a disaster far beyond Israel’s borders. The view of Hamas and Islamic Jihad has prevailed, in Arabic media -- that the Israelis were forced to retreat under the barrage of Islamist rocket and suicide attacks. The moral taken from it, is that terrorism works, and should be escalated to keep Israel and America retreating.
A look around Gaza itself, since the evacuation, must add weight to the cart of discouragement. The public consensus of U.N. bureaucrats, embassy diplomats, and other foreign officers was that removing Israeli settlements could only help advance the “peace process”. Privately, most of those I have ever had any communication with, know better, and speak differently; which is why I tend to think of this whole international class as “professionally naïve”.
Look around Gaza, after the Hamas-sponsored victory parades, with their exhibitions of weapons and psychopathic slogans and acts, and what is there to see? Since Israel's exit, the “joyous Palestinians” have desecrated then torched all the synagogues left behind, looted and destroyed all the greenhouses that philanthropists had bought up to provide new sources of employment, and stepped up cross-border attacks on Israeli targets within Katyusha rocket range. Worse, they have effectively stormed down the frontier with Egypt, creating what increasingly resembles a Somali-style free trade zone for weapons, and opening new and more intimate contacts between Palestinian terror interests and the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.
Palestinian “terrorists of fortune” were already being fed through Syria into the Sunni Triangle of Iraq, where their corpses regularly wash up in considerable numbers after American and Iraqi offensives. But now there are also numerous reports from Lebanon, of Palestinian terrorists being inserted into the Bekaa Valley and other lawless districts, to do the work of the departed Syrian occupiers in fomenting Levantine chaos. Jordanian authorities are increasingly alarmed by Palestinian underground activities in Amman and elsewhere. And within the West Bank itself, attacks on Christian Palestinian settlements, such as the recent pogrom at Taybeh near Ramallah, suggest an accelerated breakdown of civil authority, to which the unilateral withdrawal of Israeli forces can only contribute.
For two generations, Palestinian society was radicalized, by a psychotic leadership, at first in a secular, socialist, pan-Arabist direction, but more recently, and more successfully, in an Islamist one. Far from being contained by the counter-productive “peace process”, the Palestinian problem is now metastasizing throughout the region, like a long-nurtured cancer. |
