Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (46410)	5/23/2004 12:27:05 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793955

The Gaza Paradox Israel is damned if it stays, damned if it goes. BY MICHAEL B. OREN - WSJ.com Mr. Oren, a senior fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem, is author of "Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East" (Oxford, 2002). JERUSALEM--The father of an Israeli soldier recently killed in Gaza blamed his son's death on Ariel Sharon and his refusal to evacuate the strip. The same day, paradoxically, another grieving father whose son died in the same battle denounced Sharon for his very willingness to withdraw. These pained accusations followed a turbulent two weeks that began with the murder of a pregnant Jewish woman and her four daughters by Gaza gunmen on the same day Sharon's own party rejected his Gaza detachment plan, and concluded with Palestinians brandishing the body parts of Israelis soldiers killed in Gaza. The trauma of these events has riven Israeli society between the two irreconcilable positions expressed by the bereaved parents. The right believes that the best way to fight terror is to maintain Israel's occupation of Gaza and the beleaguered Jewish settlements there, while the left claims that terror will only end with Israel's complete evacuation and the renewal of talks with the Palestinians. Both sides, however, are tragically and disastrously wrong. Threatened with destruction since its birth, Israel exists thanks to an unwritten agreement between the state and its citizens. Israelis allow the state to send them off to battle, and perhaps to die, but only when a solid majority of them believe that their vital security is at stake. If most Israelis consider a confrontation unnecessary or avoidable, they will simply refuse to fight. Such is the situation in Gaza today where a commanding majority of the population is no longer willing to risk their--or their children's--lives defending 7,500 settlers from the million Palestinians surrounding them. They do not regard Gaza as part of their spiritual and historical homeland, nor see how Israel can remain within the densely populated strip and retain its Jewish and democratic character. By insisting on perpetuating the status quo in Gaza, then, the right threatens to undermine the implicit pact that binds Israeli society--which enables the state to survive. The left, on the other hand, holds that the recent deaths of 13 Israeli soldiers in Gaza were a direct result of the government's settlement policy and its refusal to seek Palestinian partners for peace. The 13, however, died not defending settlements but destroying tunnels used to smuggle explosives into Gaza, and the factories that produce Qassam rockets. Those explosives killed 10 Israelis in a suicide-bomber attack on the coastal city of Ashdod, and the rockets have struck Jewish towns and villages outside of the strip. Israel's withdrawal from Gaza will do nothing to lessen these threats--on the contrary, it will almost certainly enhance them, enabling the Palestinians to acquire even deadlier missiles capable of hitting Tel Aviv. Further escalation would result from resuming talks with Arafat and his Palestinian Authority. Arafat, who publicly congratulated the Hamas "martyrs" of Gaza and called for a million more like them to liberate Jerusalem, has also stressed the need to drive Israel forcibly from Gaza and deprive it of a peaceful pullout. Any attempt to grant the PA responsibility for security in Gaza will likely repeat the experience of Bethlehem, on the West Bank, where a similar experiment led to the last two suicide bombings in Jerusalem and 18 Israeli dead. Both of the bombers came from Bethlehem. Clearly Israel cannot remain in Gaza, but neither can it negotiate a phased withdrawal. The evacuation that the bulk of Israelis demand, therefore, can only be accomplished unilaterally while acting to maintain Israel's deterrence power. Israel will also have to reserve its freedom to frustrate weapons smuggling into Gaza by land and by sea, and to strike at terrorist targets inside the strip. Though proposals have been raised for deploying international peacekeepers in Gaza, such a force will surely lack the mandate and the means for effectively rooting out terror, and will probably serve to shield the Palestinians as they continue firing at Israel. Someday a Palestinian leadership may emerge that is capable of ensuring a quiet border, but until it does, there can be no substitute for preserving Israel's ability to defend itself, by itself, from Gaza. One can only sympathize with the anguish of fathers who have lost their sons in Gaza--I, too, have a son serving in the territories--but that compassion must not obscure Israel's course. At all costs, Israel must avoid repeating its hasty retreat from Lebanon in May 2000, which emboldened the Palestinians to launch their terror war four months later. Rather, Israel must withdraw from Gaza but in a way that cannot be interpreted as a victory by the Palestinians and that allows the IDF to continue operating freely. The challenge Israel now faces in Gaza is thus similar to America's in Iraq: how to pull out gradually, prudently, all the while maintaining the message that terror will never go unpunished. Copyright © 2004 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.