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| Israel-Palestine |
| Steyn : WHY GAZA? WHY NOW? |
| 2005-08-30 |
| From Newsdayâs report of the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza: Palestinians Friday celebrated what they consider their victory over Israel... âThis pullout is a result of our sacrifice,â he [Mahmoud Abbas] said, âof our patience, the sacrifice of our people, the steadfastness and the wise people of our nation.â 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 âvictoryâ, some Palestinians canât stop blowing themselves up long enough to celebrate it. Iâve never subscribed to the notion that this or that people âdeserveâ a state - a weird and decadent post-modern concept of nationality and sovereignty, even if it werenât so erratically applied (how about the Kurds then?). The United States doesnât exist because the colonists âdeservedâ a state, but because they went out and fought for one. The same with the Irish Republic. By contrast the world deemed Palestinians âdeservingâ of a state ten, three, six, eight decades ago, and theyâve 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 â 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 â 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 â as the most appealing location from which to launch the more ambitious Islamist rocketry â 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, theyâll 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 âpartner for peaceâ, 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 thatâs to demand more, even as theyâre still flaying Israel for having the impertinence to withdraw from Gaza âunilaterallyâ. A couple of years ago, I had a conversation with a British cabinet minister who was denouncing Sharon for the usual reasons â his âintractabilityâ and so forth. I replied blithely that, au contraire, I thought heâd 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 didnât quite know why I said what Iâd said, and I didnât 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 âstabilityâ invariably favours the bad guys. Under cover of âstabilityâ, the situation always deteriorates. The worldâs embrace of the Palestinian âcauseâ 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 âroot causeâ as the lack of a Palestinian state. The current intifada has in essence been funded by European taxpayers â and the EUâs auditors donât seem to care. The withdrawal from Gaza was celebrated with promotional materials bearing the slogan âToday Gaza, tomorrow the West Bank and Jerusalemâ, which doesnât sound awfully like a âtwo-state solutionâ 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 â which in Europe theyâve done very effectively. A continuation of the status quo â whereby the Palestinians are preserved in perpetuity as âdeservingâ a state without ever having to earn one â would only see further remorseless deterioration for Israel in the world. In that sense, any change in the situation would be for the better â especially a change that makes Gaza not Israelâs problem but everybodyâs 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 ânationalismâ. It was my National Review colleague David Frum who came up with the clearest assessment to date of the Israeli strategy: âCould 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.â 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 â 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. Itâs a dangerous move, but in a tough neighborhood there arenât any other kinds. |
| Posted by:anonymous5089 |
| #4 It's been obvious that Sharon is 'calling their bluff' and that his actions have been coordinated with the Bush administration. Perhaps the poker player, Bush, even sold him on the concept. Now that they have a state to ruin for themselves. I totally disagree with the idea that rockets and artillery coming from Gaza would be a problem. Israel has the capability for immmediate, accurate counterbattery fire. Also, they countrol the sea and could employ naval guns. The whole thing, happening in such a small area, would play out on video so it would be clear who 'started it.' I'd spring for the pay per view. |
| Posted by: JAB 2005-08-30 22:03 |
| #3 It's still a situation for the Paleos living in the Gaza: would they rather live under Paleo control, or be illegal aliens in Cairo? Much to the horror of the Egyptians, I would suggest that the latter is high probability. |
| Posted by: Anonymoose 2005-08-30 21:50 |
| #2 Egyptians... new protectorate. Don't forget that Gaza belonged to Egypt before they lost the Six Day War -- and they ran it so well then, too. /end sarcasm |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2005-08-30 20:56 |
| #1 I think the rewards from leaving Gaza are many and manifold. Because leaving Gaza is not a singular act, it has dozens of linkages that change the whole situation, many of which are in Israel's favor. It does force the Paleos to deal with themselves--it is damnably hard to blame a wall for your own, self-inflicted miseries. It is also hard to blame a wall for billions of dollars of aid money that somehow never gets used for its intended purposes. It forces the Paleos and the Egyptians to deal with each other. Unless the Egyptians also build a wall to keep Paleos out, soon they will be pestered by them too. But unlike the Israelis, the Egyptians have no sense of humor or delicate touch in these matters. They will slaughter them if they misbehave. On top of that, the Egyptians are Sunnis, and not prone to appreciate the Iranian backed Shiite Hizbullah moving into their new protectorate. After all, they are heretics. |
| Posted by: Anonymoose 2005-08-30 19:13 |