At The Belmont Club, Wretchard writes that Sharon’s Gaza withdrawal “may turn out to be far more dangerous to the Palestinian Authority than to Israel because it unleashed powerful forces which Abbas has been unable to control.”
The sad trainwreck unfolds. Hamas blows up its own parade through stupidity. Unable to lose face, Hamas rockets Israel from Gaza. Sharon, loathe to concede the Gaza withdrawal may have endangered Israel, will kill a score of terrorist leaders and hit the Palestinians in the pocketbook to show he’s tough. That will get the “militants” all jumping up and down, while the PA teeters like a house of cards in a Category 4 hurricane and the peace movement hums an inspirational hymn indistinguishable from the shrieking of the wind.
One of the commenters to Wretchard’s post suggests that the PA “as a monolithic organization is dead in Gaza:”
[T]he organization was propped up by the Israelis themselves, under the pressure of the world, as the representative of the Palestinian people. . . In reality, it was merely a mafia that had little internal legitimacy besides being the world sponsored monopoly.
This could be done when Gaza was under outside (Israeli) control, [but] the UN and its affiliates can’t do jack [once] the Israelis are gone — they were the normalizing and deterring force. . . . Hamas or a derivative will be in control of Gaza before this is over. The real war hasn’t begun . . . .
The first political casualty of the Gaza withdrawal may be Sharon himself, if the Likud effectively impeaches him tomorrow.
Sharon’s speech today to the Likud Central Committee is here. Netanyahu’s speech is here. Both are worth reading. The chaos of the Likud meeting is described here.