The New York Jewish
Week publishes four essays on the expected consequences of the
disengagement, three by supporters and one by an opponent — although it is
difficult to tell them apart:
Yossi Alpher, co-editor of Bitterlemons and former director of
the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University writes
that:
Once the smoke of
disengagement clears, there is no certainty the “good guys” will control the
ground in Gaza. . . . Nor will the pullout necessarily contribute to Israel’s
immediate military security. Clearly it
will be easier and safer not to have to protect isolated settlements inside the
territories. But the withdrawal could
also precipitate more terrorism, particularly in the form of rocket and mortar
attacks, from either Gaza or the West Bank.
Yossi
Klein Halevi, senior fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem and
Israel correspondent for The New Republic, writes
that:
I expect most of the worst-case scenarious of the settlers
to be fulfilled.The terrorists will present the withdrawal as a victory for terror, part of an
arc of withdrawal under pressure that began in Lebanon, extended to Gaza and
may well continue on into its next phase, the West Bank.Gaza will become an armed camp dominated in effect by Hamas, if formally by an
ineffectual PLO. As a result, we will be
exposed to terror enclaves on our northern border and our southern border —
and, perhaps, on our eastern border as well, in those parts of the West Bank we
evacuate (though Israel will try to maintain a security presence there). . . .Missiles may well hit Israeli cities, forcing us to massively retaliate against
the Palestinian state in Gaza. The mood of the Israeli public after withdrawal
will be grim, and we are likely to show little restraint.The war, then, will continue.
Danny Rubenstein, longtime Palestinian affairs correspondent
for Haaretz, writes:
The unilateral nature
of Israel’s withdrawal is a success for [the Palestinians], as this is a
withdrawal for which they are required to make no payment. . . . Moreover, the
withdrawal puts Israel back on the 1967 border with no amendments or
compromises. . . .
And what brought this about? The
Palestinians have only one explanation: Terror, suicide bombings, and the mortar and Kassam rockets launched at
Israeli towns . . . .
Naomi Blumenthal, one of the 13 Likud members of the Knesset
who oppose the disengagement, writes
that:
Terror will be much harsher. There will be a free flow of all kinds of
weapons — including missiles and Kassam rockets — from Egypt into the Gaza
Strip. There are those who say the
Egyptians will stop it. But if they
wanted to stop it, why aren’t they doing so now?
Hamas now has the majority of Palestinian support in the Gaza Strip, and it has
been using the so-called cease-fire to rebuild the terrorist infrastructure
that we had destroyed by use of targeted killings. . .The message of our
leaving is that we are giving in to terror. We are leaving without getting anything in
return — not even one day of peace. And
the terrorist infrastructure in the Gaza Strip will now be multiplied.
Benjamin
Netanyahu, in an interview
in today’s Jerusalem Post, takes the
above conclusions one step further:
"It’s the West’s problem as well
because forces that are controlled, deployed and cooperate with Iran — and
today Hizbullah and Hamas are controlled in a significant way by Iran — will
receive an additional base of operations not only in close proximity to
Israel’s cities but also on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea not far from
Europe."He said the relinquishment of Israeli
security control over the international passages to Gaza will "create a
highway for the transfer of terrorists and terror materiel" to the area.
Alpher writes that the "only really persuasive and sustainable rationale" for disengagement is that it will allegedly "ensure that Israel remains a Jewish and a democratic state."
Israel must be the only country in history that — in the midst of a war —
thinks the most important question is the immediate resolution of a future
“demographic problem” that: (a) may not
even be a problem, (b) will not (even assuming it is) occur for at least half a
decade or more, (c) cannot in any event be solved by yielding land to the demography
sworn to Israel’s destruction, (d) involves a “solution” that even its advocates admit creates a strategic threat to
Israel, and (e) results in a victory for the forces who believe the
“demographic problem” consists of even a single living Jew.
And all this at the cost of the appalling self-inflicted
human toll that Anne Lieberman has been memorializing this week at Boker
tov, Boulder (in, for example, posts here, here and here).
There should have been a referendum, and still should be.