PrintApril 24, 2009
Israel to withdraw from West Bank?
Today a Ha'retz article reports that Michael Oren, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's candidate for Israeli ambassador to Washington, supports a unilateral Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and an evacuation of most of the settlements.
Did Michael Oren have Grad rockets fall on his home recently? I have had Grad rockets falling on my head for two weeks and it is not pleasant. It tends to clarify the issues very quickly. Had Michael Oren gone through it, I believe he would have had second thoughts. One can just look at the Israeli election results breakdown. Take note of the results in the cities within the Grad range like Ashkelon and Be'er Sheva.
Michael Oren qualifies his statement by saying that he does not believe that a solution to the conflict could be achieved at this stage. But what arguments are there to support the notion that there is a solution at any stage? Will Hamas ever change its ideology?
I too was for Israel disengaging from Gaza. I too believed that the mistake was Israel's failure to immediately react to the Qassam fire from Gaza and not the disengagement itself. I wrote
Sensing that in a democracy the Israeli electorate which was not fully aware of the true Palestinian motives and magnitude of the threat , and realizing that the electorate to whom these motives had never been fully explained by any Israeli government, would not fully support continuing Israeli presence in Gaza, Sharon decided to leave Gaza . His aim I believe was to consolidate and prepare for the next round, despite all the risks. He never got the chance to react and implement his unsigned agreement with the international community to hold the Palestinian government diplomatically and militarily responsible if it refuses to eliminate terrorism from its realm. Prime Minster Sharon , the man who had in effect won the war against the suicide bombers by implementing the policy of targeted killings, going ahead with the construction of the anti-suicide bomber fence and showing that there is a military solution to jihadi terror, would I believe not have stood for this absurd situation we are in today.
But the problem is that we are fighting an asymmetrical war in the sense that world public opinion is anti-Israel by some two orders of magnitude and this has to be factored in because the Palestinians make use of it. In other words, if Israel were to leave the West Bank, Hamas or Fatah (or Hamas alone when it defeats Fatah) would soon start sending rockets into Israel. Why? Like in the Scorpion and the Frog parable they cannot do otherwise. Their jihadist ideology commands them to do so except if they perceive themselves as being too weak. Israel would once again have to react and the whole world opinion would once again be up in arms. Up in arms at the Israeli reaction, not the Palestinian rocket attacks.
So until the world is educated in the motives that clearly explain why Hamas is sending rockets into Israel three years after all Israelis had left (they could read the Hamas Charter for a start), Israel should stay put in the West Bank. The terminology used in the conflict like hudna and tahadiyeh should become clear. Only then may we start to consider what Michael Oren suggests.
In any case, Israel has much more pressing concerns, like Iran, to deal with in the near future.
