I must admit that prima facie the withdrawal didn't sound completely unreasonable; after all why retain control over functionally a terrorist infested rathole that held only a handful of settlers that required a tremendous security effort? So not only was it a good tactical move it also showed flexibility from the Israeli side.
Lerner though makes several extremely compelling counterarguments:
We think Gaza is all about Israel and the Palestinians; our enemies know it's mainly about us. We think we are encouraging Israel to hand Gaza over to Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah party, local Palestinians with purely local ambitions... Our enemies know that behind a Fatah fig leaf, we are handing Gaza over to Hamas, an international terrorist organization of global reach and ambition that is one of America's deadliest enemies.
...We think Hamas sends all these jihadists only to Israel. They know Hamas sends a never-ending stream of them to Afghanistan, Chechnya, the Balkans, Kashmir, Lebanon and, most critically for us right now, to Iraq. And when our press insistently refers to Abu Musab al Zarqawi, the master terrorist who directs the foreign jihadists in Iraq, as "a Jordanian," our enemies laugh. They know Zarqawi has always called himself a Palestinian, and is recognized as such, in Jordan and throughout the Middle East.
...
Place Gaza in that context, and its strategic location jumps out at you. Control of Gaza gives Hamas and its partners direct access to the land border with Egypt, as well as access by sea to terrorist supply ports in Lebanon and Syria, and from them, overland, to the terror training camps in Syria, Lebanon, and Iran and to the ratlines from Syria into Iraq.
...
What, then, of Abu Mazen's presumed popularity...that led to his easy victory in the first post-Arafat election, which so many American pundits of the right as well as the left praised as a birth of democracy, like the election in Iraq? That too is a mirage. The Palestinian election was nothing like the one in Iraq. Abu Mazen won the top job only because Hamas chose not to run, preferring to take control from the bottom up. Hamas ran in the subsequent municipal elections and swept to victory in almost every major Palestinian population center. It was poised to do the same in the parliamentary elections, until Abu Mazen postponed them indefinitely, and invited Hamas to join him without an election. It hardly matters. Hamas is taking over, with or without elections or invitations, and most Palestinians are glad. Hamas is a disciplined terrorist organization, and they are sick of chaos and corruption.
The idea of Israel allowing Gaza to become an unfettered stronghold of Hamas is distinctly unappetizing. It does shorten Israel's line of defense physically but it won't win many points with the U.N., Old Europe or the usual lefty hand-wringers who won't be even half satisfied until Israel retreats to the pre-1967 borders. At this stage though it is unlikely that either Sharon or Bush will derail the withdrawal barring an ugly catastrophic attack.
On the other hand as Israel has shown over and over, a Hamas escalation is likely to lead to a near-immediate re-occupation of Gaza. Or, perhaps Arik is using this to flush out the Hamas folks gone underground...
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