FROM JERUSALEM, Volume 10, Number 12, May 2005 

On the Disengagement

I know I am going to have to speak about the subject of disengagement from Gaza during my lecture tour in November. Can’t avoid it, much as I try. I sure hope I make up my mind by then because otherwise it is going to be a very confusing lecture!

            The arguments on both sides of the controversy are so solid that I can’t think of one other issue in the whole history of the country where the pros and the cons are so evenly balanced.

            Those who oppose the plan to leave Gaza (and a few places in northern Samaria) unilaterally, argue that to do that would be to give a huge prize to terror. The Arabs attack us non-stop with bombers and rockets and mortars, and get villages, houses, greenhouses, factories, and whole community infrastructures as a gift for their efforts. Nobody will ever again say terror doesn’t pay.

            Opponents of disengagement argue also that it is inhuman, and certainly not what a Jewish government should be doing to Jews, to uproot families and communities from their houses after 35 years.  Especially as they never went there on their own imitative but were sent on a Zionist mission of fulfillment by the government of the time.

            The military/security people—who carry a lot of weight in forming Israeli public opinion—argue that there’s no way anybody can expect Egypt to police the border between Sinai and Gaza, even though they’re supposed to, and so for Zaha”l to simply leave Gaza opens the area to a flood of arms and fighters from the rest of the Arab world, a development that could threaten not only Ashkelon and Tel Aviv but the whole country. The military risk, they say, is intolerable; we MUST be there or  chaos is sure to follow.

            Political, academic and strategic thinkers argue that unilateral action of any kind is a terrible precedent. The rules of negotiation and conflict resolution demand that you never give something without getting something in return. Unilateral anything is poison in these situations. They say that the whole international campaign against terror will be set back by this precedent. If Israel can just walk out of Gaza then America can just walk out of Iraq.

            That may well be a good thing—America just walking out of Iraq—but that’s beside the point. A program or a plan needs to be followed consistently if it is to be credible. When the government, any government, declares its intention to do something, it needs to stick at it till it’s done unless forced by circumstances (as in Vietnam) to abandon the intention altogether. As there is international consensus that terror must be fought, one can change tactics as needed, but the strategic goal needs to be coherent and consistent. Israel stopping fighting terror in Gaza and rewarding the terrorist with a moral, political, and propaganda victory is counter-productive to this campaign.

The Facts of Life 

s against all this there are the sad facts of life. Only one real  and very strong argument here; the rest is just power. The main argument of those who favor the disengagement is  that Israel is now forced to rule over 1,200,000 Arabs in Gaza who hate us, and that is not only an expensive but an ultimately impossible task. This moral/political stance is definitely THE one argument for disengagement. We cannot and ought not be doing what we are doing to another people. We may not continue to rule Gaza.

            The second fact of life is that the same Army that is meant to fight terrorists is spending a considerable amount of its time protecting 7-8,000 Jews living in the Gaza Strip. They have to do that—a government (any government) is required above all to protect its citizens—which is a great waste of their time and resources. And young soldiers have died for that cause, which is (for many) an intolerable cost.

            The third fact of life is that the clear majority of the Israeli public is fed up with the waste of time, money, and lives stemming from our presence in Gaza and is quite prepared to get out. Public support is crucial; the Prime Minister knows that when push comes to shove he definitely has both public and parliamentary opinion on his side, and that matters a lot in a democracy.

            Then there is the biggest and saddest fact of life: the international community in general and the Americans in particular require the Israelis to withdraw from Gaza.  Arik Sharon is the one man who can resist this pressure most successfully, and he has, and he will continue to do so for longer than one would have thought possible, but in the end even he will give up and go through with the disengagement, because the Americans demand it.

            Politics thus becomes very much like a traffic accident. It rarely matters who was right and who was wrong. Only who’s alive and who’s dead at the end of it. And so the last word goes to Mae West,  murmuring between her teeth that “Goodness had nothing to do with it.”