By Reuven Koret
April 18, 2004
What will Israel get for expelling thousands of its citizens from their homes and handing those homes over to a terrorist-led regime?
It had better be a lot. To put the country through the spectacle of seeing soldiers breaking down doors, bulldozers crushing living room walls, bedrooms being shattered and emptied. To see security forces beating and dragging Jews from their homes.
Or to see the images of Palestinian terrorists, or whole Jew-hating families, moving in to these red-roofed houses and pleasant towns, shooting in the air, burning Israeli flags, declaring victory over the Zionist enemy. That's not even consider the long-term suffering and dislocation of the families, who may or may not be compensated for their expropriation.
Is our reward hearing George Bush say that "it seems clear" that Palestinian refugees will return to the Palestinian state (some occupying Israeli homes) rather than Israel?
"It seems clear" was deliberately chosen so that it has no binding force, as Colin Powell today clarified.
Is our reward hearing the President acknowledge that "it is unrealistic" to expel each and every one of the hundreds of thousands of Israelis living in the parts of the Jewish homeland reclaimed after the Arabs failed to destroy our nation in 1967?
"It is unrealistic" was also deliberately chosen to avoid making a binding policy judgment. All it means is that at this point in time it is not practical to expel Israelis from every last inch of the Biblical lands acquired in a self-defensive war. Those who read it as a justification for holding on to any settlement blocs or even an apartment block in East Jerusalem are deluding themselves. Heck, the U.S. does not even formally recognize Israeli control over West Jerusalem!
I can appreciate a good job of speechwriting as much of the next guy. And I appreciate that George Bush is, relatively speaking, a friend of Israel. Trouble is, such pleasures doesn't last very long, and nations run on interests, not personalities or press conferences.
If our reward would be never needing to send our soldiers to defend us or having our citizens never again die in terrorist attacks, or (remember when people talked about that?) true peace - that price may be worth considering. But of course no one is expecting or promising this.
On the contrary, we can expect to get more of the same, with less ability to defend ourselves, with transportation routes, army facilities and defensive positions in enemy hands. And we can expect the Israeli weakness at the top that led to this inexplicable cave-in to invite only more terrorism and diplomatic pressure.
That's what happened after Ehud Barak fled from Lebanon. Now southern Lebanon is lined with hundreds of missiles, some capable of bearing chemical warheads, which for the first time put Haifa and points south in range.
No one disputes that Gaza and northern Samaria will become armed camps, refuges of terrorists and repositories of weapons. Except Israel will have waived its ability and right to re-enter and clean up these terror nests in any significant way.
If there was a chance that this is the final price we will be expected to pay to achieve de facto or de jure annexation of Gush Etzion, Gush Ariel, the Jordan Valley, Jewish Hebron, the Jerusalem envelope - that at least would be a calculation that reasonable people could evaluate for its costs and benefits.
Sharon's cabinet promise to not withdraw from Gaza until the security fence has been completed, including the main Israeli population centers, offers a glimmer of hope that the territorial sacrifice, however painful, might be worthwhile in the overall calculus of costs and benefits.
The declaration creates a delicious dilemma for Israel's detractors: you want us to withdraw from Gaza? then let us complete our fence route. You don't like the fence route? no withdrawal from Gaza. But to think this challenge will stand up to pressure from Washington and others is, based on our sad experience with Sharon and Netanyahu, delusional.
For, as Sharon has said, and the Americans eagerly crow, this is just the beginning of a process. Rather, it is just a bitter taste of suffering and bloodshed to come: expulsion of Israeli families from their homes, and further endangering of Israeli lives from emboldened terrorists in better positions. And we have seen, especially during the nineties, that the goalposts keep being moved back after tangible Israeli territorial concessions.
I have publicly advocated the value of unilateral Israeli action, including the possibility of limited withdrawals from isolated towns and communities--if it is in our interest. But only so long that this is accompanied by strong positive action and the unquestioned ability to retain forever whatever territory we feel is required for our security or ours by right. Anything less will undermine our moral right and practical chance of retaining vital lands. It will reward and incite terrorists.
Israel should be saying, loud and clear, what every Israeli knows: the security fence is our future political border, which we will unilaterally determine and defend. For Israel to retreat to the "Philadelphi" strip on the border with Egypt invites only additional pressure. In Gaza, by rights, we should have kept the southern Gush Katif bloc as a defensible buffer, preventing Egyptian adventurism, controlling from nearby air and sea ports, forever; we should have annexed the Israeli towns in the northern Gaza strip to Israel proper.
Any PR value of saying that Israel withdrew from all of Gaza is undermined by the harmful precedent and expectations it sets for similar wholesale retreats in Judea and Samaria.
If there is a settlement or two to be evacuated, the residents should be entitled and compensated for moving to the next town over-- in the northern or south settlement/security blocs, in Judea, Samaria or wherever they please. This is the proper answer to incessant terrorism and unending genocidal threats emanating from the Palestinian people. The Palestinians should understand that they are losing the possibility of an independent state precisely because of their embrace of terror and their refusal to fight it. And Israel should not hesitate to say it.
Emperor Sharon is naked here, the disengagement plan is from start to finish a (self)deception to achieve results that any child can see are not in the long-term interests of the Jewish State. You want to get out of hard-to-defend parts of Gaza? Fine. But leave all of Gaza including the compact Gush Katif bloc? Why? Who benefits? Not, on the face of it, Israel.
A charitable view is that Ariel Sharon believes that he is resplendent in his security concept and reveling in the glowing words of approbation showered upon him by American, British, and leftwing Israeli politicians. He is enamored by the rare embrace of his erstwhile detractors as they laud him as bold statesman and courageous visionary.
The words of Colin Powell, explaining why the Administration supports Sharon now, says it all. Its support, he says, has nothing to do with supporting his plan but rather that this is the easiest way to get Israel out of "occupied territories" and out of settlements - so that Palestinians can take them over. After that, with salami tactics, the enemies of Israel will work on the next slice. And to defend us we would get a government led by the master of unreciprocated concessions, Shimon Peres, and his European sponsors, even if Sharon remains dangling as a marionette.
Likud voters need to see through the pretty words and the diplomatic rhetoric. Is this an Israeli retreat and sell-out that endangers the future of our country, or a calculated gambit by a master tactician confident that the Palestinians will throw away this opportunity even as Israel wins brownie points with the U.S. and a few others? I am confident in the good sense of the voters to see the facts for what they are, and to vote accordingly.
To Israel's credit, this referendum has been put forward as a democratic contest, to be conducted among patriotic yet pragmatic Likud voters. Even with Bibi and Livnat abandoning the opponents of the plan, it is a battle which can be won. If Sharon's retreat plan is turned back on May 2, if his disengagement from reality is exposed as a sham, then the healthy elements of Israeli society can celebrate a return to sobriety and an impressive assertion of Jewish independence. As much as I would like to believe the Likud ministers who wish to sell this plan, it strikes me on balance as one more self-delusion on the road from Oslo, leading to the unrepentant return of its chief architect Shimon Peres.
Likud voters have two more weeks to evaluate whether Sharon's disengagement plan is a vehicle for fencing in the best possible territorial deal, or whether it leads us down a slippery slope of open-ended concessions, of unending pressure for more, and great and possibly irreversible danger to the Jewish nation.
I think of the children of the Cohen family in Kfar Darom, who had their limbs blown off by shrapnel from a mortal shell fired at their school bus in November 2000. The attack was reportedly at the directive of Mohammed Dahlan, one of the "good Palestinians" to whom in "the best case" Israel would like to hand over their town and the surrounding towns of the Katif bloc. All of the wise political or diplomatic considerations in the world will never justify this coarse expulsion of Jews or this base reward to Arab assailants of innocent Israeli children.
May the sensible souls of our nation see what their Emperor is or is not wearing. On first glance, it is not a pretty sight.
P.S. I added the paragraph about the Cohen family last night, after the rest of the piece had been published. Later that night, the Cohen home in Kfar Darom was hit by a mortar fired by Palestinians. No one was hurt this time. But mother Noga Cohen had a question for Ariel Sharon: "If the disengagement plan is implemented, I will ask Sharon why my children gave their legs."
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