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Dr. Aaron Lerner is co-founder of , Independent Media Review and Analysis, an Israel-based news organization which provides an extensive digest of media, polls and significant interviews and events relating to the Israeli-Arab conflict.
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By Dr. Aaron Lerner
October 20, 2006
It just doesn't work.
Years of working papers, conferences, arrangements and photo ops have failed to obviate Israel's need to keep the Gaza Strip and West Bank within the Jewish State's security envelope. As developments in the Gaza Strip prove once again, third parties simply cannot be relied upon to take Israel's place in this critical matter.
Inclusion in the security envelope may not be a sufficient condition for stability and security - but it certainly is a necessary one.
As reports streamed in today about the massive Palestinian war preparations taking place in the Gaza Strip -- made possible thanks to Israel's retreat from the Philadelphi Corridor that runs between Egyptian Sinai and Gaza, recently retired former head of Israel's National Security Council, Maj-Gen Giora Eiland, patiently defended the move -- noting that retreat from Gaza required also abandoning that border area.
Now it is possible to understand how people leaped from the World Trade Center to escape the unbearable heat, but Israel's presence in the Gaza Strip was hardly a situation that required retreat at all costs.
But instead of honestly dealing with this reality, Eiland and the other retreat supporters hypothesized that a series of international, regional and local arrangements could somehow effectively take the place of Israeli control.
Retreat supporters had to embrace this leap of faith because otherwise retreat was impossible.
But reality is reality. Elephants can't fly and all the photo ops in the world can't change that.
Dumbo crashed in Gaza but the rhetoric continues about a sovereign Palestinian state living side by side in peace with Israel.
But a key element of Palestinian sovereignty would be its removal from the Israeli security envelope.
Retreat and Palestinian sovereignty advocates tend to try to dismiss their detractors by challenging them to propose an alternative that would achieve "peace" but it is a hollow argument.
The onus, however, is on the sovereignty advocates to demonstrate that their leaps of faith won't keep on slamming us into the pavement.
Views expressed by the author do not
necessarily reflect those of israelinsider.
 
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