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By Bruce S. Ticker
April 2, 2007
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In the be-careful-what-you-wish-for department, the Arabs persist in hating Israel more than they want to save their children from a literally disgusting drowning death, facilitate travel for their own people and preclude Israelis from reclaiming abandoned settlements.
They proved as much in the week following the formation of the unity government which will ostensibly govern Israel's territories. In so doing, they affirmed oft-quoted statements attributed to Jewish icons Albert Einstein, Abba Eban and Golda Meir. To paraphrase Einstein's definition of insanity, they implemented the same approach in hopes of achieving the same result: The dominating faction of the unity government, Hamas, continues to dedicate itself to Israel's destruction while expecting international aid and Israeli concessions.
What's more, they still hold Cpl. Gilad Shalit, a 20-year-old soldier who was captured in a blatant act of war nearly 10 months ago at the Israel/Gaza border.
So Israel refuses to negotiate a peace deal with the Arabs and, so far, the international community will not release any money to pay Palestinian Authority employees and otherwise build the economy in Gaza and the West Bank. To cite Abba Eban's observation, the Arabs did not miss their latest opportunity to miss this landmark opportunity; Eban, for those who do not readily recognize him, was Israel's first envoy to the United Nations.
When Israel evacuated Gaza in August 2005, the Arabs' hatred for Israel eclipsed any concern for their people - to paraphrase the late Prime Minister Golda Meir - and exploited their new-found independence by transforming former settlements into military training grounds and launching pads for rocket attacks upon Israel. No time for maintaining and overhauling their infrastructure.
That's why 2-year-old Jamal Abu Safra slipped from his mother's grip and drowned to death in a pool of sewage after an earthen wall of a sewage pond ruptured on Tuesday, March 27, and flooded the nearby village of Um el-Nasser, killing Jamal, a 5-year-old boy, a teenage girl and a 70-year-old woman.
"I can't swim and I started swallowing sewage," said Amal Abu Safra, 30, who held Jamal aloft for several minutes, The Washington Post reported. "I wanted to go under instead of him. But then he disappeared."
United Nations officials told the Associated Press that collapse of the sewage reservoir, already filled to capacity, was an accident waiting to happen. Attempts to build a new waste treatment plant to replace the existing sewage plant were consistently disrupted by fighting between Israel and Arab terrorists. Arabs frequently launched rockets into Israel, and Israeli artillery and aircraft have fired back. The village is located 300 yards from the Israeli border.
The Arabs wanted Israel to leave Gaza, and when they got what they wished for they exercised the self-determination they long demanded to destroy Israel rather than to rebuild the village's infrastructure and prevent any deaths.
A week before, the Post reported that Israel is making the case in its courts that it does not need to allow Arabs in Gaza to travel to the West Bank and vice versa since one area, Gaza, is no longer occupied by Israel and the other, the West Bank, is still Israeli territory.
Israel's original plan was to evacuate Gaza and then prepare for dismantling many of the settlements in the West Bank. However, the two-front war launched by Hamas and Hezbollah last summer disrupted these plans. Israel has its hands full contending with damage to cities in the north, a weak leadership and expanded opposition to leaving the West Bank.
Again, the Arabs got what they wished for, giving Israel a convincing argument for depriving the Arabs of their desire to visit Gaza and the West Bank.
Just before the tragedy at Um el-Nasser, at least 2,000 Israeli activists gathered to reclaim Homesh, the former West Bank settlement that Israel evacuated when it eliminated all the settlements in Gaza. Homesh was one of four settlements on the West Bank that were abandoned in August 2005. The activists left after a day or so with a minimum of friction, but they could well return.
"If we do not succeed this time," organizer Boaz Haetzni told The New York Times, "then we will the next time or in another 10 times."
Most likely, the Arabs got what they wished for with their intransigence by dampening any Israeli regard for departing from even portions of the West Bank.
Israeli officials reinforced the expectation that the Arabs in Gaza wish for far more. An Israeli commander and other Israeli officials said in a front-page Times article on April 1 that Hamas has been building tunnels and underground bunkers and smuggling in ground-to-air missiles and military-grade explosives. One day, the Arabs may push Israel so hard that Israel will be compelled to give them far more than what they wish for.
Views expressed by the author do not
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