"Israel's enemies will only respond favorably toward
Israel when these enemies are decisively defeated....
A new approach must begin by the rejection of the
very idea that the Arabs have the right to establish
a new Arab state in the unallotted lands of the Mandate
of Palestine. "
"Facing the implacable Arab enemy, Arab attack against
Israel, henceforth, must be answered, not by Sharon's
ineffective tit for tat responses, but by irrevocable
loss to the Arab enemy of his foothold in the lands of
the Mandate...."
Norman Podhoretz's article in the April COMMENTARY will afford
little solace to those who would seek an explanation and a
rationale for Sharon's surrender of Gaza to the Arab terrorists.
This heinous act of ethnic cleansing by the Israeli government of
Jews from their own country to benefit would-be Arab conqueror's
becomes no more understandable from Podhoretz's perspective than
have the deadly Oslo surrenders more than ten years before.
In fact, this round of surrenders will be far worse. Not only is
it being done in the aftermath of the painful experience of the
horrific consequences of the Oslo surrenders but in the aftermath
of Sharon's egregious betrayal of those who elected him, having
fully expected him to put Israel on the road to self assertion
against an enemy that clearly seeks to destroy any kind of Israel
standing.
What is more, this round of surrender, which marks Israel's
abandonment of its territorial claims under the Mandate of
Palestine, sets a precedent that will soon lead to the loss of
Jerusalem and the strategic Jewish heartland. At the same time,
it affirms Arab rights to nationhood and for the so-called
"return" of 5,000,000 alleged Arab refugees to at least "to
Palestinian lands." This policy is no less than an affirmation of
Islam and a damning slap at all that Jews dreamed of and hoped
for 2,000 years. And what do you know? Podhoretz is all for it.
In his COMMENTARY article, he even expresses admiration of
Sharon's capacity to politically maneuver the government in an
exercise of autocratic tyranny to ram this down the throats of
significant sectors of Israeli society. If Sharon and Podhoretz
think this is business as usual, they are in for a dreadful
realization that they will have changed attitudes toward Israel
dramatically for the worse for what will become former supporters
of Israel.
Consider the recent news articles noting the falling away of
support for Israel by Diaspora Jews. The indifference to the fate
of Israel of second and third generation Jews becomes more
dramatic year by year. One analyst even has noted the
disappearance of the Jewish people at the rate of 50,000 per
year. This deracination is what has been happening among the
secularist, universalized Jews of the Diaspora as well as within
leftist sectors of Israel and has been an attitudinal trend
fostered by Israeli governments that have been in the business of
throwing over the value and worth of traditional Judaism. It has
been reported that about 30% (if I remember correctly) of
Diaspora Jews will feel no personal impact were Israel to
disappear.
The only sector of Jewry that has marched in the opposite
direction has been the traditional community. It is this sector
of Israeli society that Sharon's shocking policies will now
immediately impact. How many of this sector of Jewry, witnessing
the ethnic cleansing of Jews in Israel by Jews, will continue to
regard Israel as the beginning of redemption for the Jewish
people? How many will now give up on an Israel that has failed to
be for herself and to have now places its trust on building a new
Arab nation in the Promised land that has as its only rationale
and purpose as the replacement of Israel by "Palestine" and Jews
by Arabs? The heinous nature of Sharon's policies that are
designed to attack the most patriotic sector of Jewry will cause
a monumental disjunction in the attitudes of Jews toward Israel,
bringing repugnance instead of the joyful and enthusiastic
attachment that exists and this is now liable to afflict those
who were in the forefront of supporting and defending Israel. The
aftermath is likely to leave those Jews feeling that they should
henceforth worry about themselves and leave Israel to fend off
the hostility and aggression of the Arabs that Israel is so
intent on empowering.
In this light, why would any rational person continue dumping
precious energies and treasure down the barren rat hole that
Sharon wishes to make of Israel? Expect rather that Sharon's
surrender of Gaza will accelerate the reported downward spiral in
Jewry's attitude toward Israel, a drop off in financial giving to
favor more universal causes and the canceling of subscriptions to
Jewish magazines and newspapers. Who wants to irritate an aching
heart with news about an arrogantly self-destructive Israel?
Even Podhoretz's daughter in Israel, Judy Bloom, has been shocked
at her father's turnabout and is baffled at the rationale for
such self-inflicted wounds. As discussed by Podhoretz, he
provides no serious gain to Israel that such an irrevocable
policy of retreat and self-abnegation brings. What are hailed as
tactical advantages will surely turn into their opposites in the
aftermath of what it will bring. Podhoretz banks on the
transformation of the Arab heart through President Bush's
policies of democratizing the Middle East. But such a
transformation will not likely change the fixed anti-Jewish and
anti-Israel attitudes that are a fixed feature of cultural and
religious Islam. Arab democracy will only unite the people to
accomplish the goals of such anti Jewish sentiments as it did in
Nazi Germany. In fact, the only part of the Bush doctrine that
seems likely to succeed is the part about establishing a new Arab
state on Israel's territory and this will certainly be at the
cost of the existence of Israel.
It may well be that Podhoretz has already given up hope for
Israel's capacity to stop a new Arab state from forming and hope
for Israel's long term survival and has decided not to waste his
effort on the sinking Israel/Birobidzhan that is being created,
Birobidzhan-like in being emptied of its Judaic heritage.
Podhoretz has chosen instead to back the governmental career of
his son in law, Elliot Abrams, and the policies of President Bush
for the obvious real favors he can gain for himself and family.
No other explanation seems to suffice.
In his article, Podhoretz undermines his own case when he
recounts the recent history of Israel and her leaders who, over
and over again, misread ambiguous positive political developments
and use them as rationales to embark Israel on surrenders that
irreparably harm the nation to gain what turn out to be
short-lived advantages.
Thus Podhoretz mentions how Rabin thought that with the collapse
of the Soviet Union the Arabs would have no recourse but to
accept the permanent existence of Israel, hence Rabin embarked on
the disaster of Oslo that not only brought the defeated Arab
enemy back from Tunisia, but armed him, richly endowed him with
diplomatic support, and gave him lands and Arab populations to
control. Rabin, of course, was altogether wrong.
Similarly, Barak, in the heady atmosphere of President Clinton's
support, diagnosed the failure of Oslo to have been, not the fact
of fixed Arab designs to destroy Israel, but the failure to carry
out Oslo alleged reforms fully. Barak therefore sought to fulfill
the long stated objectives of the Arabs for nationhood on the
lands of the Mandate of Palestine that Israel had gained in the
1967 War. But Barak had misread the signs and had taken the
deceptions of the Arabs as the soul of sincerity, only to
discover that the Arabs are not the lovers of peace with Israel
he expected but crafty liars and dedicated to the destruction of
Israel.
Again it was clearly revealed that nationhood in itself was not
what Arabs were after but this in connection with putting Israel
on an irreversible course to collapse and disappearance. Arafat
showed himself unwilling to forego an opportunity for destroying
all of Israel for the mere sake of getting a few dunums for a
"Palestine" that encompassed less than all of Israel. Barak's
policies that supported the first phases of the Arab plan to
destroy Israel enabled the Arabs to embark on the bloodiest
terror campaign in Israel's history with more dead and maimed
Israelis within two years than twenty years had accomplished for
the Arabs in the years before.
The reality that emerges from Podhoretz's account is that, over
50 and more years, the Arab enemy has not changed his goal to
destroy Israel and to replace her with the 5,000,000 so-called
Arab refugees held in readiness. But if the Arabs have not
changed, neither have the Israeli leftists changed in their
utopian dream of creating a universalist society that they dream
is so compelling that it would draw Arabs away from their Islam
the way it had drawn the leftists from their Jewish heritage. But
what seems to Podhoretz to have changed now is that former
supporters of Israel like him think that U.S. efforts to
democratize the Middle East Israel will enable Israel to safely
surrender her lands and with it her rights and Jewish ethos to
transformed former Arab jackals that will henceforth turn into
lambs, abandoning their blood lust to devour the Jewish lamb of
Israel.
Unlike Natan Sharansky, who believes that such Gaza surrenders,
if at all, should not occur until the Arabs have demonstrated a
true and unquestionable change of heart and action, Podhoretz
would count these peace chickens well before they are hatched,
banking on such a millennial change in the savage Arab heart
without the slightest evidence that this could arrive.
But bitter experience tells that such a change in the Arab heart
will not come willingly without outward compulsion, a compulsion
that will need to be ever continued to keep the changes intact.
Reality teaches that the Arabs are compulsively structured to use
whatever capability they have or gain to destroy Israel. The new
state they say they want is merely to reverse their losses in the
1967 War and would be a lever to overthrow Israel. The
frightening thing is that the Arabs are perfectly content to see
the region totally devastated and made uninhabitable even for
Arabs if that will remove what they regard as the abomination of
an Israel.
Of what value then to the future of Israel is Sharon's
strengthening the Arab enemy? Already we hear of the placement in
Gaza of lethal strella missiles from Egypt, a threat to Israel's
underbelly, not unexpected. It is merely illustrative of the fact
that a vacuum created by Israeli withdrawal from Gaza is nothing
less than an invitation to fully transform it into an Arab
military beachhead poised at the heart of Israel, the inevitable
byproduct of the folly of trusting peace to the good wishes of an
implacable Arab enemy.
The solution of Israel's problem of security and peace obviously
does not lay in surrender of lands and the rights the Jewish
people in their ancient lands. That this is the wrong direction
is made evident by the ugly fruit this surrender bears: the
dangerous division and demoralization of the nation's people and
of Jewry worldwide, not to mention that Israel's supporters.
Who will blame those not already turned off to Israel from
following the secularist, universalist dream that Israeli
governments have long self-destructively preached? Who will blame
them for becoming apathetic toward an Israel that has lost belief
in the rightness of her cause and that stumbles over her own feet
in making war on the interests and values of her most patriotic
sectors -- all to the benefit of the Arab enemy? In his long
article, Podhoretz presented not a shred of evidence that
Sharon's surrender policy brings immediate or lasting benefits to
Israel. The enemy remains as he is, only more empowered,
strengthened, and lusting to continue his war.
What then is the answer to Israel's plight? Obviously, the true
path is not Israel's slow, suicidal self-strangulation, but to
avail herself of her resources and capabilities. Israel's enemies
will only respond favorably toward Israel when these enemies are
decisively defeated. Podhoretz showed that making way for this
enemy through surrenders over the past decades has only
emboldened him and has not in the least diminished this enemy's
intent and Nazi-like murderous hatred of Jews that is so deep
that it can only be eradicated by eradicating the Nazi Arab that
bears it.
A new approach must begin by the rejection of the very idea that
the Arabs have the right to establish a new Arab state in the
unallotted lands of the Mandate of Palestine. No such Arab right
exists in the lands set aside as a homeland for the Jewish people
by the world speaking through the League of Nations. Such a new
Arab national existence is inimical to the peace of the region
since its very ethos will be the continuation of the ongoing war
against Israel.
Facing the implacable Arab enemy, Arab attack against Israel,
henceforth, must be answered, not by Sharon's ineffective tit for
tat responses, but by irrevocable loss to the Arab enemy of his
foothold in the lands of the Mandate. Not only will this diminish
the Arab hold in the land, but also his capability to make war
against Israel.
Such a policy -- and only that policy -- will make it clear to
the Arab enemy that he will not achieve his goals of destroying
Israel and that his very attempts will grossly erode the position
he began with. This will simultaneously destroy the Arab illusion
that the lands of the Mandate of Palestine West of the Jordan
River will become the eventual home of the 5,000,000 Arab
refugees held in Arab lands slated by the Arabs to replace
Israel's people. It should be already evident that the natural
resources of the lands of the Mandate and peace in the region
cannot ever accommodate such an influx. Israel will not be a
party to such Arab illusions, certainly not to what must end in
her own destruction.
Instead of removing Jewish communities from Gaza, delegitimizing
and weakening Israel's hold on all her lands, the Gaza lands must
be made even more accessible to Israel. This can be accomplished
by opening a wide Israeli land corridor, ten miles or more, that
cuts Gaza South to North reaching into the Mediterranean and
removing Arabs that would interfere with this connection and
concentrate them in adjacent Arab residential communities.
In response to Arab attacks, Jewish Gaza would be opened to
Israel and cut off the supply of weaponry coming to the rest of
Gaza from Egypt. What is more, it will compress the living areas
of Arab population and make the Arabs feel today the greater
hardships that they will inevitably face in the not too distant
future as a result of their population growth. In no case will
Israel be the solution to this Arab plight but it will only come
from the willing Arab relocation to other Arab lands. The
situation will merely become what the so-called Arab refugees
face in Lebanon and the solution to their plight in both
instances will be for the Arab nations to accept them and
integrate these Arabs into their lands. In no case will the Arabs
support this solution while they expect, as they do now, that the
solution is in their overrunning Israel.
No doubt this will make for a harsh situation for the Gaza Arabs
in the short run, but they have a peaceful solution awaiting them
in Arab lands as their only viable course. This is a solution
that is far better than Israel bearing the full brunt of serving
these Arabs at the cost of her own existence. Saving herself as a
viable Jewish state that can defend against her enemies is a just
cause for Israel. It is this just cause to which Israel should
dedicate herself, not to her self-emulation and deracination that
will merely insure her ultimate collapse and will truly set back
any democracy that will be possible in the region. But that will
be the least of the horrible consequences.
******
David Basch is a city planner and a research associate of the Freeman Center Strategic Studies. He is also the world's leading expert on William Shakespeare's Jewish roots.
NORMAN PODHORETZ SUPPORTS AN ISRAELI SURRENDER
by David Basch
Norman Podhoretz's article in the April COMMENTARY will afford
little solace to those who would seek an explanation and a
rationale for Sharon's surrender of Gaza to the Arab terrorists.
This heinous act of ethnic cleansing by the Israeli government of
Jews from their own country to benefit would-be Arab conqueror's
becomes no more understandable from Podhoretz's perspective than
have the deadly Oslo surrenders more than ten years before.
In fact, this round of surrenders will be far worse. Not only is
it being done in the aftermath of the painful experience of the
horrific consequences of the Oslo surrenders but in the aftermath
of Sharon's egregious betrayal of those who elected him, having
fully expected him to put Israel on the road to self assertion
against an enemy that clearly seeks to destroy any kind of Israel
standing.
What is more, this round of surrender, which marks Israel's
abandonment of its territorial claims under the Mandate of
Palestine, sets a precedent that will soon lead to the loss of
Jerusalem and the strategic Jewish heartland. At the same time,
it affirms Arab rights to nationhood and for the so-called
"return" of 5,000,000 alleged Arab refugees to at least "to
Palestinian lands." This policy is no less than an affirmation of
Islam and a damning slap at all that Jews dreamed of and hoped
for 2,000 years. And what do you know? Podhoretz is all for it.
In his COMMENTARY article, he even expresses admiration of
Sharon's capacity to politically maneuver the government in an
exercise of autocratic tyranny to ram this down the throats of
significant sectors of Israeli society. If Sharon and Podhoretz
think this is business as usual, they are in for a dreadful
realization that they will have changed attitudes toward Israel
dramatically for the worse for what will become former supporters
of Israel.
Consider the recent news articles noting the falling away of
support for Israel by Diaspora Jews. The indifference to the fate
of Israel of second and third generation Jews becomes more
dramatic year by year. One analyst even has noted the
disappearance of the Jewish people at the rate of 50,000 per
year. This deracination is what has been happening among the
secularist, universalized Jews of the Diaspora as well as within
leftist sectors of Israel and has been an attitudinal trend
fostered by Israeli governments that have been in the business of
throwing over the value and worth of traditional Judaism. It has
been reported that about 30% (if I remember correctly) of
Diaspora Jews will feel no personal impact were Israel to
disappear.
The only sector of Jewry that has marched in the opposite
direction has been the traditional community. It is this sector
of Israeli society that Sharon's shocking policies will now
immediately impact. How many of this sector of Jewry, witnessing
the ethnic cleansing of Jews in Israel by Jews, will continue to
regard Israel as the beginning of redemption for the Jewish
people? How many will now give up on an Israel that has failed to
be for herself and to have now places its trust on building a new
Arab nation in the Promised land that has as its only rationale
and purpose as the replacement of Israel by "Palestine" and Jews
by Arabs? The heinous nature of Sharon's policies that are
designed to attack the most patriotic sector of Jewry will cause
a monumental disjunction in the attitudes of Jews toward Israel,
bringing repugnance instead of the joyful and enthusiastic
attachment that exists and this is now liable to afflict those
who were in the forefront of supporting and defending Israel. The
aftermath is likely to leave those Jews feeling that they should
henceforth worry about themselves and leave Israel to fend off
the hostility and aggression of the Arabs that Israel is so
intent on empowering.
In this light, why would any rational person continue dumping
precious energies and treasure down the barren rat hole that
Sharon wishes to make of Israel? Expect rather that Sharon's
surrender of Gaza will accelerate the reported downward spiral in
Jewry's attitude toward Israel, a drop off in financial giving to
favor more universal causes and the canceling of subscriptions to
Jewish magazines and newspapers. Who wants to irritate an aching
heart with news about an arrogantly self-destructive Israel?
Even Podhoretz's daughter in Israel, Judy Bloom, has been shocked
at her father's turnabout and is baffled at the rationale for
such self-inflicted wounds. As discussed by Podhoretz, he
provides no serious gain to Israel that such an irrevocable
policy of retreat and self-abnegation brings. What are hailed as
tactical advantages will surely turn into their opposites in the
aftermath of what it will bring. Podhoretz banks on the
transformation of the Arab heart through President Bush's
policies of democratizing the Middle East. But such a
transformation will not likely change the fixed anti-Jewish and
anti-Israel attitudes that are a fixed feature of cultural and
religious Islam. Arab democracy will only unite the people to
accomplish the goals of such anti Jewish sentiments as it did in
Nazi Germany. In fact, the only part of the Bush doctrine that
seems likely to succeed is the part about establishing a new Arab
state on Israel's territory and this will certainly be at the
cost of the existence of Israel.
It may well be that Podhoretz has already given up hope for
Israel's capacity to stop a new Arab state from forming and hope
for Israel's long term survival and has decided not to waste his
effort on the sinking Israel/Birobidzhan that is being created,
Birobidzhan-like in being emptied of its Judaic heritage.
Podhoretz has chosen instead to back the governmental career of
his son in law, Elliot Abrams, and the policies of President Bush
for the obvious real favors he can gain for himself and family.
No other explanation seems to suffice.
In his article, Podhoretz undermines his own case when he
recounts the recent history of Israel and her leaders who, over
and over again, misread ambiguous positive political developments
and use them as rationales to embark Israel on surrenders that
irreparably harm the nation to gain what turn out to be
short-lived advantages.
Thus Podhoretz mentions how Rabin thought that with the collapse
of the Soviet Union the Arabs would have no recourse but to
accept the permanent existence of Israel, hence Rabin embarked on
the disaster of Oslo that not only brought the defeated Arab
enemy back from Tunisia, but armed him, richly endowed him with
diplomatic support, and gave him lands and Arab populations to
control. Rabin, of course, was altogether wrong.
Similarly, Barak, in the heady atmosphere of President Clinton's
support, diagnosed the failure of Oslo to have been, not the fact
of fixed Arab designs to destroy Israel, but the failure to carry
out Oslo alleged reforms fully. Barak therefore sought to fulfill
the long stated objectives of the Arabs for nationhood on the
lands of the Mandate of Palestine that Israel had gained in the
1967 War. But Barak had misread the signs and had taken the
deceptions of the Arabs as the soul of sincerity, only to
discover that the Arabs are not the lovers of peace with Israel
he expected but crafty liars and dedicated to the destruction of
Israel.
Again it was clearly revealed that nationhood in itself was not
what Arabs were after but this in connection with putting Israel
on an irreversible course to collapse and disappearance. Arafat
showed himself unwilling to forego an opportunity for destroying
all of Israel for the mere sake of getting a few dunums for a
"Palestine" that encompassed less than all of Israel. Barak's
policies that supported the first phases of the Arab plan to
destroy Israel enabled the Arabs to embark on the bloodiest
terror campaign in Israel's history with more dead and maimed
Israelis within two years than twenty years had accomplished for
the Arabs in the years before.
The reality that emerges from Podhoretz's account is that, over
50 and more years, the Arab enemy has not changed his goal to
destroy Israel and to replace her with the 5,000,000 so-called
Arab refugees held in readiness. But if the Arabs have not
changed, neither have the Israeli leftists changed in their
utopian dream of creating a universalist society that they dream
is so compelling that it would draw Arabs away from their Islam
the way it had drawn the leftists from their Jewish heritage. But
what seems to Podhoretz to have changed now is that former
supporters of Israel like him think that U.S. efforts to
democratize the Middle East Israel will enable Israel to safely
surrender her lands and with it her rights and Jewish ethos to
transformed former Arab jackals that will henceforth turn into
lambs, abandoning their blood lust to devour the Jewish lamb of
Israel.
Unlike Natan Sharansky, who believes that such Gaza surrenders,
if at all, should not occur until the Arabs have demonstrated a
true and unquestionable change of heart and action, Podhoretz
would count these peace chickens well before they are hatched,
banking on such a millennial change in the savage Arab heart
without the slightest evidence that this could arrive.
But bitter experience tells that such a change in the Arab heart
will not come willingly without outward compulsion, a compulsion
that will need to be ever continued to keep the changes intact.
Reality teaches that the Arabs are compulsively structured to use
whatever capability they have or gain to destroy Israel. The new
state they say they want is merely to reverse their losses in the
1967 War and would be a lever to overthrow Israel. The
frightening thing is that the Arabs are perfectly content to see
the region totally devastated and made uninhabitable even for
Arabs if that will remove what they regard as the abomination of
an Israel.
Of what value then to the future of Israel is Sharon's
strengthening the Arab enemy? Already we hear of the placement in
Gaza of lethal strella missiles from Egypt, a threat to Israel's
underbelly, not unexpected. It is merely illustrative of the fact
that a vacuum created by Israeli withdrawal from Gaza is nothing
less than an invitation to fully transform it into an Arab
military beachhead poised at the heart of Israel, the inevitable
byproduct of the folly of trusting peace to the good wishes of an
implacable Arab enemy.
The solution of Israel's problem of security and peace obviously
does not lay in surrender of lands and the rights the Jewish
people in their ancient lands. That this is the wrong direction
is made evident by the ugly fruit this surrender bears: the
dangerous division and demoralization of the nation's people and
of Jewry worldwide, not to mention that Israel's supporters.
Who will blame those not already turned off to Israel from
following the secularist, universalist dream that Israeli
governments have long self-destructively preached? Who will blame
them for becoming apathetic toward an Israel that has lost belief
in the rightness of her cause and that stumbles over her own feet
in making war on the interests and values of her most patriotic
sectors -- all to the benefit of the Arab enemy? In his long
article, Podhoretz presented not a shred of evidence that
Sharon's surrender policy brings immediate or lasting benefits to
Israel. The enemy remains as he is, only more empowered,
strengthened, and lusting to continue his war.
What then is the answer to Israel's plight? Obviously, the true
path is not Israel's slow, suicidal self-strangulation, but to
avail herself of her resources and capabilities. Israel's enemies
will only respond favorably toward Israel when these enemies are
decisively defeated. Podhoretz showed that making way for this
enemy through surrenders over the past decades has only
emboldened him and has not in the least diminished this enemy's
intent and Nazi-like murderous hatred of Jews that is so deep
that it can only be eradicated by eradicating the Nazi Arab that
bears it.
A new approach must begin by the rejection of the very idea that
the Arabs have the right to establish a new Arab state in the
unallotted lands of the Mandate of Palestine. No such Arab right
exists in the lands set aside as a homeland for the Jewish people
by the world speaking through the League of Nations. Such a new
Arab national existence is inimical to the peace of the region
since its very ethos will be the continuation of the ongoing war
against Israel.
Facing the implacable Arab enemy, Arab attack against Israel,
henceforth, must be answered, not by Sharon's ineffective tit for
tat responses, but by irrevocable loss to the Arab enemy of his
foothold in the lands of the Mandate. Not only will this diminish
the Arab hold in the land, but also his capability to make war
against Israel.
Such a policy -- and only that policy -- will make it clear to
the Arab enemy that he will not achieve his goals of destroying
Israel and that his very attempts will grossly erode the position
he began with. This will simultaneously destroy the Arab illusion
that the lands of the Mandate of Palestine West of the Jordan
River will become the eventual home of the 5,000,000 Arab
refugees held in Arab lands slated by the Arabs to replace
Israel's people. It should be already evident that the natural
resources of the lands of the Mandate and peace in the region
cannot ever accommodate such an influx. Israel will not be a
party to such Arab illusions, certainly not to what must end in
her own destruction.
Instead of removing Jewish communities from Gaza, delegitimizing
and weakening Israel's hold on all her lands, the Gaza lands must
be made even more accessible to Israel. This can be accomplished
by opening a wide Israeli land corridor, ten miles or more, that
cuts Gaza South to North reaching into the Mediterranean and
removing Arabs that would interfere with this connection and
concentrate them in adjacent Arab residential communities.
In response to Arab attacks, Jewish Gaza would be opened to
Israel and cut off the supply of weaponry coming to the rest of
Gaza from Egypt. What is more, it will compress the living areas
of Arab population and make the Arabs feel today the greater
hardships that they will inevitably face in the not too distant
future as a result of their population growth. In no case will
Israel be the solution to this Arab plight but it will only come
from the willing Arab relocation to other Arab lands. The
situation will merely become what the so-called Arab refugees
face in Lebanon and the solution to their plight in both
instances will be for the Arab nations to accept them and
integrate these Arabs into their lands. In no case will the Arabs
support this solution while they expect, as they do now, that the
solution is in their overrunning Israel.
No doubt this will make for a harsh situation for the Gaza Arabs
in the short run, but they have a peaceful solution awaiting them
in Arab lands as their only viable course. This is a solution
that is far better than Israel bearing the full brunt of serving
these Arabs at the cost of her own existence. Saving herself as a
viable Jewish state that can defend against her enemies is a just
cause for Israel. It is this just cause to which Israel should
dedicate herself, not to her self-emulation and deracination that
will merely insure her ultimate collapse and will truly set back
any democracy that will be possible in the region. But that will
be the least of the horrible consequences.
******
David Basch is a city planner and a research associate of the Freeman Center Strategic Studies. He is also the world's leading expert on William Shakespeare's Jewish roots.
Posted by Ted Belman at March 30, 2005 11:38 AM