By R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. on 8.18.05 @ 12:08AM
Israel's withdrawal from Gaza is as noble an act on behalf of peace as has been recorded in modern history.
WASHINGTON -- What we are seeing this week in the withdrawal
from Gaza of 8,000 Israeli citizens is as noble an act on behalf of
peace as has been recorded in modern history. No peace
demonstration on record has involved so much personal sacrifice.
Nor has any peace demonstration involved so much trust. The trust,
for the most part, comes from Jerusalem, and the Sharon government,
believing as it does that after Israel vacates Gaza the Palestinian
Authority will hold elections, establish a peaceful government, and
control those terrorists intent on destroying Israel. Sharon is a
general of proven prowess. Yet he is now, as the phrase has it,
giving peace a chance. This withdrawal is his plan. So much for the
claptrap that generals only want war.
Yet I am skeptical that this withdrawal will lead to peace.
Eighty percent of the Palestinian Arabs deny the right of Israel to
exist. Most swallow the historically inaccurate line that the Jews
"stole" the lands they now inhabit -- and their Gaza settlements
too -- from what are now called the Palestinians. Scholars, whether
they be historians or archaeologists, have demonstrated that this
is hooey. Jews have inhabited these lands since the time of
Abraham. Writers as diverse as H. L. Mencken and Winston Churchill
a century ago when visiting these lands remarked on the peaceful
Jewish villagers cultivating their fields and living civilized
lives. The land of Israel is rightfully the land of the Jews. After
World War II the Jews accepted the 1947 United Nations Partition
Plan to live with Arab indiginae and others in the region in peace.
Yet neighboring Arab states attacked these Jews to rid them from
the region, setting off Israel's War of Independence.
The Arab armies were beaten. Israel was established, and very
cruelly the Arab nations allowed uprooted Palestinian Arabs to
collect in refugee camps where they became angry pawns of the
irredentist Arab states hoping to eliminate Israel. That is the
origin of the present hostilities. Arabs live in Israel with full
citizenship. Arabs live too under the Palestinian Authority outside
of Israel and in areas that it is hoped will become a peaceful
Palestinian state. What the Sharon government intends is that this
withdrawal will lead to peace between these two nations.
As I say, it is a noble gesture and one that places great trust
in the Palestinians. Yet there is plenty of evidence that
firebrands from the Islamic Resistance Movement known as Hamas,
among others, will be emboldened by Sharon's generosity to see his
withdrawal as a sign of weakness, or worse, a sign that Hamas's
terrorist violence has caused an Israeli defeat and could cause
still more Israeli defeats. Already the Washington Post is
reporting the head of a Gaza branch of Hamas as saying that
"Without jihad, without attacking the settlements, digging the
tunnels, launching the rockets, the Israelis wouldn't have moved."
Thus Sharon's noble gesture could encourage more violence and
legitimatize in the eyes of Palestinian voters the most militant of
Israel's enemies.
If all goes well for now, Gaza will be peacefully resettled and
the Palestinian Authority will govern in harmony with its Israeli
neighbors. Yet elections among the Palestinians lie ahead. On
January 21 Hamas will field candidates against other less violent
Palestinian groups, mainly Fatah, Yasser Arafat's old political
organization. What if this withdrawal by the Israelis actually is
seen by the Palestinian electorate as a vindication of terror and
leads to Hamas's victory at the polls? This whole policy of
magnanimity could backfire on Sharon and leave him with a more
dangerous situation than before.
Yet I write as an American, comfortably living thousands of
miles from this vexed part of the world. Whether my skepticism is
right or wrong I shall not have to pay any price. It is the
Israelis who pay the price. For now they support Sharon and
withdrawal. Thousands of their countrymen who settled Gaza out of
religious conviction and the sense that they were fortifying
Israeli democracy are now being summarily uprooted and denied the
land in which they invested their hearts and their labor. The price
they pay in beyond simple calculation.
All in all, this is an enormous effort on behalf of peace made
by a noble leader and a noble nation. If it is repaid by continued
terror, let the critics of Israel shut down. On behalf of peace
this time the Israelis have done all they can -- and Sharon's Nobel
Prize for Peace should await him either way.
topics:
Islam, Israel, United Nations
