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COMMENTARY
April 12, 2006
Wages of retreat
Tonight is Erev Pasach, the beginning of Passover, and all over the world Jewish families, including the most secular, will gather at seders. I wish them joy.In Israel, the security forces will be on special alert, for Palestinian terrorists have always been partial to massacring Jews on their most holy days. Meanwhile, at the United Nations in New York, a motion to condemn Israel for recent strikes against Palestinian terror camps in Gaza has been withdrawn from the Security Council. The Arab states sponsoring it found it wouldn’t fly, even there. I juxtapose these things, expressly to bring out how crazy the world is. Our media hardly reported that when the Israelis voluntarily withdrew their settlements from Gaza, as part of the one-sided “peace process”, the sites of two of them were turned into terror camps. Nor have we read or heard much, if anything, about the escalating rounds of Qassam rockets being fired daily into southern Israel from these new Hamas bases at former Neve Dekalim, and Slav. We hear now, when the Israelis strike back. The Gaza perimeter fence, in place for many years, has offered fairly secure protection against the infiltration of suicide bombers to Israel, though the border guards themselves suffer the occasional detonation. But the fence is no use against rockets. Since it is not acceptable to be the target of constant rocket attacks, the Israel Defence Forces must do something. The only thing they can do, is attack the people launching the rockets. This must now be done almost exclusively from the air. Civilian casualties -- including two Palestinian children in the last few days -- are made inevitable by the Palestinian habit of moving families into the likely target areas, to serve as “human shields”. When they are maimed or “martyred” in the crossfire, they become so much more heart-wrenching material to feed the international Islamist grievance machine. As more extensive reports in Israel have made clear, Gaza has now become a bigger security problem for Israel than it ever was during the nearly four decades that Jewish settlements were established there. This is because the need to defend the settlements gave the IDF a forward position within Gaza, and better local intelligence. They could respond more immediately to developing threats. Now they have been withdrawn from Gaza, they must watch the enemy’s preparations only electronically. It has become clear that Al Qaeda and other terror affiliates are now setting up shop in Gaza at the invitation of both Hamas and Fatah. This could not have happened, with the IDF still there. The withdrawal from Gaza was a small thing, however, in comparison to the impending withdrawal of forward Israeli settlements from the West Bank. Some 80,000 Israelis, most of whom have lived there more than a generation, will be removed behind “more defensible lines”. The acting prime minister, Ehud Olmert, is hoping to get international, or at least American, recognition for the borders behind which they are withdrawn. Good luck to him. Israel has never been repaid, except with more violence, for any of its tactical retreats, and no other fate is foreseeable. The abandonment of forward positions in the West Bank will repeat the mistake in Gaza, but on a much larger scale, while the sight of ten-thousands of Israelis being evicted from their homes, by their own army, will tear at the fabric of Israeli society. Israel faces, as we in the West also face, an enemy who will not be reconciled. It makes no sense to offer concessions to such an enemy. The whole idea of “withdrawing behind more defensible borders” is built upon illusion. Either you carry the battle to the enemy, or the enemy carries the battle to you. It is the same story, finally, in Iraq and Afghanistan. We fight them there, or they fight us here. Israel is looking directly into that quandary. We still look on from far away. * There was a little mistake, worth correcting, in my column Sunday. I mentioned General (later Viscount) Allenby’s entry into Jerusalem, at noon, on December 11th, 1917, through the Jaffa Gate, on the west side of the old, walled city. So far so good. However, the expression I used was “rode in”. I was thinking of him as a master of cavalry, and he was. But as several readers have pointed out, from as far away as Australia, Allenby and his officers dismounted before passing through Jaffa Gate. This was intentional. In at least one later account, it is said that Allenby dismounted out of respect for a city holy to Christians, Jews, and Muslims. This is not quite right. Allenby was remembering Christ’s mounted entry, on the original Palm Sunday. He therefore instructed his men, in deference, to lead their mounts. Edmund Allenby was a very great man, and general. It is worth remembering that there were giants in those days. David Warren
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