From Bad to Worse
Eleven months ago, Israel withdrew from every last inch of the Gaza Strip. The Israelis dismantled all military bases, destroyed all their settlements, turned over functioning greenhouses that could employ 4,000 people, expelled all 7,500 Israeli settlers--all at a huge financial and political cost. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon even went a step further, declaring the lines that divide Israel from Gaza an international frontier, making Gaza the first independent Palestinian territory ever.
Everyone hoped then that the Palestinians would show the world what they could achieve with freedom as a template for a future independent state. Alas, they have shown us all too well. Not one day of peace has followed since then. The pattern was set on the very day of Israel's pullout. Palestinian militants fired rockets from Gaza into Israeli towns on the other side of the border, targeting innocent civilians living in the pre-1967 Israel recognized by the international community. The final straw came last month, with the Hamas attack that killed two Israeli soldiers and resulted in the kidnapping of a third. Last week, inspired by the rhetorical threats of Iran's incendiary president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Hezbollah--like Hamas, another Iranian proxy--attacked Israel from the north, killing eight Israeli soldiers and abducting two more, and then began raining rockets down onto Israel civilians.
Nature's law. The Palestinians are giving the lie to virtually every scenario so hopefully envisaged by their friends, including Israeli supporters of disengagement. They failed to begin building schools, roads, and hospitals; they made no effort to turn Gaza into a thriving state, nor did they create villages of their own out of the settlements the Israeli government forced its settlers to abandon. They vandalized the greenhouses not once, but twice. They elected a radical Islamic Hamas government; they breached the border with Israel, permitting the smuggling of huge quantities of weapons and creating new bases for terrorism.
Not only did Hamas fail to become more moderate; Fatah and the Palestinians became even more radicalized, moving closer to Hamas's extremist position, choosing to interpret Israel's voluntary evacuation not as a gesture of peace but as a victory for the armed struggle. Terrorism in Gaza flourished, tunnels were dug, more weapons were imported, militants trained, more Kassam rockets were produced and fired at Israel.
At first, the Israelis tried nonlethal deterrence--diplomatic warnings, then sonic booms from fighter jets to remind the Gazans that Israel has the power to retaliate. Those failed. It was a sad demonstration of the truth in the metaphor that in the Middle East the law of nature prevails--an animal perceived as weak invites only attack. The Israelis fell back on targeted assassinations against the terrorist leaders--exactly what America did against Abu Musab Zarqawi in Iraq, despite the risk that innocents might be killed because the terrorists hide among civilians, moral shields for immoral men.
Some apologists suggest that Israel should ignore the Palestinian rockets because they are puny and erratic. That's easy to say from an armchair, but every one of the rockets fired into urban areas is intended to kill or maim as many Israeli civilians as possible. The Israeli town of Sderot lost 13 people to Palestinian rocket fire, and a third of the children are said to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. Now, Palestinian militants have begun firing longer-range rockets that have reached larger cities like Ashkelon, where 115,000 Israelis live.
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