Erich Isaac

(Editor's note: The following article is a slightly updated version of "Gaza Reconsidered" by Erich Isaac, published in the December 1993 Outpost, when Gaza and Jericho were turned over to Yasser Arafat as part of the first phase of Oslo. At that time, of course, there was no mention of uprooting existing Jewish communities.)

A poll of the Israeli public (including Israeli Arabs) conducted for the Israeli newspaper Ma'ariv in the first week of February 2004 (and published in Ma'ariv Feb. 6) found that 52% supported Prime Minister Sharon's announced plan unilaterally to evacuate all Jewish communities in the Gaza Strip. This easily-won support for uprooting close to 8,000 Jews from their homes and communities calls to mind the equally swift support the Rabin government won for turning over Gaza to Arafat in 1993, even from many of those who recognized other elements in the Oslo agreement were calamitous for Israel. The prevalent view of Gaza then could be summed up as a) Who wants to bother with all those Arabs? and b) What possible value -- to anyone -- is Gaza and the Strip? And so for most Israelis, the 1994 retreat from Gaza produced a feeling of relief.

Much of that feeling remains now that the issue has become the uprooting of Jewish communities in the Strip. The attitude of "good riddance" pervades journalist Hillel Halkin's "Goodbye to Gaza" in the New York Sun of February 10. Gaza, "overpopulated and impoverished...teeming with refugee camps and resentments," was and is "nothing but a burden to Israel." The evacuation of 7,500 Jewish settlers, writes Halkin, "is a reasonable price for ridding Israel of what has long been a painful and valueless thorn in its side."

Unfortunately, such easy dismissal of the Gaza region reveals an abysmal ignorance of the Strip's vital role on the part of the public and facile but foolish journalists like Halkin, along with wilful denial by Israel's political elite, above all by Ariel Sharon, who knows better.

The Gaza Strip has had uncanny persistence as an invasion corridor. From prehistoric times to the present it has served as a critical segment of the route linking Asia and Africa. This route, roughly paralleling the Mediterranean shore, leads from Egypt through northern Sinai to the narrow Rafiah gateway between the sea and the sand dunes of Halutza. From Rafiah the route continues north through the Gaza Strip into Israel's heartland. Known to the Egyptians as the "Ways of Horus," or the Pharaonic road, to the Israelis as Derech Eretz Plishtim, or the way of Philistia, and to the Romans as Via Maris, the way of the sea, this route passes between the coastal dunes to the west, and the badlands of the Western Negev inland to the east. There are no natural obstacles on its way northward into modern Israel's core territory.

The route has the singular advantage of ample water sources, based in part on natural storage in the one to five mile wide coastal dune belt. Hence, to this day it remains the only route with adequate water available to supply large regular formations on the march. It is noteworthy that the watering and reorganization areas of the invading armies of Pharaoh Sethos 1, which he depicted on reliefs in the Temple of Karnak in the 13th century B.C.E., are the very same sites that supplied Napoleon's army in 1799, the British army under Allenby in 1917, King Farouk's Egyptian army in 1948 and Israel's army, albeit moving in the opposite direction, in 1956 and 1967.
Hundreds of armies have marched over this route from Egypt: Tuthmosis I in the 16th century B.C.E. reached the Euphrates, Necho in the 7th century overran Judea and Assyria, Psametichus II in the 6th century conducted a siege of Ashdod that lasted almost 27 years. The list is endless, representing every historical stage of military technology and strategy. Israelis who fought in the south in the War of Independence well remember the rapid Egyptian advance through Gaza, with probes reaching to the dunes of Yavneh, a mere fifteen miles from Tel Aviv. So also do the villagers, like those of Be'erot Yitzhak, Nirim and Negba, who fought the Egyptian onslaught, and those who survived the Egyptian capture of Kfar Darom, whose destroyed village remained under Egyptian rule in what became known as the "Gaza Strip." (Reconstituted as a Jewish village after Israel's victory in the Six Day War of 1967, Kfar Darom is one of the communities Sharon now proposes to abandon to Arafat.)

There is no better testimony to the strategic importance of Gaza than its place in the Allon Plan. A commander of the Palmach, Yigal Allon was a general in the War of Independence and a minister in a series of Labor governments (including Foreign Minister and Deputy Prime Minister). The Allon Plan, which was adopted by the Labor government, sought to integrate into Israel the minimum amount of territory vital for security after the 1967 war, at the same time ensuring that Israel did not rule over hostile Arabs. Thus the plan called for Israeli retention of the uninhabited Jordan Valley, which would be settled by Jews, while the populated Arab areas of Judea and Samaria would be returned to Arab rule.

It would seem obvious that under a plan to relieve Israel of rule over hostile Arabs, the Gaza Strip would be first in line to be turned over to Arab control. Not so. In Allon's view, the Gaza Strip was so vital to Israel's security that his plan called for removing much of the Arab population from the Strip, resettling it in western Judea and Samaria, and making much of the Strip part of Israel. This aspect of the Allon Plan is rarely cited today. Nonetheless, it is a powerful reminder that even Allon, from the left of the Zionist movement, saw Israeli sovereignty over Gaza as a sine qua non for Israel's defense. Allon remembered what Israel's leaders now ignore: that prior to 1967 the Strip was the base for an endless stream of attacks by terrorists (they were known as fedayeen then) on Israeli settlements in the south. Giving up Gaza, Allon recognized, would not only add 33 miles of hostile borders to Israel but provide Israel's enemies with a port into which arms could easily be brought by sea.

In Halkin's deluded scenario, Gaza lost its strategic importance once Egypt signed a peace treaty with Israel. With Gaza cut loose, claims Halkin, Egypt will have no choice but to resume responsibility for the area, which it exercised until 1967. The trouble with this is that, as chairman of the Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee Yuval Steinitz has warned in a series of intelligence briefing papers, Egypt is approaching a state of active war with Israel. The first step has been facilitating the construction of tunnels at the southern tip of the Gaza Strip, which have been used to smuggle arms into the area, and which Israel's Defense Forces have been in a constant battle to shut down. Without Jewish communities in the area, and the Israeli forces stationed there to protect them, the buildup of arms from Egypt will proceed far more rapidly.

Sharon's proposed unilateral retreat is too much even for former intelligence chief Shlomo Gazit, a staunch leftwinger. Says Gazit (Ma'ariv, Feb. 9): "Our exit from Gaza will transform it into a big armed camp into which weapons of all kinds will stream via land, sea and maybe even air. It will also become an arsenal for independent development and production of arms. Moreover this capitulation will rightly be viewed as an unambivalent victory for the Palestinian armed struggle." The IDF Command has come to the same conclusion. Israel Radio (Feb.17) reports the IDF has declared that a condition for Israeli retreat must be that the Palestinian Authority not be able to operate a sea port or an airport from the Gaza Strip, or they will be able to import weapons threat- ening Israel's security. But, of course, once Israel has left, there is no way of preventing this.
Halkin shows himself equally ignorant (in company with the vast majority of mis-educated Israelis) of Gaza's role in Jewish history when he cavalierly declares that Gaza was a region "with no history of Jewish settlement and almost nothing of Jewish sentimental value." To be sure, Gaza has nothing like the significance of Jericho or Shiloh or Hebron. The Gaza strip was part of southwestern Canaan, that portion of the Promised Land which reaches "from the river of Egypt" (Genesis 15:18), or the Shihor (its Egyptian name in honor of Horus, cf. e.g. Isaiah 23:3), i.e. the ancient, easternmost Pelusian branch of the Nile Delta (now obliterated by alluvial fill), "...to the borders of Ekron northward..." This area included the lands of "the five lords of the Philistines" that "remained to be occupied" at the end of the tribal conquest (Joshua 13:1-3).

The prolonged struggle against Philistia is at the center of the accounts of the Judges and early kingdom period. First conquered by Judah (Judges 1:18) the region was lost to the Philistines. As the primary Philistine city, Gaza dominates the Samson narrrative. After the Philistine era, Gaza passed back and forth from Judean to foreign control. Albeit often hostile, its function as an invasion route made it share many calamities that befell the Jewish kingdoms. It was destroyed by the Assyrians in 734 BCE and by the Babylonians in 605 BCE. Under the Seleucids it became the largest Polis in Judea whose largely Greek and Macedonian population was consistently hostile to its Jews.

In 96 BCE, the Hasmonean King Yanai (Janaeus Alexander) captured and wreaked a terrible vengeance on Gaza. Rebuilt under the Roman procurators, this Greco-Roman Gaza was again destroyed by its Jewish inhabitants in the Great Jewish War.

In the long centuries following the last revolts against Rome, a Jewish community persisted, despite oppression, expulsions, Bedouin raids and wars. Medieval Christian travellers testify to the Jews' economic role (e.g. Giorgio Gucci of Florence in 1384 speaks of the fine wine they produced), their far flung connections (e.g. Bertandon de la Brocquiere, 1432) as well as their oppression (e.g. Felix Fabri, 1483), and their remarkable resilience in spite of it (George Sandys, 1611).

The Jews of Gaza contributed significantly to Halachic development. Gaza was the largest Jewish center in the Holy Land at the time of the Arab conquest, and even afterwards the declining community long remained a center of learning. Its religious vitality is reflected in numerous rabbinic responsa and in Jewish travel accounts (e.g. of Benjamin of Tudela or Meshullam of Voltera, 1481). Even negative developments, such as the Sabbatian ferment of 1665 (fostered by Nathan of Gaza) testify to the community's vitality.

In 1799, the Jews of Gaza fled before Napoleon's army. The community revived only to be destroyed by expulsion and flight in the six month-long British bombardment of Gaza in 1917. The bloody Arab disturbances of 1929 put an end to the stubborn efforts of a few Jews to revive a Jewish presence in the midst of a town that had become the snakepit of the Arab national movement. In 1946, religious settlers returned to the region, establishing the village of Kfar Darom near the site of the ancient Jewish village of Kfar Darom that had been the birthplace of Rabbi Eliezer ben Yitzhak, a famous contemporary of the second century Rabbi Akiva. In 1948, the handful of young settlers fought the Egyptians for seven weeks before the decision was taken to evacuate them. The hope of return was fulfilled when the entire Gaza area was conquered by Israel in 1967. In the 1970s, the series of settlements Sharon now wants to dismantle were established, many of them by Jews forced out of their homes in the Sinai (ironically it was Sharon who carried out the evacuation). They settled in the Gaza region at the urging of the Labor and then the Likud government, both eager to establish buffer Jewish communities in the region, precisely because of its strategic importance.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Jews settled in the Gaza region at the urging of both Labor and Likud governments.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Twice in Jewish history gates were removed from Gaza, once triumphantly when Samson tore them out of the city's wall and carried them off "to the top of a mountain near Hebron" (Judges 16:3); the second time as Jews fled the city in 1799, taking the gates of their synagogue's ark with them to Hebron. Hebron, with its deep roots in Jewish history, is likely to be the next area sacrificed -- to no purpose -- in Sharon's campaign of capitulation.

In an article in the Jerusalem Post (Feb. 6) entitled "Sharon's Folly," editor Carolyn Glick notes that in 2002 Sharon said that Netzarim (the most exposed of the Jewish settlements in Gaza and an especially frequent target of the left on that ground) "is the same as Negba and Tel Aviv. Evacuating Netzarim will only encourage terrorism and increase the pressure upon us." So what had changed to make Sharon so shortly afterward seek to eliminate all the Gaza settlements? Glick writes: "Quite simply it makes no sense."

In rational terms, Glick is correct. Each retreat, whether with the Oslo accords, the retreat from Lebanon, the repeated massive releases of terrorists from Israeli jails, has had the same result: increasing terror and the pressures upon Israel for further retreats. But we deal here with madness, which has been defined as repetition of the same act over and over again, always expecting a different result. 

Erich Isaac is professor emeritus of geography at the City College of New York and a founder of Americans For a Safe Israel.