Herbert Zweibon

Seeking to free captured soldier Gilad Shalit and stop the missiles falling on Ashkelon and Sderot, the Israel Defense Forces moved into the northern Gaza Strip, retaking the ruins of the once flourishing Jewish settlements of Dugit, Nisanit and Elei Sinai. Left-wing politician Ephraim Sneh, a prominent supporter of “disengagement,” announced there is “no escape from prolonged ground presence at the launch sites.” As Caroline Glick points out, this is a clear admission that the government had lied when it said the IDF was in Gaza just “to protect the settlers.” If anything, the settlers provided a vital buffer and the removal of both endangered Israel’s national security.

Everything that we (and the all-too-few other critics of Sharon’s policy in this country) predicted has come true. The terrorists have been energized in the aftermath of what they rightly see as a victory for terror. The most serious consequences have not yet become obvious: the alienation of the best elements in Israeli society, above all those snidely characterized as “settlers;” rifts and decline of morale in the army; emboldening the entire Arab world in the conviction that Israel can be destroyed.

Everything the proponents of “disengagement” predicted has been proven false. Ehud Olmert’s forecast now looks absurd. He claimed the withdrawal from Gaza “will bring more security, greater safety, much more prosperity” and “a new morning of hope will emerge in our part of the world.” Clinging to the never-never land he inhabits with vice-premier Shimon Peres (of “New Middle East” infamy) Olmert nonetheless now promises to compound the disaster by destroying the much more numerous Jewish communities of Judea and Samaria. The “new morning of hope” he promises is strictly for Hamas, which gathers confidence in its campaign to exterminate Israel.

Never has Israel been in more desperate need of new leadership. In the terrible vacuum, former IDF Chief of Staff General Moshe Ya’alon is emerging as a voice for honesty and reason, declaring the emperor has no clothes and describing why he shed them. There was no strategic plan behind the “disengagement,” he told Haaretz in a lengthy interview, only an effort by Sharon to escape his political and personal distress, i.e. his potential indictment for fund-raising irregularities. The Israeli public was “blinded and dazzled and drugged” by media spin. (It is a harsh comment on the sickness of Israel’s judicial and media elite that putting Israel’s security in jeopardy should have immunized Sharon.)

The Gaza Strip, says Ya’alon, “is turning into Hamastan, Hezbollahstan and Al-Qaidastan. The situation will only get worse over time. The failure of the disengagement will be more and more concrete. We will find ourselves facing a kingdom of terror that is capable of launching into Israel more rockets of greater range and greater effectiveness.” Israel’s failure to stick to its promise that it would react with all its force if Qassam rockets were fired after the disengagement “eroded our deterrence,” notes Ya’alon. “In practice we accepted the firing of the Qassams as though it were rain.”

Ya’alon enunciates truths as profoundly simple as they are unwelcome to Israel’s deluded government: “There is really no unilateralism.” “We cannot entrench ourselves behind fences and walls.” “Whoever projects weakness in the Middle East is like a weak animal in the wild; it is attacked…Therefore, if we now try to continue the failed disengagement with the convergence, the result will be grave. We will give terrorism a terrible tailwind. We will provide a tailwind for radical Islam across the region. We will create a strategic threat to Jerusalem and to Ben Gurion Airport and to the population centers of the coastal plain. The Qassams and the Katyushas will no longer be Sderot’s problem. They will reach the front door in Tel Aviv.”