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.

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

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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.

Steven Plaut

Zephaniah Ch. 2; verses 4-7 (addressed to the nations in the Land of Israel):

4. For Gaza shall be forsaken [Hebrew pun: aza... azuvah], and Ashkelon a desolation; they shall drive out Ashdod at the noonday, and Ekron shall be rooted up [Hebrew pun: Ekron... tei'aker].

5. Woe unto the inhabitants of the sea-coast, the nation of the Cherethites [Hebrew Pun: Kreitim; part of the Philistine nation; from the word to cut off, tear away]! the word of the Lord is against you, O Canaan, the land of the Philistines; I will even destroy thee, that there shall be no inhabitant.

6. And the sea-coast shall be pastures, even meadows for shepherds, and folds for flocks.

7. And it shall be a portion for the remnant of the house of Judah, whereon they shall feed; in the houses of Ashkelon shall they lie down in the evening; for the Lord their God will remember them, and turn their captivity.

There are three main schools of thought when it comes to Ariel Sharon.

One is that he is simply being bullied and extorted by the U.S. State Department and the Bush administration. According to this view, Sharon is unable or unwilling to stand up to Bush and Powell, who are twisting his arm mercilessly and coercing him to act like the-other-Shimon-Peres. This school of thought believes that Sharon knows better, understands perfectly well that driving the Jewish settlers out of the Gaza Strip will escalate violence and not bring tranquility, and that the whole set of "goodwill gestures" and "painful concessions" his government regularly rains down upon Palestinian Arab gunmen will only be seen as proofs of Israeli weakness and as catalysts for far worse Arab terrorism.

The second school of thought holds that Sharon is simply exhausted or senile. This school argues that Sharon truly has come to believe in the fantasies of the "New Middle East", the mindless pursuit of Xanadu initiated by Shimon Peres and Yossi Beilin, based on denial of all reality. Or, maybe worse still, if he does not, he is simply so old and worn-out that he no longer has the stomach to resist the forces of Israeli self-annihilation. In part, this school believes, his throwing up his hands in surrender is due to his being targeted in a national corruption investigation, directed at him and his family. He has himself largely to blame, both because of the sleaze of his campaign finances and his having left the Left's Dream Team to operate the Attorney General's offices. The slogan that best sums up this school of thought is the one running around the Likud these days, regarding Sharon's new Gaza "policy": Is this a Program for a Statesman or a Statesman under Interrogation? To appreciate the deliciousness of the slogan though, you have to say it in Hebrew, where "program" and "interrogation" have the same Hebrew roots and resemble one another.

There is a third school of thought that argues that Sharon is a wily strategist who knows exactly what he is doing, that he will take the heat off Israel on other issues and especially Judea and Samaria if he preemptively surrenders in Gaza, removing all Israeli settlements. Uri Dan, a veteran Israeli journalist and close confidant of Sharon, may be the leading exponent of this point of view (see, for example, the New York Post of February 3 and the Jerusalem Post of February 5). But the Wily Coyote School for explaining Sharon's behavior suffers from numerous problems, apart from the fact that Wily generally gets stomped and out-maneuvered by the Road Runner he chases.

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Every set of concessions by Israel has resulted in escalated demands for new concessions, as well as renewed accusations that Israel is obstinately blocking peace.

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The Wily Coyote axiom that Israel can take the pressure off itself by making concessions is belied by all of modern history. Every set of concessions by Israel has resulted in escalated demands for new concessions, as well as renewed accusations that Israel is obstinately blocking peace. Ehud Barak's suicidal offer to the PLO at Camp David II resulted not in congratulatory telegrams for Israel's demonstration of generosity but only triggered new demonizations of Israel, new assaults on Israeli legitimacy, and new outbreaks of anti-Semitism all over the planet.

Israeli demonstrations of generosity are nothing more than precedents for even more acts of open-ended generosity and appeasement. They never trigger quid pro quos from the Arabs and they never defuse the pressures on Israel. They simply fuel greater pressures and escalated demands. When the Likud government of Yitzhak Shamir generously agreed to grant the Palestinian Arabs autonomy, within years it was taken as a foregone conclusion that Israel would be willing to grant them a state. And when Israel was signalling it might grant them a state, it was taken as obvious that this state should control East Jerusalem and the Old City and the Temple Mount and the Western Wall.
In my opinion, there is a fourth explanation that is far more appropriate, namely that the Likud is now and always has been simply the Other Labor Party. The Likud has never been a true political party with its own vision and agenda. Until 1978, the Likud -- and its previous reincarnations Herut, the Liberal Party, and Gahal -- was nothing more than a debating society on the back benches of the Knesset, rhetorically challenging the leaders of Israel's One-Party Mapai-controlled state. Only after the debacle of the Yom Kippur War did the Likud find itself astonished and unprepared to wake up one morning as the governing party. An analysis of the party platforms of the Likud before its gaining power and after holding power is instructive. From the party of Zionist militancy and free markets while in the permafrost of opposition, the Likud morphed overnight into the Me-Too-Labor-Party. It spent the next few years implementing the same policies that had been advocated by the Labor Party. The "free market" rhetoric of the early Likud was manifested in dirigiste state control and planning, the suppression of competition and markets, and the wholesale printing of money, which characterized the Begin reign.

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Netanyahu converted Oslo from a failed program of clueless leftists into an unchallengeable national consensus.

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The Shamir governments were often in fact national unity governments, ruling together with the Labor Party. They were also characterized not only by even worse socialist kibitzing in the economy than under Labor, but also by growing manifestations of Likud cowardice and appeasement. The Shamir government released 1100 terrorist murderers in the infamous "Jibril Deal," setting the precedent for Sharon's capitulation recently to Hezbollah. When the violence of the first "Intifada" broke out, the government responded with cowardice and "restraint." Had 50 rioters been eliminated in its first days, many thousands of people would still be alive today and Israel would not be tottering on the brink of self-destruction. And when Shamir's Labor Party coalition partners began illegal "negotiations" with the PLO behind Shamir's back, he responded by turning his other cheek -- and ours as well.

Netanyahu was even more desperate to be the Other Shimon Peres. Elected by the Israeli voter for the sole purpose of ending Oslo, Netanyahu quickly morphed into the Wye's Man of Chelm, turning Hebron over to the barbarians, and converting Oslo from a failed program of clueless leftists into an unchallengeable national consensus.

Sharon took over as a result of Netanyahu shooting himself in his electoral foot by falling into the trap Ehud Barak laid for him. (Netanyahu vowed to run only if there were elections for both the Knesset and Prime Minister and, when Barak called for elections only for Prime Minister, was forced out of the running.) But by this time, Sharon was no longer the Sharon of 1973, the dashing, courageous hero of the Suez Canal. He was the overweight, aging Sharon, slow of mind, cowardly of ways. No sooner did he trounce the Labor Party's Amram Mitzna than he began mumbling about the "painful sacrifices" Israel would have to soon make to the PLO's mini-fuhrer.

With buses exploding, Sharon at first resisted the calls to build a security wall. Then under pressure to do something, even if only a symbolic act, he acquiesced. But the security wall cannot provide security. What exactly does Sharon think the PLO will be doing behind any security wall he builds? Taking up quilting? Sharon does not have the stomach to do what really needs to be done to stamp out PLO terrorism, and that is to re-establish the tightest military control over Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip, open-ended and with no timetable to remove it, together with expulsion or execution of the PLO "leadership," combined with a wide-ranging program of de-Nazification.

Of course such a program would anger the Americans, but it is becoming increasingly obvious that, unless Israel is prepared, when necessary, to defy the Americans, it will not survive. What ever happened to "Just Say No"? Israel should normally go out of its way to cooperate with and assist the United States, but there are certain existential matters where Israel simply has to say "No." Appeasing the PLO any further is one such area.

Sharon's new Gaza Plan is no better than the juvenile self-indulgences and Spanky-and-Alfalfa "Peace Plans" of Yossi Beilin. What does Sharon think the PLO will do in Gaza after Sharon expels all the Jewish settlers and delivers to Arafat a Judenrein Gaza Strip, this as the "first stage" in the Sharon Doctrine? Will the PLO engage in peaceful nation-building and economic development? Or will it rain rockets and mortars down on the nearby Jewish towns inside the pre-1967 "Green Line," sending out suicide bombers in boats and ladders, who dig under the "Wall," run around it, and shoot over it?

The PLO has been allowed to import unlimited tons of explosives from Egypt through the Rafiah tunnels Egypt operates, even when Israel's army was supposed to be on the ground and in control in Gaza! (And have you noticed that the same Powell, who wants to deduct from U.S. aid to Israel any money Israel expends on its security fence, has never suggested that Egypt be penalized for these tunnels and munitions?) So what will happen once the settlers are driven out? In the last Israeli elections, Labor's Amram Mitzna ran for prime minister on a platform of unilateral Israeli withdrawals from the "occupied territories" with no quid pro quo from the PLO in any form. Mitzna was beaten by Sharon in the largest election landslide in Israeli history. Or was he?

In fact, Amram Mitzna won that election. Ariel Sharon's proposals for unilateral withdrawal/surrender in the Gaza Strip show that Amram Mitzna may have lost the election but he was victorious in imposing his suicidal policies on Israel through Ariel Sharon.

Sharon's tenacity was further on display when he agreed to reward Hezbollah for murdering three Israeli POWs in cold blood, by releasing 450 murderers, all in order to "buy" back their corpses and to release one Israeli whom Hezbollah had been holding. Sharon's government has signaled every Israeli soldier that, should he be captured and murdered, the Beilinized government of Israel will not avenge him but rather will reward his murderers. Sharon has shown the world that the "Never Again" slogan thought to be the raison d'etre of Israel has been replaced by defeatist appeasement of Islamist terrorists and Arab fascists.

Bullied or cowardly? Victim or exhausted? I think the problem is that Sharon and the Likud leadership believe in nothing except staying in power as long as possible. Even those once thought to be people of courage and principle, like Ehud Olmert (ex-mayor of Jerusalem), have undergone Beilinization. Those very few in the party who still seem to believe in something are too small in number to mount a leadership challenge, other than Moshe Feiglin's heroic but quixotic attempts. And given the track record of the Likud, there is always the fear that even they could morph into born-again Peresites if they ever got the chance.

Most of Jewish history consisted of long periods of desperation and hopelessness. Today the Israeli government seems determined to help us identify emotionally with those millennia of Jewish history. 

Steven Plaut teaches economics at the University of Haifa.

ISRAEL'S RUNAWAY SUPREME COURT

In his new book Coercing Virtue, Robert Bork writes that "pride of place in the international judicial deformation of democratic government" goes to the State of Israel. "Imagine," writes Bork, "if you can, a supreme court that has gained the power to choose its own members, wrested control of the attorney general from the executive branch, set aside legislation and executive action when there were disagreements about policy, altered the meaning of enacted law, forbidden government action at certain times, ordered government action at other times, and claimed and exercised the authority to override national defense measures. Imagine as well a supreme court that has created a body of constitutional law despite the absence of an actual constitution. No act of imagination is required: Israel's Supreme Court has done them all."

True to its overweening form, the Supreme Court is currently arrogating to itself the power to decide if the government's decision to build a fence designed to keep out suicide bombers meets the court's standard of "natural justice." While Outpost has pointed out repeatedly that the "wall" is counterproductive, building the fence is a political decision, not one to be made by the courts. It no more belongs in the Israel Supreme Court than it does before the International Court of Justice in the Hague (whose "case" against its construction the Israeli government has rightly decided to boycott). 

THE EU'S COVERUP FALTERS

Ilke Schroder, a Green Party representative in the EU Parliament, has fought to expose the EU's coverup of its funding of terrorism by Arafat's Palestinian Authority. We are pleased to report that, thanks to pressure from Schroder and those she mobilized within the EU, EU Commissioner Chris Patten was finally impelled to order an investigation. In February, the German weekly Die Welt reported the results: the EU's Anti-Fraud office has concluded that tens of millions of dollars in humanitarian aid donated by the EU to the PA was used for terrorism against Israel. Of course, while the coverup has now failed, the funding has not stopped, although at least for the moment it has been halved. 

WAHHABI U ON HUDSON

Mary Robinson, architect of the viciously anti-Semitic so-called "human rights" conference in Durban, is the newest addition to Columbia University's anti-Israel roster. She joins the likes of Rashid Khalidi and Joseph Massad (who, in Al Ahram, denounced "the anti-Semitic nature of Israel," accusing it of "atrocities and crimes against humanity.") Meanwhile, Martin Kramer, editor of Middle East Quarterly, has accused Columbia of concealing funding of the Edward Said Chair of Arab Studies, now occupied by Khalidi, and of failing for many years to report -- as it is legally bound to do -- its foreign donors to the N.Y. State Department of Education. (It belatedly reported this year one $250,000 grant from an unidentified Saudi Arabian, the tip of the iceberg.). 

TRUTH FROM TRIMBLE

Nobel Peace laureate and Ulster Unionist leader David Trimble, at an international conference of terrorism victims in Madrid, declared a truth that has hitherto been unspeakable: "One of the great curses of this world is the human rights industry. They justify terrorist acts and end up being complicit in the murder of innocent victims."

While Trimble was predictably assailed by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (currently two of the worst offenders), he was more fortunate than BBC talk show host Robert Kilroy-Silk. Host of a highly successful BBC talk show for 17 years, Kilroy-Silk was abruptly fired for speaking salutary truths about Islam in a column in the Sunday Express. He wrote: "We owe Arabs nothing. Apart from oil -- which was discovered, is produced and is paid for by the West -- what do [Arab countries] contribute?...They should go down on their knees and thank God for the munificence of the United States. What do they think we feel about them?...That we admire them for the cold-blooded killings in Mombasa, Yemen and elsewhere? That we admire them for being suicide bombers, limb-amputators, women repressors?"

In politically correctly-mad Britain, Kilroy Silk now faces possible prosecution under race relations legislation with a maximum of seven years in prison. 

Under assault from fundamentalist Moslems, most of the community had fled. Now there are reports of a campaign of violence against Christians in Basra, the southernmost Shiite port city. The days of that Christian minority appear to be numbered as well. 

ANOTHER ISRAELI FIRST

David Bukay, a professor in Haifa University's political science department, observes: "We are the only democracy in the world with Arab religious sectarian parties that all identify themselves as Palestinian. This is insane. There are three Arab parties in the Knesset, all working with different strategies to destroy the state of Israel. Such a phenomenon is unheard of in other Western countries." 

A Christian-rein Iraq?
On this page in December 2003, we noted a report in the London Daily Telegraph about the plight of Iraqi Christians in Ramadi, 100 miles from Baghdad.

Herbert Zweibon
Most of this issue of Outpost is dedicated to exposing the dangers of Ariel Sharon's proposed unilateral withdrawal from Gaza.

Sharon knows the immense strategic importance of Gaza, as do America's foremost military experts. On June 19, 1967, one week after Israel's stunning triumph in the Six Day War, then-U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara sent a memorandum to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, requesting "the views of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, without regard to political factors, on the minimum territory in addition to that held on 4 June 1967, [which] Israel might be justified in retaining in order to permit a more effective defense against possible conventional Arab attack and terrorist raids."

Ten days later, the Joint Chiefs responded with an analysis of each of the areas Israel had won in the war, which, they emphasized, was "based solely on military considerations from the Israeli point of view." They recommended that for Israel to have "a militarily defensible border," it should keep all of the Golan Heights, most of Judea and Samaria, and some parts of the Sinai. Regarding the Gaza Strip, the Joint Chiefs stated:

"By occupying the Gaza Strip, Israel would trade approximately 45 miles of hostile border for eight. Configured as it is, the strip serves as a salient for introduction of Arab subversion and terrorism, and its retention would be to Israel's military advantage."

The Joint Chiefs never retracted the report, and what they wrote then is as valid today as it was in 1967. The only thing that has changed is the political atmosphere. During the years following the 1967 war, the Arabs launched a propaganda campaign to declare that the Israeli occupation of Judea, Samaria, and Gaza was the obstacle to Mideast peace, this, though their response in the immediate aftermath of the war to Israel's offer to retreat on all fronts, was the three "no"s of Khartoum--no recognition, no negotiations, no peace. The international community, particularly its vocal leftwing elites, inverted the true nature of the conflict. It was no longer a huge Arab world against a tiny Israel, but now a poor, oppressed, weak challenger (the Palestinian Arabs) against a powerful, relentless juggernaut (Israel).

Within Israel itself, the myth that the "occupa-tion" is the heart of the problem gradually made inroads. The Israeli left, internalizing the world's accusations and deeply alienated from the Jewish heritage that the territories symbolize, soon accepted the Arab argument and worked feverishly, through the media and academia, to demonize the "settlers" in order to justify their mass expulsion. Gaza became their easiest target. Gaza did not have large numbers of Jewish residents--8,000, as compared to nearly 200,000 in Judea-Samaria. Gaza did not have the kind of well-known holy sites that have made it harder to deny the area's Jewish roots, such as the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron, the Tomb of Rachel near Bethlehem, or the Tomb of Joseph in Shechem.

What Gaza does have is unique strategic value. Israel dare not voluntarily surrender what would be a crucial beachhead for a future Arab invasion. Just recall what the Allies in World War II sacrificed to gain the beachhead at Anzio -- six weeks of intense fighting, 30,000 dead or wounded.

Moreover, an Israeli retreat would give Hamas what the retreat from southern Lebanon gave Hezbollah -- a huge boost of morale, a psychological as well as strategic victory of inestimable value. Israel would again be "turned into a doormat," in the words of Arieh Stav, director of the Ariel Center for Policy Research. And if Israel is perceived as a doormat, it will be treated as a doormat--with catastrophic results. 

Herbert Zweibon is chairman of Americans For a Safe Israel.