After the Gaza withdrawal, will Mahmoud Abbas make concessions for peace?

OpinionJournal editorialized Even for those who believe--as we do--that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is right to withdraw Jewish settlements from the Gaza Strip, last week's events in Israel were heart-rending to watch. Settlers abandoned homes, and farmers fields, that had been theirs for years, sometimes decades. Young Israeli soldiers were asked to enforce the government's writ on their cousins, siblings and parents. Mr. Sharon has risked his job, and lost much of his political base, to move ahead with the withdrawal. The international community, including the U.S., which has long demanded sacrifices from "both sides" for the sake of peace, now has the satisfaction of seeing that sacrifice vividly offered, at least on the Israeli side.

Hopefully they will remember the sacrifices the Israelis have made, since I doubt seriously if we will see any sacrificies from the Palestenian side. Rather I predict there will just be more demands for further concessions from Israel, and increases in the attacks, and hopefully this time Israel will respond not with a few targeted killings, but massive bombings to clear much if not all of the Gaza strip.

The logic behind the withdrawal is clear. Prior to last weekend, there were only 8,500 Israeli settlers in an area that contained one million or more Palestinians. Contrary to received opinion, for most of Israel's occupation these settlers were an economic boon to Palestinians, providing them with agricultural and small-factory jobs that had never existed under the previous Egyptian military administration. But that was before Yasser Arafat returned to Gaza to radicalize the population, and before the outbreak of the intifada, in which the settlers became the targets of incessant Palestinian terrorism.

Now let us see if Abbas will be able to provide the agricultural and small-factory jobs that the attacks caused them to lose from the Israelis.

Protecting the settlers, some of them in isolated communities, turned out to be a huge drain on Israel's military and economic resources, resources that could be better deployed by putting the country behind clear defensible lines. The much-maligned Israeli security fence is part of the same strategy, and it has helped reduce Israel's terror fatalities by over 90% in two years.

And should be continued until it completely surrounds Israel. And then maybe they could come over here and build one on our southern border (and perhaps even the northern border)

These are real benefits for Israel, even if the Gaza withdrawal has not been met by reciprocal Palestinian concessions. At the same time, the risks of withdrawal are also clear, the main one being that the Palestinians will view it as a sign of weakness. There are indications this is happening, with Hamas declaring in a slogan that "resistance wins, so let's go on." Gaza may yet become a kind of "Hamastan"--a regional terrorist enclave threatening not just Israel but also neighboring Egypt and perhaps Europe.

But if the terrorists significantly increase in Gaza, including their leadership, a single massive attack would remove most of them, and those left would know not to try that again.

Israel's main security against this possibility lies in its overwhelming conventional military deterrent, just as it does against "Hezbollahstan" on its northern border with Lebanon. The man who could make the withdrawal work and stop Hamastan in its tracks is Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. Mr. Abbas came to office democratically in January with a pledge to confiscate illegal weapons and "make the law the leader in this country." Less than a year later, however, the Palestinian territories are more lawless than ever. Mr. Abbas has been unable to rein in the al-Aksa Martyrs Brigades, the terrorist paramilitary wing of his ruling Fatah party. He has also failed, or perhaps refused, to enforce his will on Hamas, trying instead to coax them into the political process and getting them to agree to a cease-fire. Hamas has not abandoned its arms, but it has seen its political popularity soar in the face of Mr. Abbas's obvious weakness.

In the coming months, Mr. Abbas may seek to deflect attention from his government's shortcomings by demanding further Israeli withdrawals from the West Bank. (Israel already intends to remove four small settlements in the northern West Bank.) If history is any guide, his plea will find sympathetic ears in European capitals and probably some pockets of the U.S. foreign policy establishment. But Israel cannot be expected to make further wrenching withdrawals if the message from the international community is that they are never enough.

Instead Israel needs to make a massive attack in Gaza, wiping out many of the terrorists attacking Israel, and then withdrawing the settlers from the four small settlements in the northern West Bank, and ask "Now are you willing to negotiate peace, or do you need another lesson"

And Palestine will have no hope of becoming a functional and civilized state if no serious demands are made of it to reform its institutions and eliminate its culture of terrorism and hooliganism. The problem with Palestine today isn't the absence of land--Singapore isn't much larger than Gaza, and is four times as populous--but the poverty of expectations as to what it ought to be and might become. Israel has now done what it had to. It's time the Palestinians follow suit.