Once more without feeling

Paul Greenberg wrote in Townhall To paraphrase Dr. Johnson on the subject of second marriages, what the world is witnessing in Gaza is a triumph of hope over experience. Once again the Israelis are pulling back, much as they did after the Oslo Accords of 1993. And once again the Israeli withdrawal is supposed to be the first step toward peace with an Arab neighbor, this time a nascent Palestinian state. It's not the first time. Back in the '90s, the Israelis agreed to pull out of Gaza on the Mediterranean and Jericho on the West Bank in return for promises of peace. Yasser Arafat's PLO was going to recognize Israel's right to exist, control its own crazies and punish disturbers of the peace. We all know how that turned out.

Arafat had no interest in peace. It remains to be seen whether Abbas does.

But it was a beautiful dream, so beautiful it is hard now to recapture the optimism of those sunny days; they seem part of not another decade but another world, where prayers were shared, handshakes exchanged on the White House lawn and peace in the Mideast was thought of as not just possible but inevitable. Alas, the whole, carefully assembled house of cards collapsed. Instead of peace coming stage by stage, war did. The anticlimax of the whole process came at Camp David, when Israel's Ehud Barak proposed a Palestinian state that would consist of Gaza, almost all the West Bank and a share of Jerusalem to boot. Yasser Arafat left without even bothering to make a counteroffer. It was clear he'd decided to launch a second Intifada instead, and suicide bombings soon became the new vogue. Not till another informal but bloody war was fought, and the Israelis began to build their wall - excuse me, Security Barrier - did an uneasy tension begin to supplant the violence. Now the Israelis are taking another unilateral step in hopes of imposing a peace.

If it leads to peace, that would be one thing, but IMHO the primary reason Israel did it is because there was no way to extend their Security Barrier to include a few small settlements in Gaza, and they believe that their real security depends on the Security Barrier. However there is a second reason. It challenges Abbas to control violence from Gaza. If he is successful in controling the violence, he will find it possible to negotiate more withdrawals from some of the west bank settlements. And if he is not successful, and if more jihadists rush to Gaza, and begin major attacks, Israel will have a good reason to retaliate, and if they launch a very massive retaliation, they should be able to kill a major number of the bad guys, and at the same time convince the others that survive, that they should help turn in any new bad guys that materialize, to avoid another massive retaliation.

Or at least a breathing spell. For the dazzling dreams of Oslo are not only long gone but almost forgotten. The ultimate vision remains the same - a Jewish and Arab state living side by side in peace, aka the two-state solution. Everybody, or at least all men of goodwill, understand that is the goal, the light at the end of the tunnel. There's just no tunnel....