The Stakes After Gaza

Charles Krauthammer wrote in JWR The world has noted — though it will not credit, and will soon forget — those deeply moving scenes of the Israeli evacuation of Gaza: the discipline and self-control of the Israeli army; the cohesion of a society torn over policy but determined to follow the dictates of democracy; and the deep, abiding attachment of Israelis to every inch of soil they have reclaimed from sand and swamp.... In my view, the religious messianists who are saying this are totally wrong in their strategic assessment. Gaza was a necessary retreat in order to hold higher, more defensible and more critical ground elsewhere.

I agree completely.

Nonetheless, the parallel images carried an unintended truth. It is not the Gaza withdrawal itself but what follows that could lead to another and final extinction of Jewish independence, this time not just for 2,000 years but forever. What follows is the world saying, almost in unison, that the Gaza evacuation is just the beginning of a total Israeli retreat, one Dunkirk to be followed by many more.

That is not going to happen. I believe Israel will complete its wall, and retalliate swiftly and strongly to any incursions over the wall, and they will wait for a Palestinian administration willing to live in peace with Israel.

What follows is Condoleezza Rice declaring that "it cannot be Gaza only,"

And it was not Gaza only. Israel also withdrew from four settlements in the West Bank. But it definitely is now the Palestinian's turn to show they want peace.

a thrilling encouragement to the Palestinians jeering the Israeli withdrawal with chants of "Gaza today, Jerusalem tomorrow." Is this what the Bush administration wants? More unilateral concessions to an implacable enemy whose "moderate" leader, Mahmoud Abbas, declares that "we will not rest until they leave from all our land" — when Palestinian maps show "our land" as nothing less than all of British Palestine with Israel totally eradicated? This is a prescription for Israel's suicide. Or rather murder, because the Israelis are not prepared to march blindly into further unrequited concessions. The final concession will be getting into boats and sailing back to where? Poland? In his policy-setting Rose Garden speech of June 2002, President Bush explicitly endorsed a Palestinian state and said that to achieve it, the next step was up to the Palestinians. Since then the only thing the Palestinians have done is to bury Yasser Arafat, an act of reverence but not exactly an initiative. In the interim, the Israelis have withdrawn from Gaza, destroyed four West Bank settlements to create geographic contiguity for Palestinian territory in the northern West Bank, and once again repeated their support of a Palestinian state. The Palestinian response has been Katyusha rockets into Sderot, promises of renewed terrorism and chants for total victory. The Arabs are a great people. They have 21 states stretching from the Atlantic to the frontier of Persia. They will soon have a 22nd state called Palestine.

Maybe efforts need to be made to remove some of the 21, to put them into a defense mode.

The only question is whether its establishment will be on the grave of the world's only Jewish state. What is at stake is whether the world, led by the United States, will demand Arab acceptance of that single Jewish state, or whether the United States will continue to push Israel from one concession to another until one day another arch is erected, this time in Jerusalem itself, commemorating the destruction of history's third and last Jewish commonwealth.