Why Gaza? Why Now?

Mark Steyn wrote Ah, well. Even when Ariel Sharon hands them a great “victory”, some Palestinians can’t stop blowing themselves up long enough to celebrate it. I’ve never subscribed to the notion that this or that people “deserve” a state - a weird and decadent post-modern concept of nationality and sovereignty, even if it weren’t so erratically applied (how about the Kurds then?).

Actually I believe the Kurds deserve a state much more than the Palestinians. After all, there are already a number of Arab states, and there is not a single Kurdish state.

The United States doesn’t exist because the colonists “deserved” a state, but because they went out and fought for one. The same with the Irish Republic. By contrast the world deemed Palestinians “deserving” of a state ten, three, six, eight decades ago, and they’ve absolutely no interest in getting it up and running. Any honest visitor to the Palestinian Authority is struck by the complete absence of any enthusiasm for nation-building – compared with comparable pre-independence trips to, say, Slovenia, Slovakia, or East Timor. Invited to choose between nation-building or Jew-killing, the Palestinians prioritise Jew-killing – every time.

If the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And if the only thing you agree about with others in your country is that Jews need to be killed, you kill Jews.

So now Ariel Sharon has given them Gaza. On the face of it, this has a certain logic: The Zionist enterprise foundered in this unpromising territory. No more than a few settlers ever showed any gusto for this particular turf and, with their offspring, in the end mustered no more than eight-and-a-half thousand Jews among one-and-a-half million Arabs. Nonetheless, the Israelis could have held it without much difficulty for many years to come.

I disagree. They were losing too many soldiers trying to protect just a handful of settlers. They are much better off pulling everyone inside of the fence, and then blowing the heck out of the area when rockets start coming over the fence.

Instead, in the short term, Gaza will decay even further into a terrorist squat fought over by Hamas and Islamic Jihad. And, in the long run, its strategic value – as the most appealing location from which to launch the more ambitious Islamist rocketry – will likely turn it into a latterday Taliban Afghanistan: jihad central masquerading as a political jurisdiction.

With a small area for all of the jihadists to go to, they will bring them all together in one place, and then when the rockets start coming over the fence, they will be able to wipe a large number out with one major attack. And they will have the support of Egypt on the other side, who will be worried about the radicalized Gaza on their doorstep.

So why would Sharon enable such a move? If you talk to the more deluded disciples of the New York Times school of foreign policy analysis, they’ll tell you the Israelis have been forced into this by the pressure of world opinion and are doing it as a good-faith gesture to the Palestinians, to the broader Middle East and to the bien pensants of the European Union and the United Nations. I doubt the Israeli Prime Minister could even peddle that one with a straight face at an international conference. He knows the government of the Palestinian Authority is not a “partner for peace”, merely a sewer of corruption whose only political opposition is even more deranged and violent. And he knows the international community only have one response to Israeli concessions and that’s to demand more, even as they’re still flaying Israel for having the impertinence to withdraw from Gaza “unilaterally”.

He certainly is not relying on that story, but when Europe complains about the Israelis returning rocket attacks with major attacks themselves, I am sure Sharon will show the videos of his soldiers pulling settlers out of Gaza.

A couple of years ago, I had a conversation with a British cabinet minister who was denouncing Sharon for the usual reasons – his “intractability” and so forth. I replied blithely that, au contraire, I thought he’d dismantle the settlements and withdraw from Gaza. The New Labour bigwig was stunned, and, thinking it over, so was I. After all, Sharon had won the 2003 elections in part because he opposed a pull-out from Gaza. I didn’t quite know why I said what I’d said, and I didn’t really have a rationale for it.

But, with the benefit of hindsight, maybe that was the point - that Sharon has come to understand, as Bush did after September 11th, that the glorification of “stability” invariably favours the bad guys. Under cover of “stability”, the situation always deteriorates. The world’s embrace of the Palestinian “cause” is now almost complete: Blow up a nightclub in Bali full of Aussie tourists and Scandinavian backpackers and within ten minutes someone will have identified the “root cause” as the lack of a Palestinian state. The current intifada has in essence been funded by European taxpayers – and the EU’s auditors don’t seem to care. The withdrawal from Gaza was celebrated with promotional materials bearing the slogan “Today Gaza, tomorrow the West Bank and Jerusalem”, which doesn’t sound awfully like a “two-state solution” but was nevertheless paid for by the United Nations Development Programme, whose logo appeared just underneath the slogan.

And the UN workers responsible for that need to be held responsible.

Taking their cue from the Palestinians themselves, these various forces have little interest in a Palestinian state itself, only in using the lack of one as a means to undermine Israel and its legitimacy – which in Europe they’ve done very effectively. A continuation of the status quo – whereby the Palestinians are preserved in perpetuity as “deserving” a state without ever having to earn one – would only see further remorseless deterioration for Israel in the world. In that sense, any change in the situation would be for the better – especially a change that makes Gaza not Israel’s problem but everybody’s problem.

Thus, the Egyptians have just deployed their own troops to the strip to replace the evacuated Israeli Defence Force. Why would they do this now the Zionist oppressor has fled and Arab lands are rightfully back in Arab hands? Well, for a very obvious reason: an Islamist squat in Gaza is a far greater threat to the Mubarak regime than it is to Israel. With the Jews out of the way, the Egyptian government can no longer avoid seeing Gaza for what it is. This is one way of re-engaging Arab nations in the grubby reality of Palestinian “nationalism”.

It was my National Review colleague David Frum who came up with the clearest assessment to date of the Israeli strategy: “Could it be that Sharon is calling the bluff of Western governments and the Arab states? By creating the very Palestinian state that those governments and those states pretend to want but actually dread Sharon is forcing them to end their pretense and acknowledge the truth.”

Sounds good to me. And he does not have to do it on the West Bank, which is too close to other Jewish settlements they want to keep.

The Frum thesis sounds right to me. In Britain since July 7th, political figures have twisted themselves into pretzels trying to explain how suicide bombers in London are somehow different from suicide bombers in Tel Aviv – unwilling, even as the double-deckers are exploding across Bloomsbury, to abandon their fetishization of the Palestinian cause, and unable to see that in an ever more Islamified continent the Europeans are the new Jews. Maybe an Islamist statelet on the Mediterranean will concentrate even European minds.

This then is the audacious gamble of the Gaza withdrawal: the best way to demonstrate that the Palestinians are undeserving of a state is to force one upon them. It’s a dangerous move, but in a tough neighborhood there aren’t any other kinds.

Alcibiades @KesherTalk blogged Could be. Although I’m sure the world will still find a way to blame whatever happens on Israel. As they say, read the whole thing.