Sharon's Gamble

Here's the WaPo account of the withdrawal from Gaza. I have been trying to imagine how I would feel if my own army came and kicked me and everyone else out ofyour homes and neighborhood? There is actually precedent in US history from the frontier days. Remember in one of the early Little House books (the 2nd?) when Pa and the Ingalls had just begun to have a good life after several years of back-breaking work to build a home and civilize a little plot of land? Then word came that the same govt. which had granted the land had now designated it Indian Territory and the cavalry was coming to run all the settlers off. Pa refused to stay and be run off his own land, preferring to "git" on his own terms first.

I know the Bush/Europe logic of withdrawal, but I've been wondering what Sharon's logic for giving up Gaza could be. Mark Steyn has a theory. . . not his own, but he summarizes well.

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.”

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.