Harsh Truths of the Disengagement

From FrontPageMagazine.com May 7, 2007, by P. David Hornik ....

Not long ago a bitter debate raged over Israel’s disengagement from Gaza. The more tender-minded proponents argued that once the hated “Israeli occupation” had been removed, Gazans would desist from anti-Israeli violence and turn to peaceful tasks of state-building. The more tough-minded proponents argued that, while the terror against Israel would continue, Israel would now have legitimacy in the world’s eyes to deal with it.

Whoever said the attacks would continue was right. Last March 8 the head of IDF Southern Command, Maj.-Gen. Yoav Gallant, said that since the disengagement “2,053 Kassams have been launched at Israel, 296 explosive charges have been detonated, 143 attacks were carried out against tanks that were outside the security fence—not inside Gaza—and there were 260 incidents of gunfire at IDF forces outside the fence.”

....Opponents of the withdrawal, though, while expecting that Israel would have great difficulty both operationally and diplomatically in acting against Gaza terror after the pullback, did not foresee a situation in which Israel would just give up and let Sderot and the surrounding area become a helpless shooting gallery. But that is what has happened since the November 26 “ceasefire,” since which time hundreds of Qassams and mortars have been fired with almost no military response by Israel.

Not surprisingly, this period has also witnessed ongoing, massive anti-Israeli military buildups not only in Gaza itself but in Lebanon and Syria as well, as Israel’s deterrence—under the combined impact of its helplessness against short-range Hezbollah rockets last summer and its continuing helplessness against Gaza rockets—has sunk to an existentially dangerous nadir.....

.....Enough time has passed, then, since Israel completed the disengagement in September 2005 to assess that it has been an unmitigated disaster of an escalating terror buildup and terror offensive from Gaza met by ineffective Israeli responses dwindling to no response at all, along with the wholesale destruction of the settlements and the ongoing plight of their former residents. Many proponents were lulled by the “occupation” and “demographic” buzzwords at a time when Gaza’s Palestinian population was actually running its own affairs and Israel’s military presence was a minimal but indispensable check on jihadist ambitions.

Handing a territorial base to Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Fatah et al. made no more sense than it would to award, gratis, a launching pad to Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or any other group hell-bent on destruction.