In fact, Amram Mitzna won that election. Ariel Sharon's proposals for unilateral withdrawal/surrender in the Gaza Strip show that Amram Mitzna may have lost the election but he was victorious in imposing his suicidal policies on Israel through Ariel Sharon.

Sharon's tenacity was further on display when he agreed to reward Hezbollah for murdering three Israeli POWs in cold blood, by releasing 450 murderers, all in order to "buy" back their corpses and to release one Israeli whom Hezbollah had been holding. Sharon's government has signaled every Israeli soldier that, should he be captured and murdered, the Beilinized government of Israel will not avenge him but rather will reward his murderers. Sharon has shown the world that the "Never Again" slogan thought to be the raison d'etre of Israel has been replaced by defeatist appeasement of Islamist terrorists and Arab fascists.

Bullied or cowardly? Victim or exhausted? I think the problem is that Sharon and the Likud leadership believe in nothing except staying in power as long as possible. Even those once thought to be people of courage and principle, like Ehud Olmert (ex-mayor of Jerusalem), have undergone Beilinization. Those very few in the party who still seem to believe in something are too small in number to mount a leadership challenge, other than Moshe Feiglin's heroic but quixotic attempts. And given the track record of the Likud, there is always the fear that even they could morph into born-again Peresites if they ever got the chance.

Most of Jewish history consisted of long periods of desperation and hopelessness. Today the Israeli government seems determined to help us identify emotionally with those millennia of Jewish history.  

Steven Plaut teaches economics at the University of Haifa.

(Editor's note: The following article is a slightly updated version of "Gaza Reconsidered" by Erich Isaac, published in the December 1993 Outpost, when Gaza and Jericho were turned over to Yasser Arafat as part of the first phase of Oslo. At that time, of course, there was no mention of uprooting existing Jewish communities.)

A poll of the Israeli public (including Israeli Arabs) conducted for the Israeli newspaper Ma'ariv in the first week of February 2004 (and published in Ma'ariv Feb. 6) found that 52% supported Prime Minister Sharon's announced plan unilaterally to evacuate all Jewish communities in the Gaza Strip. This easily-won support for uprooting close to 8,000 Jews from their homes and communities calls to mind the equally swift support the Rabin government won for turning over Gaza to Arafat in 1993, even from many of those who recognized other elements in the Oslo agreement were calamitous for Israel. The prevalent view of Gaza then could be summed up as a) Who wants to bother with all those Arabs? and b) What possible value -- to anyone -- is Gaza and the Strip? And so for most Israelis, the 1994 retreat from Gaza produced a feeling of relief.

Much of that feeling remains now that the issue has become the uprooting of Jewish communities in the Strip. The attitude of "good riddance" pervades journalist Hillel Halkin's "Goodbye to Gaza" in the New York Sun of February 10. Gaza, "overpopulated and impoverished...teeming with refugee camps and resentments," was and is "nothing but a burden to Israel." The evacuation of 7,500 Jewish settlers, writes Halkin, "is a reasonable price for ridding Israel of what has long been a painful and valueless thorn in its side."

Unfortunately, such easy dismissal of the Gaza region reveals an abysmal ignorance of the Strip's vital role on the part of the public and facile but foolish journalists like Halkin, along with wilful denial by Israel's political elite, above all by Ariel Sharon, who knows better.

The Gaza Strip has had uncanny persistence as an invasion corridor. From prehistoric times to the present it has served as a critical segment of the route linking Asia and Africa. This route, roughly paralleling the Mediterranean shore, leads from Egypt through northern Sinai to the narrow Rafiah gateway between the sea and the sand dunes of Halutza. From Rafiah the route continues north through the Gaza Strip into Israel's heartland. Known to the Egyptians as the "Ways of Horus," or the Pharaonic road, to the Israelis as Derech Eretz Plishtim, or the way of Philistia, and to the Romans as Via Maris, the way of the sea, this route passes between the coastal dunes to the west, and the badlands of the Western Negev inland to the east. There are no natural obstacles on its way northward into modern Israel's core territory.

The route has the singular advantage of ample water sources, based in part on natural storage in the

March 2004               - 5 -               Outpost