Gush Katif still hurts, Mr. Netanyahu
Gush Katif still hurts, Mr. Netanyahu

So many plans to “evacuate” the Jews

Who talks like this about any other people?

Seems like only the Jews are to keep their bags packed, ready to be moved from here to there at a moment’s notice.

Rootless even in Israel. Even in Israel?

So says John Kerry, inadvertently, in his upcoming memoir, where he writes about his Obama plan to uproot Israelis out of Judea Samaria…too often termed the West Bank.

That’s more than half a million Jews…and where would they go?

Maybe he explains that somewhere in the book, though the concern is never where to move Jews in, always out.   

Only Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, writes Kerry, kept that from happening. Kudos to Netanyahu for that.

But not this.

Here’s the quote: “The evictees of Gush Katif, their lives could have been a tragedy, a terrible catastrophe. It began with terrible pain, but the State of Israel and all the citizens of Israel worked together so that the displaced people of Gush Katif would not be refugees in their own country. We absorbed them, and they renewed their lives to wonderful life. There is the memory…”

Someone needs to tell the prime minister that bringing up Gush Katif is never smart. Indeed, “there is the memory” of nearly 10,000 Israelis ripped from Gaza.

Gush Katif still hurts.

True, that did not happen under Netanyahu. It happened under Ariel Sharon, who one fine day in 2005 he decided that Israel would be safer if Gaza were controlled by Palestinian Arabs.

How’s that been working out?

Back to Kerry. Where did he get the idea that Jews can be so easily dumped?

Well, yes, history would be his guide…the 2,000-year history of expulsions that was finalized at the 1942 Wannsee Conference.

Not much talk there, among Hitler’s top brass, about genocide. No, it was strictly business, how to “transfer” Jews from one place to another.

Among them it was largely about “train schedules.”

Talk like that would likewise appeal to Kerry and the EU’s Federica Mogherini, who would never speak of a final solution; rather, train schedules.   

You’d think NEVER AGAIN – wouldn’t you? You would think that once settled in the Land, any form of expulsion would be anathema to Israelis …even the Left.

Not so.

A remarkable slice of reportage appears here in Arutz Sheva, where Ehud Olmert, prime minister from 2006 to 2009, speaks his mind.

This is a mind so deranged that it is terrifying to think that this man (who later served eight months in jail for corruption), led the country even for a minute.

Two points from him – his love of “peace-loving Mahmoud Abbas” (whose Fatah bequeaths cash payments to Arabs who murder Jews) and his desire to divide Jerusalem.

He still wants a chance.

But the main point, overall, is the delusional dreaming that has afflicted Israeli politics…from left to right. (More on all that in this thriller.)

Yes, it was my captain at the Navy Base in Haifa who reminded me that those were right-wing governments that gave up Sinai and Gaza.

There is no choice but to say that Political Israel picked up a bad habit, believing, as did the nations, that Jews are transferable, a people never fully at home, anywhere, a people, it is assumed, to be thought of as visitors, transients who can be evicted once they’ve served a purpose and are no longer welcome.

That’s how it was then, in other lands. Now, at home in the Land of Israel, what’s the excuse?

New York-based bestselling American novelist Jack Engelhard writes regularly for Arutz Sheva.

He is the author of the international book-to-movie bestseller “Indecent Proposal” and most recently the noir novel “Slot Attendant,” plus the two inside journalism thrillers “The Bathsheba Deadline” and “News Anchor Sweetheart, Hollywood Edition.” Engelhard is the recipient of the Ben Hecht Award for Literary Excellence. Website: www.jackengelhard.com