Quick! Who said the following sentence?



"Those who espouse unilateral disengagement under fire - to this line or that - only invite more terror." (Jerusalem Post, January 9, 2003)



As amazing as it sounds, if you answered Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, you would be correct. In fact, it was on this platform that Ariel Sharon ran in the last Israeli general elections and on this platform his Likud party won almost a third of the seats in the Israeli Knesset. The party that supported unilateral disengagement, the Labor party, lost half its seats in parliament. So people naturally became upset when Sharon gave democracy the boot and did the exact opposite of what he promised.



Sharon's words against his own plan, unfortunately, have proven prophetic. Since he announced his scheme to forcefully expel the Jews of Gush Katif, the number of Arab terror attacks in the region has risen exponentially. In the past year, dozens of civilians and soldiers have been slaughtered. But that is only the tip of the iceberg. Sharon's capitulation in Gaza and the victory handed to Arab terrorists has emboldened them for the first time to attack Israeli civilian targets within the 1967 borders with artillery. In the past few months, Arabs shooting Kassam rockets on the development town of S'derot have murdered three children and one woman. And the death from the skies continues to pour down daily. Attacks of this type were unheard of prior to Sharon's show of weakness. Large population centers such as Ashdod and Ashkelon are also within range of the terrorist rockets.



Of course, we didn't need Sharon to tell us that surrender to terror only leads to more terror. We already learned that from "Oslo". After 10 years of territorial compromise in exchange for promises of peace, Arab terrorists have murdered 1,500 Israeli citizens, a 700% increase in the number of terror victims over the 10 years prior to Oslo. The current plan has many asking how can we continue to go forward with such a discredited policy? Has Sharon learned nothing from the failure of Oslo?



But worse than compromising Israel's security is the immoral nature of the plan. The ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims by Serbs was roundly condemned by the world, and former US President Clinton even sent in the US military to forcefully stop the practice. But the ethnic cleansing of Jews from Gush Katif is not only ignored by the world, but encouraged. Most hard to believe is the Jewish leftist support for the racist policy. They have been at the forefront of the civil rights movement in the US. In the sixties, they forced segregated schools and universities in the American South to accept Black students. In Israel, the Left has forced Jewish communities to accept Arab families; whereas, many Arab towns are legally off limits to Jews, such as Shechem and Bethlehem.



Unfortunately, these same activists who fight against racial discrimination against Blacks and Arabs favor racial discrimination against their own Jewish brothers. They are willing to kick these people out of their homes only because they are Jewish. Jews today can live in New York, Paris, London and throughout the free world. Only in the Land of Israel, and due to a Jewish government, are there rules forbidding them from living where they will.



Throughout their history, Jews have been expelled from the majority of the lands in which they lived. The English forbid Jews to live in England for centuries. It took Oliver Cromwell to overturn that decree. France had a similar policy. Of course, they were the good guys. What the rest of Europe did to the Jews was a lot more efficient - they simply burned them in ovens. After all, these expulsions and ethnic cleansing of Jews, it is particularly painful to see Jews doing the same thing to other Jews. Its sad to say, but after two thousand years of anti-Semitism, it seems that the message of Jew-hatred has finally been internalized.