[Part one of this article can be read at http://www.israelnn.com/article.php3?id=4497.]
The Likud of Ariel Sharon refuses to be left behind in the race to make things worse. The latest manifestation of the Likud's adgravophilia is the Sharon plan for unilateral "disengagement" in the Gaza Strip.
In fact, the Sharon plan is identical to Amram Mitzna's erstwhile plan, against which Sharon and the Likud ran in the last elections. Sharon and his people were elected by voters precisely because they claimed to oppose the Mitzna Plan. But within months of the election, Sharon was announcing that he had always believed that a Palestinian terror state was the way to go, and unilateral eviction of the Jewish population of the Gaza Strip was the only effective way to make peace. Once the Gaza Strip has been made Judenrein, with no Israeli soldiers left behind there, without a doubt the Gaza population will take up quilting and transcendental meditation. Joan Baez disks will be all the rage. And do I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you!
The Sharon round of adgravophilia was accompanied by all the accoutrements familiar from Labor Party days, the large "spontaneous" ads in the papers endorsing the plan by civilian rank and file, the billboard blitz, the endless repetitions that there is just no alternative, the pie-in-the-sky promises, the denunciation of opponents of the plan as irrational haters of peace, as people driven by fanatical religious prejudice, greed and blindness.
Like previous rounds, the Sharon Plan chapter of adgravophilia will make things far worse. The hundreds of rockets already fired into Jewish civilian areas, even while the Israeli army is in control of Gaza, will morph into thousands and then tens of thousands. S'derot will be obliterated and then Ashkelon. The Oslo death toll will jump by an order of magnitude, maybe by two. Israel's pre-1967 area within rocket range of Gaza will be emptied of Jews, turned into a no-man's zone, hailed as yet another victory by the Palestinians in driving out the Zionist untermenschen. Bands of suicide bombers will emerge from Gaza in numbers far exceeding what Israel has known.
The tunnels through which weapons were smuggled from Egypt even while the Israeli army controlled the ground will become uninterrupted super-highways of terror. Missiles will be brought in that threaten Israeli air space. The range of rockets will be upgraded until they strike Tel Aviv. All the while, just like in all previous deteriorations following previous rounds of adgravophilia, the same politicians will pout before the cameras and insist that none of this could have possibly been foreseen, that it was entirely unexpected, that no one at all had predicted this could happen.
No matter how many times Ariel Sharon swears on the heads of his children that the Gaza Plan is in fact a wily tactic by him to allow Israel to retain control of the West Bank indefinitely, no one should believe him. And no matter how many times the Likud apparatchiks insist that the Gaza capitulation is not a precedent for a similar unilateral "disengagement" in the West Bank, they are lying. The demands and pressures for an identical West Bank capitulation will come even before the last Jewish "settler" has been evicted at bayonet point from Gush Katif. Now that His Ugliness Yasser Arafat has been dispatched to the great hijacked airplane of the sky, pressures will build for Israel to show its goodwill to the new Palestinian "moderates" who take Arafat's place. Since the circus of Arafat's funeral, the media are discovering peace-loving moderates behind every cactus bush, and the United States and United Kingdom are escalating demands for Israel to meet these "moderates" more than half way.
But the Sharon adgravophilia is disastrous for another reason. It is a one-sided population transfer. Sharon's argument is that Jewish settlers in the Gaza Strip need to be moved to another part of their homeland to remove tensions and reduce confrontation. So why is this eviction not balanced and even-handed? Why is it not accompanied by, say, a plan to evict the population of Jenin and move it to the Gaza Strip in order to remove tensions and reduce confrontation? Why aren't these two fully integrated halves of a single plan? Why is it that only Jews need to be shifted and moved to reduce confrontation? This lack of balance establishes a clear precedent that will haunt Israel in all future "negotiations".
One interesting twist in the Sharon round is the clear demonstration of how utterly unpopular adgravophilia is among Israelis in general. When Sharon tried to provide "his" plan with the Likud party household seal of approval in the party referendum last year, adgravophilia lost by a huge three-to-two majority, despite intense lobbying for it by the Likud party machine. Sharon has had to fight a long series of battles, accompanied by naked threats against his own cabinet ministers and back-benchers. In fact, every time Israeli voters have actually been allowed to express their opinion on adgravophilia, they have rejected it.
Understanding that they would do so again is what motivated Sharon's people to prohibit any ballot referendum on the plan. This was accompanied by Labor Party-like trotting out of "experts" to lecture the public about how anti-democratic ballot initiatives are. Tell that to Californians.
I have always believed that politics are a lot like medicine, and that the first obligation of all leaders is simply to avoid making things worse, to avoid doing harm. Part of maturity is understanding that not all problems in life have solutions and that not every unpleasantness can be removed and eliminated. Ugliness and discomfort are often an unavoidable part of life. This does not make death the preferred alternative.
For fourteen years, Israeli politicians have been attempting to resolve the complexity of the Middle East conflict by making things worse.
[Part 2 of 2]
[This article first appeared in Outpost of December 2004, published by Americans For a Safe Israel.]
The Likud of Ariel Sharon refuses to be left behind in the race to make things worse. The latest manifestation of the Likud's adgravophilia is the Sharon plan for unilateral "disengagement" in the Gaza Strip.
In fact, the Sharon plan is identical to Amram Mitzna's erstwhile plan, against which Sharon and the Likud ran in the last elections. Sharon and his people were elected by voters precisely because they claimed to oppose the Mitzna Plan. But within months of the election, Sharon was announcing that he had always believed that a Palestinian terror state was the way to go, and unilateral eviction of the Jewish population of the Gaza Strip was the only effective way to make peace. Once the Gaza Strip has been made Judenrein, with no Israeli soldiers left behind there, without a doubt the Gaza population will take up quilting and transcendental meditation. Joan Baez disks will be all the rage. And do I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you!
The Sharon round of adgravophilia was accompanied by all the accoutrements familiar from Labor Party days, the large "spontaneous" ads in the papers endorsing the plan by civilian rank and file, the billboard blitz, the endless repetitions that there is just no alternative, the pie-in-the-sky promises, the denunciation of opponents of the plan as irrational haters of peace, as people driven by fanatical religious prejudice, greed and blindness.
Like previous rounds, the Sharon Plan chapter of adgravophilia will make things far worse. The hundreds of rockets already fired into Jewish civilian areas, even while the Israeli army is in control of Gaza, will morph into thousands and then tens of thousands. S'derot will be obliterated and then Ashkelon. The Oslo death toll will jump by an order of magnitude, maybe by two. Israel's pre-1967 area within rocket range of Gaza will be emptied of Jews, turned into a no-man's zone, hailed as yet another victory by the Palestinians in driving out the Zionist untermenschen. Bands of suicide bombers will emerge from Gaza in numbers far exceeding what Israel has known.
The tunnels through which weapons were smuggled from Egypt even while the Israeli army controlled the ground will become uninterrupted super-highways of terror. Missiles will be brought in that threaten Israeli air space. The range of rockets will be upgraded until they strike Tel Aviv. All the while, just like in all previous deteriorations following previous rounds of adgravophilia, the same politicians will pout before the cameras and insist that none of this could have possibly been foreseen, that it was entirely unexpected, that no one at all had predicted this could happen.
No matter how many times Ariel Sharon swears on the heads of his children that the Gaza Plan is in fact a wily tactic by him to allow Israel to retain control of the West Bank indefinitely, no one should believe him. And no matter how many times the Likud apparatchiks insist that the Gaza capitulation is not a precedent for a similar unilateral "disengagement" in the West Bank, they are lying. The demands and pressures for an identical West Bank capitulation will come even before the last Jewish "settler" has been evicted at bayonet point from Gush Katif. Now that His Ugliness Yasser Arafat has been dispatched to the great hijacked airplane of the sky, pressures will build for Israel to show its goodwill to the new Palestinian "moderates" who take Arafat's place. Since the circus of Arafat's funeral, the media are discovering peace-loving moderates behind every cactus bush, and the United States and United Kingdom are escalating demands for Israel to meet these "moderates" more than half way.
But the Sharon adgravophilia is disastrous for another reason. It is a one-sided population transfer. Sharon's argument is that Jewish settlers in the Gaza Strip need to be moved to another part of their homeland to remove tensions and reduce confrontation. So why is this eviction not balanced and even-handed? Why is it not accompanied by, say, a plan to evict the population of Jenin and move it to the Gaza Strip in order to remove tensions and reduce confrontation? Why aren't these two fully integrated halves of a single plan? Why is it that only Jews need to be shifted and moved to reduce confrontation? This lack of balance establishes a clear precedent that will haunt Israel in all future "negotiations".
One interesting twist in the Sharon round is the clear demonstration of how utterly unpopular adgravophilia is among Israelis in general. When Sharon tried to provide "his" plan with the Likud party household seal of approval in the party referendum last year, adgravophilia lost by a huge three-to-two majority, despite intense lobbying for it by the Likud party machine. Sharon has had to fight a long series of battles, accompanied by naked threats against his own cabinet ministers and back-benchers. In fact, every time Israeli voters have actually been allowed to express their opinion on adgravophilia, they have rejected it.
Understanding that they would do so again is what motivated Sharon's people to prohibit any ballot referendum on the plan. This was accompanied by Labor Party-like trotting out of "experts" to lecture the public about how anti-democratic ballot initiatives are. Tell that to Californians.
I have always believed that politics are a lot like medicine, and that the first obligation of all leaders is simply to avoid making things worse, to avoid doing harm. Part of maturity is understanding that not all problems in life have solutions and that not every unpleasantness can be removed and eliminated. Ugliness and discomfort are often an unavoidable part of life. This does not make death the preferred alternative.
For fourteen years, Israeli politicians have been attempting to resolve the complexity of the Middle East conflict by making things worse.
[Part 2 of 2]
[This article first appeared in Outpost of December 2004, published by Americans For a Safe Israel.]