Haim Misgav - A Voice Not Often Heard

No more withdrawals

We must resist pressure for further pullouts, as they will mark Israel’s demise

More than two years have passed since the act of folly that took place in Gush Katif and northern Samaria – and again, our leadership is conducting itself as if it was blinded by spotlights. No lesson has been learned; we hear the same old tunes. The same disregard to what the Arabs said, all of them, including the ones that already signed “peace deals” with us; the same old talk about “good” terror groups that can and should receive armored vehicles from us, in order to encourage what politicians greedy for a government seat refer to as a peace process.

Mortar shells and missiles and Qassam rockets continue to land across the western Negev desert, and now in Ashkelon too, a town of 150,000 residents, yet at the Prime Minister’s Office they are only talking about one “enemy” – the settlers; the people who settled beyond the Green Line, which has become holy since 1967.

The fact that these settlers fill the ranks of combat units and command courses is not being considered in their favor at all; the opposite may even be true. According to various “peace groups” funded by various external elements, this fact is more worrisome than anything else. This explains their obsessive urge to fight those living in Judea and Samaria. They are the only ones that need to be banished from their homes. Only after that will the sought-after peace arrive, apparently; the peace that would only apply to those who remain in the wake of the grand withdrawal to the coastal plain.

And another thing: Officials at Olmert’s court are not talking about south Lebanon, where a security zone existed until Ehud Barak ran away from there; a security strip that prevented rocket attacks at Haifa and other communities in its vicinity all the way to the outskirts of Zichron Yaakov. They are also not talking about the Gaza region that is so “far’ from the center of the country and where thousands of Jewish families lived and worked the land. Now they are talking about the very heart of the Jewish national home.

There is no shortage of excuses. Just like in the past, during the grim Oslo days, while buses were exploding in our streets, now too they are trying to sell us the idea that this is good for the Jews. These dumb withdrawals, that is. This is the way to go in order to maintain the “Jewish majority”, say the shapers of public opinion, and this is the only way to avert an “apartheid state.” The State of Israel has no future without another terror state on its eastern border.

Jews won’t survive another exile

Yet this is nonsense. More withdrawals like the one we saw in the summer before the “Second Lebanon War”, another euphemistic name for the colossal failure and complete collapse of the unilateral pullout model, and the entire Zionist enterprise, which has been established through such hard work and exacted such a heavy human toll, will crumble. There will be no more revivals following the next withdrawal.

The president currently serving in the White House can continue preparing his smooth retirement on our backs, but we must learn from history; from what happened to the glorious Czech people on the even of Word War II. Cynical politicians (at the time it was the British prime minister, who was apparently a naïve and not too bright individual) sought to achieve peace for generations to come at the cost of selling off Czechoslovakia to the Germans. Today, we see his American duplicate playing with the lives and fate of small nations.

There is perhaps only one small and not-so-significant difference between us and the Czechs: They survived World War II and after it ended went back to being what they used to be before. We, the Jews, will not be able to survive another exile, and therefore, if we wish to stay alive, we must not cave in to dictates: Neither the ones imposed by George Bush, nor the ones of local politicians whose political survivability dictates extraneous considerations.

In any case, there is no place in the world where unilateral withdrawals without an agreement bring peace. On the whole, there is nothing good about withdrawals.