A lot of people are worried about Israel’s “retreat” from Gaza and now, presumably, from the West Bank. They think that it shows weakness and just encourages the Palestinians to be militant and put off making peace with Israel.
But that ignores the significant downside of the West Bank occupation. It allowed a disempowered Palestinian people to act like angry adolescents, blowing themselves up in militarily insignificant but publicity powerful acts of terrorism.
Israel would really benefit if it faces a united Palestinian people with an army. Sooner or later a Palestinian government would be forced into attacking Israel with actual army units, rather than terrorists embedded in the civilian population.
On that day Israel could inflict a decisive defeat on the Palestinians. And that would decisively change the situation on the ground.
It is in that sense that Richard Z. Chesnoff is right to recommend that Israel continues its retreat to defensible borders, “leaving the Palestinians to cut their own throats or make peace.”
But of course, they will not make peace, not until after the throat-cutting is finished and the winner has boldly taken the fight to the Zionist entity, as promised.
The most interesting fact to emerge in the last few months as Hamas has emerged as the chosen government of the Palestinians is the extent to which the Palestine Authority is financed by the West. We find that the EU, Canada, and the United States have been shoveling money by the truckload into the West Bank and Gaza. And during the cartoon crisis we were amazed when the Palestinians trashed the Danish agencies in the Territories. The Danes? They were in the West Bank and Gaza too?
Let the Palestinians form their government. Let it figure out how to built a political system that actually goes beyond mere welfare from the West. And then we shall see.
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