Two years ago, when Ariel Sharon's government erected a security barrier along Israel's beset frontier I was skeptical of the construction's physical utility and political precedent. Withdrawing behind fortifications, I reasoned, only prompts one's enemy to engineer the means to achieve what he could before the interruption; build a wall and the sappers will come. Peace, rather, follows an enemy's end.
Tactically I was very wrong. Israel has thwarted a multitude of terrorists, whittling the number of successful mass-murderers down to about a quarter of the number at the 2002 height of Yasser Arafat's final lunge for conquest. Was I wrong politically? On that, I am not so sure. These past several days have left us with a difficult collection of pictures, sounds and words. Israel Defense Forces soldiers are reluctantly dislocating their Jewish countrymen who settled in land won nearly forty years ago, when Israel struck at Near East fascist states before they could destroy her. Evictor and evictee shed tears together, while the international body responsible for the 1947 partition in the interest of Zionism now finances the manufacture of paraphernalia celebrating a genocidal fantasy wherein the failures of those fascist states are bloodily rectified.
For every excision of Israeli territory there is a chance to consolidate the defense of what remains — likely Ariel Sharon's calculation, this time gaining strategic advantage for a second political loss. What do you think of the Gaza pullout, I was asked yesterday. I do not blame the Arabs trapped in slums governed by the Palestine Liberation Organization's splinters, I answered; there is no sin in one's own miseducation and mistreatment. But the late Yasser Arafat's little fiefdom is a Historic Williamsburg of Nazi Germany, every last bit of racist incoherence preserved in ghoulish reenactment. The Gaza forfeiture is Near East fascist lebensraum, I said, and was soon affirmed by the reenactors themselves: "Gaza today," they said, "the West Bank and Jerusalem tomorrow." Oh, what a thing to mimic.
On national security I defer to Jerusalem. I will, however, call this a retreat. When does "the conflict" end? When the authoritarian states bordering Israel fall to liberals; the inflammation designated in the Western diplomatic imagination to become a "Palestinian state" lanced and the refugees allowed to drain away to proper homes. Watch, over the months, the fate of Gaza farms being confiscated from their Jewish owners. That will be a measure of the stewardship of men who say to us that the people they rule should have a state.