Amkha Yisrael

In "Stripped", by Yossi Klein Halevi, appearing in The New Republic, there is this line:

"...the untenability of maintaining 8,000 settlers in a war zone surrounded by a million Palestinians..."

This is what drives me nuts.

Gush Katif was one territorial unit, further from Gaza City than Sderot (in the Negev) is from Gaza City. The northern Gaza settlements had no Arabs between them and the next most northern Jewish town, inside the Green Line. The "too many Arabs" argument has absolutely no truth in that case. But guess what? Ariel Sharon's friends signed a deal to build a casino on the ruins of one of those northern Gaza Jewish towns.....

And even if the above statement from Halevi's TNR article were true, it just as easily applies to Jewish settlements in the Galilee and to Israel as a whole.

And Gaza is a "war zone" only because the Israeli government applied a policy that effectively turned the Arab areas there into a war zone ever since the first Oslo Accords (Remember? It was called "Gaza & Jericho First"). The Jews in Gaza used to be guarded by a handful of reserve soldiers, and they used to go shopping in Arab Gaza. Only Shimon Peres/Yitzchak Rabin's importing of organized terrorists, Islamists and murderers into Gaza (First) led - surprise - to the subsequent terrorism against civilians and soldiers there. They, our leaders, made it a "war zone" voluntarily.

The Jews of Gaza were the ones who suffered attacks (along with the rest of Israel, of course; eg., today's suicide bombing in Be'er Sheva) by groups armed and empowered by the Israeli and US governments. Why, then, did the victims of such facilitated violence have to now suffer expulsion?

Disengagement rationalization is blame-the-victim writ large. And it stinks.