Wednesday, August 24, 2005

Not So Fast, Mr. Halkin

What a difference a day makes.

Just a day ago, Hillel Halkin had us believing that the settlers in Gaza:

have shown us what it takes to move 8,000 Jewish settlers out of a far corner of the land of Israel having no great strategic value or Jewish historical significance. Does anyone care to imagine what it would take to move 60,000 or 70,000 settlers out the biblical heartland of Judea and Samaria, which sits smack in the middle of this country, scant kilometers from Jerusalem?

...A second disengagement from the West Bank is a dead duck, at least for the foreseeable future - and by the time the foreseeable future is gone, the only politician in Israel capable of carrying out such a step, Ariel Sharon, will be gone too.

And to think that Halkin almost got away with it, making us think further withdrawls were impossible.

Fortunately, we have Reuters to thank for setting us straight and letting us know just how easy this first Disengagement was:

In a few long days, Israeli forces have buried any idea that giving up settlements on land Palestinians want for a state would be impossibly traumatic.

Some had predicted before Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's Gaza pullout that it could be so drawn out, painful and even violent that it might put off for years any removal of more West Bank enclaves seen by Palestinians as a prime obstacle to peace.

There was certainly deep personal grief for the Jewish settlers forced from their homes of decades in Gaza and four of the 120 settlements in the occupied West Bank.

But warnings of mass disorder, military mutinies and even civil war proved wrong.

How could we have missed it, this cake walk called the Disengagement. Fortunately, more objective observers are on-hand:

The fact the operation was declared over by police two weeks ahead of schedule showed how smoothly it went. That was not lost on Palestinians or the Israeli leftists campaigning to give up all land occupied in the 1967 Middle East war.

"It has been proven that settlements can be dismantled and must be dismantled," said Uri Avnery, a veteran Israeli left-winger.

Top Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said: "The lesson here is that it went so peacefully, so smoothly, peace can be doable in the West Bank."

Amazing.

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