A recent email received by this writer: “Well, thanks toÖ people like yourself and Krauthammer, who supported these expulsions, this is now the world’s expectation. .. send back the tide you brought on.”
While we are flattered at being placed in such good company with syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer, we are saddened that talented people like the writer of this note are absorbed in recriminations. Israel's disengagement from Gaza is over and doesn't need to be relived. For our part, we'd hoped to not have to go over the same ground again, but it looks as though the issue will be with us for a while. This communal retelling distracts Israel (as Krauthammer says in a recent article), from the great challenges and threats that face her. Winston Churchill's dicta comes to mind when he said that those who obsess about the past lose the future.
The emotional arguments against leaving Gaza in the end had little to do with Israel’s future security. This was Arik Sharon's primary consideration. The prime minister thought that the building of the fence and withdrawal from Gaza was the best way to make Israel safe. His goal was to make Israel able to withstand many of the physical threats on the ground as well as the world's relentless pressure to force Israel behind indefensible borders. Sharon also knew he had to end the constant cost in lives that were being lost defending a position that a large fraction of his polity thought was indefensible. Charles Krauthammer rightly notes, "Gaza was a necessary retreat in order to hold higher, more defensible and more critical ground elsewhere." It was also an important step in maintaining Israel's future unity.
The first responsibility of any government is to secure the best possible strategic position for its citizens to defend. Anything less than that puts a country at risk internally as well as externally. Sharon dealt with both of these issues at the same time.
No successful military commander ever won a war by continually choosing to fight his battles on inferior ground, and no country survives for long if it is constantly on the defensive. When a people or its leaders begin to believe that their success and prowess is due to things other than strategic superiority, they are heading for trouble.
Napoleon, a great believer in Èlan and morale, ignored the high ground at Waterloo and succumbed to Wellington's better positioning and concentration of force. Lee at Gettysburg neglected the principles that brought him victory up until then and asked his army to use their pride and bravery to prevail over a superior position. Pickett's hardened veterans paid the price.
Overwhelming numbers and material can force a decision, but at significant cost. Iwo Jima, Okinawa and the beaches of Normandy taught us that. In the end, superior positions win the day, and more importantly, can and do deter conflict entirely.
Those who romanticize Masada forget the outcome there. And those who think convoys are a way to win wars forget the Jewish doctors and nurses on the road to Mount Scopus Jerusalem in 1948. Hill 54 didn't answer because it was untenable to begin with and defeats like Dien Ben Phu led to larger and more costly engagements.
What of the military men who spoke out against withdrawal? Military men rarely have one voice and like everyone else divide on every issue. But Israel's electorate, in their wisdom, chose the one military man who has always had a sound strategic grasp of the issues. Arik Sharon's actions in all of Israel's wars have been right ones, and if there is a better predictor of success than precedent, no one has found it. Emotion certainly isn't an alternative to strategic vision.
Few who now keep repeating that Israel should have stayed in Gaza have pushed their thinking to deal with real alternatives. The imbalance of 8,000 Israelis, less than 2,500 households, in a sea of more than a million Arabs was untenable. That too few claimants to Israel's heritage lived on the land made Gaza impossible to keep.
Jews have always lived in Gaza, but that matters little, for right or wrong was never in question. In the end this was about Israel's security, one million Arabs, 8,000 Jews and a population growing unwilling to defend them. Sharon did what he had to do.
Israel must now move on from Gaza. She certainly must tend to her dispossessed (Ariel Sharon might begin the healing by asking Natan Sharansky back into the government to tend to this task), but Israel needs all of its people to coalesce around the Zionist enterprise and reaffirm their right, bought so dearly in Gaza, to define their own future.
The tide may indeed be coming in, but tides always do, and how they are dealt with is more important than debating their inevitability.

–nrg

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