By Ryan Jones
Jun 30, 2004
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon Tuesday set out to convince Israelis that the deadly Kassam rocket barrage a day earlier would never be repeated, even after he had implemented his Gaza retreat plan.
“…We are determined to ensure that what happened won't repeat itself, not now and not after the evacuation of Gaza,” the prime minister said during a brief tour of Sderot.
But not everyone is buying it, and with good reason.
Israelis have been sold this line before. The late Yitzhak Rabin and his Oslo sidekick, Shimon Peres, once told the nation that the weapons they were handing over to Yasser Arafat and his PLO terrorists would never be turned against Israeli Jews.
The Palestinian Arabs "know very well," Rabin said in 1993, "that if they use these guns against us once, at that moment the Oslo Accord will be annulled and the IDF will return to all the places that have been given to them."
Eleven years on, that is clearly a promise no one ever intended on keeping.
Why, then, should any Israeli, especially those within rocket range of Gaza, believe that they would be safe from the threat of attack?
It is a certainty that after Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, the terrorists entrenched there will rebuild their capabilities and launch wave after wave of Kassam rockets at nearby Israeli towns. To believe otherwise is delusional.
The question is, how would Israel respond to such an escalation?
It is easy for Sharon and Defense Minister Sha’ul Mofaz to talk tough now and say such provocation would lead to major IDF incursions and possibly a reversal of the pullout. But everyone knows Israel does nothing on the security or diplomatic front without looking over its shoulder at Washington.
What will happen when America informs Israel its plans to invade the sovereign “Palestinian” territory of Gaza in order to curb rocket attacks is unacceptable?
Israel will inevitably back down from fully eradicating the threat, and will instead send a “message” to the terrorists by launching a minimal helicopter strike. The same kind of “message” that has had little or no affect on the “Palestinians” thus far.
And so everyone will forget Sharon’s stern words, and the Israeli towns on Gaza’s periphery will become sitting ducks for Arab rocket crews operating out of an area the international community will never allow Israel to enter again.
Civilian casualties in Kassam barrages will become more and more common, until the shock has worn off and everyone is as callous to them as they have become to the victims of the guns Rabin put into the PLO’s hands.
By fleeing Gaza, Sharon is not providing Israel with greater security, but rather he is allowing terrorism to evolve and leaving the Jewish state with far less control over how it defends its citizens.
National Religious Party chairman Effi Eitam correctly assessed this week that “whoever runs away from terror, terror will chase after him; and whoever fights terror wins.”
National Union MK Benny Elon took the issue one step further, accusing Israel of betraying “biblical values” by fleeing Gaza with its “tail between [its] legs.”
Behaving in such a manner, Israel should “not be surprised when the enemy aids” the Jewish state in its “own humility ritual.”