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The real reason for Israel’s retreat
To understand why the Israelis withdrew from their settlements in Gaza, we need to understand why they planted the settlements in such a seemingly unlikely place to begin with. According to Ethan Bronner writing in New York Times this past August, it was because the Zionist movement’s sense of Israel’s territorial potentialities rested on the assumption that most of the world’s Jews, driven by anti-Semitism in their respective countries, would immigrate to Israel, creating a population that could settle a large area. Some earlier Zionists envisioned a Jewish state on both sides of the Jordan, as suggested by the original Palestine Mandate. Later Zionists still hoped for a Greater Israel on one side of the Jordan, from the river to the sea. But the requisite Jewish immigration for these national visions failed to occur. Of 14 million Jews in the world, 5.3 million live in Israel. More live in the United States than in Israel. According to the article, a second factor driving the withdrawal from Gaza, and, if Prime Minister Sharon follows through on his plans, from parts of the West Bank as well, is that in the two intifadas, from 1987 to 1993, and from 2000 to the present, the Palestinians have shown themselves to be more determined terrorists than the Israelis had previously expected. Against this unrelenting murderous opposition, the Israelis simply lacked the will to maintain control over a marginal area such as Gaza. [“Why ‘Greater Israel’ Never Came to Be,” New York Times, August 14, 2005.]
I do not accept this thesis. The Jewish population that gained and maintained control of the area inside the current Green Line at the time of Independence was a small fraction of the current Jewish population. A growing population of 5.3 million Jews (the Israelis have one of the highest fertility rates of any Western people, it only seems low compared to the Palestinians’ much higher fertility rate) would have been (and could still be) entirely adequate to occupy and control Greater Israel, if the Israelis had had the vision and will to do so, and if the entire world had not sided with the demonic jihadist terrorists who seek Israel’s destruction. Furthermore, the Israelis could have removed the Arabs from west of the Jordan after the 1967 war, as they had every right to do. Had they taken that step, they would presently be occupying the Greater Israel that some now are saying was always precluded by inadequate immigration and by Arab rejectionism. Email entry |