Frank Gaffney argues persuasively that in the present climate Israel must not unilaterally withdraw from the West Bank. Hillel Halkin calls March 28's election "the wackiest" in Israel's history. The center-left government is expected to push disengagement. I have long been a supporter of disengagement but now have changed my mind. My reasons:
(1) Hamas's win, coupled with its open advocacy of war against Israel, and the triumph of radical minorities in Iraq have made hash of America's Mideast democracy project for at least several years, and thus silenced many potential moderate voices in Mideast lands;
(2) Palestinian assaults against international peacekeepers in Gaza and on the West Bank, including forcing American and British troops to stop guarding a Palestinian jail they had promised to keep secure--there is in this episode a whiff of Somalia 1993;
(3) the immense--albeit orchestrated--cartoon riots in the Islamic world show that radical Islam has tremendous power to intimidate societies far more powerful than they;
(4) Iran's open defiance of the West and the UN, re its nuclear program, eliciting tepid diplomacy at best despite Hitlerian threats made towards Israel by Iran's millenarian President.
(5) a resulting serious deterioration in the political stature of President Bush, partly 1-4, partly massive managerial ineptitude at the White House and partly opportunistic, often mendacious attacks on him from Democrats and their media allies.
Things might be different had Bush won in Iraq, were Iran stopped, had the West forcefully resisted the pressure stemming from the Islamic world over the cartoons, had the Palestinians showed a modicum of interest in trying to govern their society rather than agitate anew for war--and had US and UK troops stood their ground against Palestinian threats. Some of these could have sufficed to let Israel risk disengagement. But none have gone our way--or Israel's. Retreat when strong is risky, but doable; retreat when weak energizes the enemy, and courts calamity. Israel should finish the fence and stand firm on the West Bank.
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