A number of people have reacted in dismay to my post below. They make some very fair points, and so I will amplify my previous remarks. I agree with them when they say that the vast majority of settlers are not messianic zealots, as Gershon Baskin implies, but are ordinary Israelis who have lived in Gaza for a number of more mundane reasons. I agree with them when they say that this vast majority are not bent on civil war. I agree with them when they say that the main reason for the feeling in Israel against disengagement is not 'messianism' but the conviction that to leave Gaza without getting anything in return is an act of recklessness. And I agree with them when they say that the issue is not that the Israelis don't want to live in peace with their neighbours but the Arabs don't want to live in peace with Israel.

I agree with all of this. In so far as Baskin implied the opposite, I disagree. But the point of his passionate despair seemed to me to be that Israel had to leave Gaza and most of the disputed territories because it is wrong for the Jews to rule another people -- even though that was not their intention, and even though the only reason Israel is in those territories at all is because their inhabitants remain in a state of war against it.

And that is what I agree with. Whatever the original arguments for settling the territories -- some, on grounds of security, were more reasonable than others -- that is what this exercise has meant in practice. I am under no illusions that disengagement will bring peace. But I want Israel to be better able to defend itself, and a war of attrition in territory which is not even part of Israel seems to me instead to be the way eventually to destroy it from within.

As for leaving without getting anything in return, I'd say wake up and smell the coffee -- there isn't going to be anything in return for the foreseeable future. There is no peaceful Arab interlocutor who wants to live side by side with Israel. So Israel would wait forever for The Moment. And so it would be ruling an unwilling people forever. And I think that because this is wrong in itself, it would eventually tear Israel apart.

That is why I think Israel is right to leave Gaza now, and should go further and leave more of the territories too, in order to regroup, consolidate and repair itself morally and militarily. I fully accept that this is an agonising decision. I fully accept that it is fraught with the greatest of dangers. But Israel is, as it has always been, between the very hardest or rocks and hard places. And the bottom line is that this desperately dangerous act of disengagement is made very much more dangerous if Israel's population is not strong and united but is in a state of uproar against it. That is why I think that Baskin -- for all the caveats about some of his attitudes -- is fundamentally right.

Posted by melanie at July 26, 2005