STATEHOOD IS THE STRATEGY:

With Gaza pullout, Sharon again has right strategy (Victor Davis Hanson, 8/25/05, JewishWorldReview.com)

"Brilliant tactician, lousy strategist." So goes the conventional wisdom about the old bulldozer Ariel Sharon.

But that assessment is exactly backward. [...]

[S]haron was always a strategic thinker, and we are seeing his accustomed foresight working in the controversial exodus from Gaza.

The Israeli military is crafting defensible borders, not unlike the old Roman decision to stay on its own side of the Rhine and Danube rivers. In Sharon's thinking, it no longer made any sense to periodically send in thousands of soldiers in Gaza to protect less than 10,000 Israeli civilians abroad, when a demographic time bomb of too few Jews was ticking inside Israel proper.

But Gaza itself is only a tessera in a far larger strategic mosaic. The Israelis also press on with the border fence that will in large part end suicide bombings. The barrier will grant the Palestinians what they clamor for, but perhaps also fear — their own isolated state that they must now govern or let the world watch devolve into something like the Afghanistan of the Taliban.

Once Israel is out of Gaza and has fenced off slivers of the West Bank near Jerusalem deemed vital for its security, Sharon can bide his time until a responsible Palestinian government emerges as a serious interlocutor.

Then any lingering disagreements over disputed land can be relegated to the status of a Tibet, northern Cyprus, Kashmir or the Sakhalin and Kurile Islands — all postbellum "contested" territories that do not prompt commensurate attention from the Muslim world, Europe or the United Nations.

The key to understanding the recent history of the Palestine/Israel conflict--since the fall of the Soviet Union--is that it was the Palestinian leadership that was least interested in statehood and that forcing it upon them represents a victory not just for the Palestinian people but for Israel and the U.S. as well.

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 25, 2005 3:14 PM