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BUSH AND SHARON'S GAZA SLUMBER PARTY

by Don Feder

Imagine the following scenario: In the wake of 9/11 and the murder of 3,000 Americans, President Bush announces a unilateral disengagement from the war on terrorism. The U.S. determines to do nothing further about Saddam Hussein or al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan. Troops will be withdrawn from Saudi Arabia and America will end all support for Israel.

What do you think the outcome would have been? Unless you're Cindy Sheehan or Michael Moore, the answer is obvious - more terrorism, total war on the home-front. That's exactly what Israel and the world will get from the ethnic-cleansing of Gaza.

In yet another example of pervasive bias, the liberal media referred to last week's forcible removal of roughly 9,000 Jews from Gaza and parts of Samaria (and the destruction of homes, businesses, farms and synagogues) as an "evacuation." That's like calling Kristallnacht urban renewal.

When people are driven from their homes because of their religion or race, it's ethnic cleansing. The Israelis are the first people in history to ethnically cleanse themselves (so much for the theory of Jewish intelligence), all to make way for a Palestinian state, which, the international community has decreed, will be Judenrein.

After the establishment of Jihadistan, one million Arab Muslims will continue to reside in what's left of Israel, while not one Jew will be allowed to live in Judea and Samaria (AKA: The West Bank) or Gaza. In other words, the Palestinians will succeed where the anti-Semites of antiquity (Philistines, Babylonians, Assyrians and Romans) failed: There will be no Jews in Biblical Israel.

More than half a century after the destruction of European Jewish communities, the world calls this progress.

Palestinian terrorists (a redundancy) were exultant. What they've been unable to achieve in military confrontations, Ariel Sharon, George Bush, the US State Department and European Union handed them on a silver platter. As Munich was for Hitler, it only whetted their appetites.

Muhammad Def (on the top of Israel's terrorist most-wanted list) jeered at the Israelis from his Gaza rat hole: "Today you leave Gaza in humiliation. You are leaving hell. But we promise that, with Allah's help, all of Palestine (i.e., Israel) will turn into hell for you. ... We will not rest until we liberate our entire holy land."

In the few days since the destruction of 25 thriving Jewish communities was completed, a yeshiva student was stabbed to death in Jerusalem, an Israeli border cop was stabbed in the throat in Hebron and two Qassam rockets were fired from Gaza into the Israeli town of Sderot. Only quick thinking by a bus driver prevented a bloodbath in Beersheba, where a suicide bomber in a bus station succeeded in killing only himself, and injuring a score of passengers.

Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas (hailed by the administration as a moderate) joyfully proclaimed, "We will not rest until they ("the Zionist enemy") leave all of our land." Official maps produced by the so-called Palestinian Authority make it clear that "all of our land" means not just Gaza City, Ramallah, Jenin and East Jerusalem - but West Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa and Netanya.

If Israel evacuated every square inch of the Jewish state, except for one block in Tel Aviv, the Palestinians would demand that too. And the EU would insist on negotiations to determine the block's final status.

While IDF soldiers were driving other Jews from their homes, PA Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei was in Damascus hammering out a deal with Hamas and Islamic Jihad, confirming what realists knew all along: The PA will do nothing to disarm them or hamper their operations in Gaza.

Remember Bush's 2002 Rose Garden declaration that the ball was in the Palestinians' court and that it was now up to them to prove their commitment to ending terrorism?

Recall Sharon's assurances, starting with his 2001 campaign for prime minister, that there would be no concessions, no talks, not even pre-negotiations, until the Palestinians stopped killing pregnant women, toddlers and elderly Holocaust survivors? I won't talk to the Palestinian leadership until the terrorist gangs are disarmed, Sharon bravely pledged.

All, of it was empty rhetoric - posturing designed to placate constituencies and sooth consciences.

Gaza is the first bitter fruit of those hollow words. Washington fights terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan (at the cost of more than 2,000 American lives) and rewards it in Israel. How long will it be before al-Qaeda sets up shop in Gaza city, along with Islamic terrorists from Kashmir, Chechnya, the Philippines, etc.?

The world may smile smugly at the sight of Jews evicting Jews from their homes. But the whirlwind awaits all of us, and not just those "hardcore settlers" (as The New York Times called them) clinging to their Torah scrolls.

First and foremost, Ariel Sharon, who has lustily embraced the illusion of land-for-peace -- a suicidal fantasy he would have scorned a decade ago.

Sharon has based his political career on being Bush's buddy. I have the best relationship with the Americans of any Israeli leader, Sharon bragged when he ran for reelection.

That "special relationship" has come with a hefty price tag: Sharon has ceded his national security policy to Foggy Bottom. "This is what the U.S. State Department is demanding that I do, and I must do it" Sharon reportedly pleaded to the Chief Rabbi of Haifa to justify the Gaza surrender. Someone forgot to tell the general that he is prime minister of Israel, and not Condoleezza Rice (who, by the by, warns her subordinate in Jerusalem that "It cannot be Gaza only").

Blame Bush too. It's wrong to say that W. is willing to sacrifice Israel to what he perceives to be the new, post-Iraq, alignment of US interests in the Middle East. The reality is much worse. The president really believes all of this will work -- that the Palestinians will have a state aimed like a dagger at the heart of Israel, and the latter will have "secure borders." That will happen when Osama bin Laden converts and has his bar mitzvah at the Wall in Jerusalem.

Bush has an undeserved reputation as a hardheaded foreign-policy realist. In reality, much of the time he inhabits a dream world. He refuses to protect our borders from terrorist infiltration or from people who could become our Palestinians in a generation.

He has fantasies of Jeffersonian democracy sprouting in the arid soil of Iraq. (Exactly how many democracies in nations with a Muslim majority are there?) Having read the Cliffs Notes Koran, he's convinced that Islam is a religion of peace.

Even before 9/11, the president was persuaded that solving the Palestinian problem was the key to peace in the Middle East - that regional tensions could all be laid at Israel's doorstep. (Did the supposed dispossession of the Palestinians cause Saddam Hussein to invade Kuwait in 1991? Israel wouldn't be reborn for another 500 years when Muslim cannon smashed the walls of Constantinople.)

Give the Palestinians a state, Bush reasons, and they'll settle down to the task of nation-building. Rockets will be beaten into pruning hooks. The fact that the Palestinians have never given the least indication that they're ready to coexist with Israel (however it's constituted) isn't allowed to intrude on this New World Order vision.

Without the territory liberated in 1967, the rest of Israel is indefensible. Abba Eban, a leader of the left Labor Party, called Israel's pre-'67 boundaries "Auschwitz borders." Every retired U.S. general who's visited the region essentially has said the same thing: Without the high ground of Judea-Samaria, without strategic depth, Israel can not be defended. Within a year of the loss of the Sudetenland (part of Hitler's Road Map), the rump Czech state was incorporated in the Third Reich.

Sharon and Bush are sleepwalking through history (participants in a lethal Middle East slumber party). Pray that something shakes both leaders out of their somnambulistic state before Israel drifts into that not-so-good night.

Don Feder was an opinion writer for the Boston Herald and a syndicated columnist. He is currently a political/media consultant. Contact him by email at or go to his website at http://www.donfeder.com/

This article was posted September 7, 2005. An earlier version of this article was published on GrassTopsUSA.