By Victor Sharpe
August 15, 2005, began as a day of infamy. It ushered in a great tribulation for the Jewish state, but one forced upon it by its very own Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon.
It began one day after the annual commemoration of the saddest day in the Jewish calendar, Tisha B' Av, the ninth day of the Hebrew month of Av when, according to tradition, both Temples in Jerusalem were destroyed; the first one by the Babylonians in 586 BC and the second by the Romans in 70 AD.
Palestinian Fatah members celebrate the Israeli pullout of Jewish settle- ments during a rally in the northern part of Gaza Strip on August 21, 2005.
On that August day, the Jews of Gaza began to be driven from their homes by Israeli soldiers and police acting on the orders of their Prime Minister. The tragedy ended one week later, known now by its euphemism -- disengagement. Its self-imposed execution ushered in a needless catastrophe for Israel and eventually led to the occupation of Gaza by Hamas through an election engineered by Condoleezza Rice.
Hamas thus came to power using a democratic tool and subsequently destroyed its rival, Fatah, in a bloody massacre; the same Hamas, which proclaims its Constitution is the Koran
and implacably calls for the destruction of Israel. Israel woke up to relentless daily barrages of sometimes scores of missiles deliberately aimed at its civilian populations in villages and towns. The little town of Sderot, in particular, became Israel's Stalingrad. Finally, after years of astonishing forbearance and thousands of incoming rockets from Gaza, Israel struck back against a cruel Islamic enemy, which gloried in using its own civilians as human shields. In the years during this Palestinian Arab aggression there were hardly any street protests anywhere.
The 2009 Gaza War, however, allowed pent up hatred of the Jewish state to be used as an excuse for vicious anti-Israel and anti-Jewish demonstrations exploding throughout Europe and the world. The snake pit for much of this venom originates now on College campuses.
After enduring hundreds of years of Christian and Moslem discrimination in exile, Jews felt that with the re-birth of their ancestral homeland, Jewish communities would no longer face the horrors of being dragged from their homes.
Ariel Sharon dealt a blow of seismic proportions to that belief. His rationale was that by disengaging from the Palestinians in Gaza it would grant Israel peace from Arab terror and end the genocidal ambitions of Palestinian Arabs. Nothing could be further from the truth. Instead, Sharon and his deputy, Ehud Olmert, created a roadmap leading to yet more worldwide pressure.
U.S. Ambassador George Mitchell is planning to remain in Jerusalem to do one thing only. By entrapping Netanyahu and Israeli leaders, in order to coerce Israel into giving away its ancestral and biblical lands in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank), he works to create for the first time in history an independent Arab state called Palestine.
Jews will not be permitted to remain in their Judean and Samarian (West Bank) homes and will be expelled. Arabs may live in Israel but Jews are forbidden to live in Palestinian Arab territories. They are to be victims of ethnic cleansing. Apartheid! Arab style.
Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, with her so-called dream team, is preparing to do the same as Ambassador Mitchell. Meanwhile, President Obama is reaching out to the terrorist enabling states of Syria and the Islamic Republic of Iran. He is promising nearly one billion dollars to the Palestinian Authority - three hundred million for Gaza - U.S. taxpayer money that will inevitably all end up in the coffers of Hamas. And at the Sharm el Sheikh donor conference, 70 countries will reportedly pledge 2.8 billion dollars to Gaza reconstruction even as Hamas missiles continue their renewed daily barrage on Sderot using fresh Iranian missiles supplied through Egypt.
Palestinian Arabs will never accept the existence of a Jewish state on any of the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Nor are they willing to abandon their belief, indoctrinated for decades, that all of Israel is "occupied territory." Simply put, if Israel shrinks to one downtown square in Tel Aviv the Palestinian Arabs will still not be satisfied.
Imagine the unthinkable, that Israel ceases to exist; a desire that galvanizes Jew bashers everywhere into orgasmic delight. Or imagine that Israeli leaders continue to engage in further disengagements under the rubric of land for peace; a recipe for slow but certain Israeli extinction.
So what would a world without Israel be like?
For starters, the only true functioning democracy in the region will have vanished. Since there will still be autocratic Arab dictators, kings, emirs and sheikhs, corruption, over-population, and socio-economic dislocation, the unelected Arab despots will have to find a new scapegoat towards whom to deflect their population's endemic anger and despair. Palestine, the fraudulent state that Israel haters finally foisted upon the world, will remain as underdeveloped as most other Arab states despite enormous donor sums forever falling like manna into a black hole. Saddled with the highest birthrate in the world, most Palestinian Arabs will remain unemployed because of the inability of their terrorist government to create viable institutions and infrastructures and because there will no longer be an Israel for the Palestinian Arabs to work in.
Both Jordan and Egypt will be terrified of the fatal exposure on their borders of this new Iranian and Al Qaida backed Palestinian base for worldwide terror. Not a prospect the U.S. should be happy about either.
Syria will still menace and subvert the once predominately Christian state of Lebanon and still make territorial demands upon Jordan and Palestine, which it always considered historically part of southern Syria.
Those Arab states without oil will still envy those Arab states awash with the commodity, and water, always in short supply in the Middle East, will become the most precious liquid to wage war over. The intra-Islamic animosity between the Sunnis and the Shia will not abate but become ever more violent in civil wars, especially after the U.S. finally withdraws all its forces from Iraq, now slated by Obama for 2011. No doubt Al Qaeda and Iran will have taken note and are plotting accordingly.
Egypt will still be discriminating against its Christian Coptic minority despite endless denials. Christians will continue to endure persecution in an increasingly Arab and Moslem dominated world from Africa to Indonesia.
Hindus will still be victims of Moslem terror and the Kashmir issue will remain a flashpoint between Hindu India and Moslem Pakistan -- both nuclear powers. Buddhists in Thailand will still be battling Moslem insurgents in the south of that country as will the Christians in the south of the Philippines.
Cairo, the capital of the largest and most powerful Arab state, will continue vying with Damascus and Riyadh for leadership of the Arab world's own version of the 19th century's Great Game. And all the while the menace of non-Arab Iran will loom over them all.
The ever suffering Kurds, who truly deserve an independent state of their own, will still be pressing Iraq, Turkey, Syria, and Iran for such a state and those countries will still be violently denying them their national aspirations.
Iran's mullahs will still be hell-bent on developing even more Islamic nuclear bombs. Such weapons atop ever more powerful ICBMs and perhaps now located on
the eastern shore of the Mediterranean will inevitably threaten the West -- and Israel will not be there to be blamed. Al-Qaeda, even without Osama bin Laden, will still receive enormous funds from Islamic and Arab states and continue its campaign against the "infidels." Even without the excuse of U.S. troops any longer in Iraq, the Islamists will target Europe and America with suicide killers, just as they perpetrated their grisly work among hapless Israeli civilians.
All this will be the reality in a world that can no longer have Israel to blame for its ills.
The world hated the stateless Jews and now it hates the State of the Jews. But Israel may yet survive and find leaders who present a strong, resolute defiance to the world's siren calls for it to commit national suicide, all for the sake of an illusory peace.
From Madrid to Oslo to Camp David great demands were made upon Israel to take risks for peace, the majority of which Israel met. Far lesser demands were made upon the Palestinian Arabs, which they have hardly ever met.
President Obama, nevertheless, plans on perpetuating the discredited two-state solution and will press Israel to give away its biblical heartland to create the 23rd Arab state. That is the goal of Hillary Clinton and her so-called dream team. But dreams often become nightmares. President Reagan at first believed the received wisdom that all problems in the Middle East stemmed from the Israel-Palestinian conflict. It was Israel's Menachem Begin who disabused him of that fallacy and educated him on biblical and post biblical Jewish history in its ancestral homeland.
Prime Minister Begin and President Reagan, though from very different backgrounds, were both conservatives. Binyamin Netanyahu is a fiscal conservative while President Obama is anything but, and the President's foreign policy as it relates to the Israel-Arab conflict is jarringly in opposition to that of Netanyahu and Israel's conservative
parties. Netanyahu may yet educate the new American President to the ties that bind Israel to its land and to the immense dangers to all from Iran. Perhaps he will be the man to save both Israel and the United States from irreparable harm.
If not, all the democracies of the world will stumble before Iran's ascendant theocracy and Israel will not be there for them to blame.
Victor Sharpe writes on Jewish history and the Arab-Israel conflict. He is the author of the book: Politicide - The attempted murder of the Jewish state
Prime Minister Netanyahu
