Sharon’s disengagement plan was perhaps the most deceitful, manipulative and shameful move by any Israeli leader.
By ISRAEL HARELPrime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, unable to achieve a satisfactory ceasefire agreement without having to commit ground forces, was forced to send in the troops; here IDF APCs maneuver outside the northern Gaza Strip, July 18(photo credit: RONEN ZVULUN / REUTERS)
It is now nine years since then-prime minister Ariel Sharon’s “disengagement ” from Gaza, a euphemism for the uprooting of 10,000 people from their land and the destruction of their homes.The thanks Sharon got for his gesture to the Palestinians were barrages of Hamas rockets fired at towns and villages in southern Israel. Before the withdrawal, Hamas had targeted mostly the settlers in Gaza’s Gush Katif. Since then it has progressively extended the range of the areas under attack.It also dictates when hostilities start and when they end. The fact that in the latest round of fighting in July more than a thousand rockets were fired at civilians all over the country and terrorists emerged from cross-border tunnels with mega-terror plans in mind laid bare the disaster of Israel’s longstanding policy of restraint – pursued by successive governments, including those led by the Likud.Even the more farsighted opponents of the disengagement never dreamed it would come to this. When the opponents of the lethal Oslo process (around 1,500 Israelis lost their lives to the terror in its wake) warned that it would lead to Katyusha rockets over Ashkelon, then-prime minister Yitzhak Rabin declared: “The Likud is dead-scared of peace.” And he added: “There has never been a Katyusha from Gaza and there never will be.” Then-foreign minister Shimon Peres (“next year there will be a new Middle East here”), Oslo architect Yossi Beilin and most of the pundits and columnists in the Israeli media, which has a built-in left-wing bias, made similar predictions.Eleven years after Oslo, after thousands of mortar shells and short-range rockets rained mainly on Gush Katif, Sharon imposed his disengagement plan, perhaps the most deceitful, manipulative and shameful move by any leader in Israel’s history. All the government ministers, Knesset members, ex-generals and experts who cooperated with him share responsibility for the ensuing tragedy.Clips of Sharon and members of his cabinet dismissing people predicting Katyushas on Ashkelon as “delusional” are now doing the rounds on YouTube and the social networks. But at the height of the latest fighting, as the rockets, spawned on the ruins of Oslo and the disengagement, continued to fly in their hundreds every day, hardly any of those responsible for the catastrophe were ready to admit their mistake. Worse: They continue to advocate the same misguided policy that brought down all these evils on our heads and to back Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s kowtowing to Hamas.Over the past few weeks, I spoke on a number of panels and at conferences where the main subject – in one form or another – was “What next?” Amazingly, the people who had made the catastrophic blunders – not those who had correctly warned of the dire consequences – were the guests of honor. As if they were not responsible for thousands of deaths, the uprooting of thousands more from their homes, the empowering of Hamas – which took the credit for the disengagement, for putting Israel on the defensive and proving that it has lost its deterrent capacity (which it has, big time).And yet not one of these architects of peace and quiet expresses regret. No one admits making mistakes. Many even deny the obvious results – like the disasters that followed the release of terrorists in return for abducted Israelis.The nation, the leadership and the army need to learn from these mistakes. The Second Lebanon War of 2006 showed that even the IDF, which is ostensibly committed to learning from mistakes as part of its organizational culture, was not prepared to admit its errors or its blind following of processes that led to disaster.The time has come to sober up. We cannot afford to go on taking delusional drugs, like “Iron Dome,” which enables the government to persist with its policy of restraint and Hamas to rebuild and enhance its military structures.Anyone who continues to take these drugs as if nothing has happened is leading us willy-nilly to the next string of disasters.Israel Harel, the founder and former director of the Judea, Samaria and Gaza Settlers’ Council, is head of the Jerusalem-based Institute for Zionist Strategies
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