Comment: What to do about Gaza

First, as someone once suggested, we should close the crossings, turn off the electricity.

By ADAM HASKEL
hamas abbas office (photo credit: AP)
hamas abbas office
(photo credit: AP)
It took Hamas six days to conquer Gaza. On Thursday night, I told the editor-in-chief of this newspaper I was glad Hamas had taken over the Gaza Strip, and he asked me, "What do you think Israel should do now?" This is my response. First, as someone once suggested, we should disengage from Gaza. Close the crossings, turn off the electricity. No more fuel for the Strip, either. Let them bring it in from Egypt or learn to rely on donkeys. I don't recall the United Kingdom supplying Germany with electricity during the Battle of Britain. We'll have to continue providing water, for now. We don't want people dying of thirst. But they won't die of hunger. Egypt and the international community will see to that. What else do we need to do? We can't stop the flow of arms and ammunition from Egypt into Gaza as long as our Supreme Court is a branch of Meretz, and the court will remain a branch of Meretz as long as its members appoint their own successors. But we can do better. Yes, the IDF needs to be in Gaza, along the border with Sinai, for a very long time. And yes, the IDF needs to conduct operations elsewhere in the Strip, on a large scale and on a regular basis, indefinitely. It's a small part of the price of Oslo, of bringing in thousands of terrorists from Tunisia and elsewhere and continuing to make concession after concession even though the PLO/Palestinian Authority has never kept any part of any agreement with any counterparty. Not with Jordan, not with Lebanon, and not with Israel. And why should they? They quite correctly see any concession on Israel's part that does not require them to renounce the "right of return" to within the Green Line as a sign of weakness, that those who govern us lack any normal sense of self-preservation and will continue to reward terrorism by handing over land. Which brings us to the most important thing that we must do: Stop retreating. If we want to reproduce the hell of Gaza in Judea and Samaria, all we have to do is follow the same policies there; if we leave the Palestinians in that region to their own devices and provide them with territorial contiguity, the results will be the same, whether the terrorists who run it are from Hamas or from Fatah. The Fatah terrorists are actually more dangerous, because they have learned to lie - not very convincingly, I admit - about their genocidal intentions for Israel. Finally, no one should be under the illusion that Israel's international standing has improved in any permanent way as a result of 2005's disengagement, or of the 1993 Oslo Accords, 1995's Oslo II, the 1994 Cairo Agreement, the 1997 Hebron Agreement, or any other of the memoranda and protocols signed with the PLO over the years. No amount of transient goodwill on the part of our enemies in Europe is worth the blood of one Israeli civilian or the bones of one IDF soldier. The writer is a member of The Jerusalem Post's editorial staff.