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Withdrawals And Crackdowns

What’s more, the 2002 bloodshed didn’t seem to do lasting damage to hopes for progress or moderation on the West Bank. After all, it’s Gaza, from which Israel withdrew in 2005, not the West Bank, that became a Hamas stronghold. ~Bill Kristol If you knew next to nothing about the situation and couldn’t remember back […]

What’s more, the 2002 bloodshed didn’t seem to do lasting damage to hopes for progress or moderation on the West Bank. After all, it’s Gaza, from which Israel withdrew in 2005, not the West Bank, that became a Hamas stronghold. ~Bill Kristol

If you knew next to nothing about the situation and couldn’t remember back a few years, this would sound plausible. However, Gaza did not “become” a Hamas stronghold just recently (Gaza is Hamas’ birthplace and has long been where it found its base of support), and the political base of relatively more moderate Palestinian groups has been in the West Bank for at least a decade. It was only in the last few years that Gaza became almost exclusively dominated by Hamas, and it is not as if Defensive Shield did not have a radicalizing effect on Palestinians both in the West Bank and in Gaza. Events in one territory obviously have political effects in both, and so we are seeing political unrest in the West Bank in response to the current conflict and Fatah is risking its credibility with its own constituents to the extent that it is seen as supporting the strikes in Gaza. What we have seen in the last few years is the division of the territories into fiefdoms of the major parties; the more moderate party has every incentive to root out Hamas operatives in their fiefdom, and they have been doing this, and Hamas has done likewise in its fiefdom. It is misleading to claim that the reason an extremist group prevailed in one area was the Israeli withdrawal, while implying that Israeli crackdown in the other territory led to the opposite result. Both groups have become relatively stronger in their respective territories. Naturally, the blockade of Gaza receives no mention in any of this “analysis.” Had Israel stayed in Gaza but had done the politically more difficult but ultimately far more necessary work of pulling out of the West Bank, Fatah would likely be even stronger where it now exists and Hamas would have still possessed considerable strength in Gaza.

The most frustrating thing about commentary on this subject is that many “pro-Israel” writers want to make the claim that withdrawing from southern Lebanon and Gaza was some sort of great gift, when there had been no good reason from an Israeli perspective to continue occupying either place. The reason Barak and Sharon could withdraw from these places at little political cost was that there was no emotional, religious or ideological attachment to them; they were accidental holdovers from past campaigns, which made continuing the occupations of them seem even more useless.

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