Soccer Dad

How Sharon Differs

Charles Krauthammer argues today that Israel has won the war of the intifada. In "Israel's Intifada Victory" Krauthammer writes:

While no one was looking, something historic happened in the Middle East. The Palestinian intifada is over, and the Palestinians have lost.

For Israel, the victory is bitter. The past four years of terrorism have killed almost 1,000 Israelis and maimed thousands of others. But Israel has won strategically. The intent of the intifada was to demoralize Israel, destroy its economy, bring it to its knees, and thus force it to withdraw and surrender to Palestinian demands, just as Israel withdrew in defeat from southern Lebanon in May 2000.

That did not happen. Israel's economy was certainly wounded, but it is growing again. Tourism had dwindled to almost nothing at the height of the intifada, but tourists are returning. And the Israelis were never demoralized. They kept living their lives, the young people in particular returning to cafes and discos and buses just hours after a horrific bombing. Israelis turned out to be a lot tougher and braver than the Palestinians had imagined.

The end of the intifada does not mean the end of terrorism. There was terrorism before the intifada and there will be terrorism to come. What has happened, however, is an end to systematic, regular, debilitating, unstoppable terror -- terror as a reliable weapon. At the height of the intifada, there were nine suicide attacks in Israel killing 85 Israelis in just one month (March 2002). In the past three months there have been none.

There were those who claimed that PM Sharon brought Israel neither peace nor security. And maybe he hasn't. But with most of the Palestinian terror leadership underground, terror has been reduced as a threat.
I have many qualms about the withdrawal from Gaza, but the difference between the way Sharon is doing it and a Labor Party leader would have done it are quite different. Krauthammer's reference to Lebanon is not unintentional. A Labor led withdrawal would almost certainly have exacted little or no price from the Palestinians. In contrast the withdrawal from Gaza has involved a major offensive against the Palestinian terrorist infrastructure. Hamas might claim victory when Israel withdraws, but not a single Hamas leader will appear publicly to claim that victory for fear of a rendezvous with a helicopter gunship.
This is not to say that the Israel victory has been cheap. It hasn't. But that doesn't mean that the other side won.
Crossposted on Israpundit and Soccer Dad.

Posted by SoccerDad at June 18, 2004 02:41 PM | TrackBack