April 28, 2004

PM: "Much harsher" response to violence after pullout

Israel's response to Palestinian violence after a pullout from the Gaza Strip would be even harsher than its present military operations, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said Tuesday.

Interviewed on Channel 10 TV for Independence Day, Sharon defended his unilateral disengagement plan, including a pullout from the Gaza Strip. Members of his Likud Party vote on the plan in a referendum on Sunday.

After a pullout, Palestinians could no longer explain violence by saying that Israel was occupying their land, Sharon said, "and Israel's responses (to violence) would be much harsher."
[...]
In the TV interview, Sharon warned Likud skeptics that voting down the plan would also negate US guarantees that Israel could keep parts of the West Bank and deny entry to Palestinian refugees.

Palestinians suspect Sharon's real intention is to trade Gaza for a permanent hold over large areas of the West Bank.
[Don't look now, Paleos, but Israel won that land fair and square in war against you in 1967 and 1973!--Jen]

In the West Bank city of Nablus, about 1,500 backers of the radical Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine demonstrated against the change in US policy.

"Bush does not own a house in Jaffa or Acre for him to give away to the Israelis," one PFLP member shouted, and actors played out a scene in which masked gunmen kidnapped an American soldier and killed him.

Charming little "play," huh?
Yep, once the security fence is completely built and the Israelis pull out of Gaza, it will be very clear who the bad guys are and why they do what they do.
IOW, the whole world will see that the Islamists are using terrorist murder to try and kill every Jew in Israel and to wipe Israel off the map, not to get an independent country that lives "side-by-side" peacefully with Israel.
The going will be tough in the days, weeks and months ahead, but the Israelis (with America's help under President Bush) have finally extricated themselves from the "peace process/cycle of violence/land for peace" quagmire they've been in since they signed the Camp David accords in 1979.
(Actually, their problems with the radical Muslims go back much, much further than that...which reminds me: Happy 56th Birthday to the nation of Israel!)