A terrible idea — and Israel’s only hope
I figured if anybody could give me a reason to be optimistic about the Gaza withdrawal, it would be Daniel Gordis.
A Conservative rabbi from America’s left coast — raised in Baltimore by academic parents he de
scribes as liberal Democrats, a fairly recent immigrant to Israel who now heads a pluralistic educator-training foundation, and the author of a book on the toll the Intifada took on his family — surely Gordis would bring glad tidings from the Holy Land.
And yet even he started a talk this week at a Millburn synagogue like this: “I am going to explain why withdrawal could not be a worse idea.”
Et tu, Danny?
With some rare exceptions, the Jewish discourse on the withdrawal seems to be divided between a minority of fierce opponents and a majority of sad, reluctant, and skeptical supporters — if that adds up to support. Those of us who actually think it a good and overdue idea don’t find much validation in the cautionary materials being put out by the major Jewish organizations.
A few have been trying to see past the gloom and doom. Onetime Mideast negotiator Dennis Ross writes that by dismantling the Gaza settlements “Israel opens up the possibility of restoring its core bargain with the Palestinian Authority: security for Israelis, freedom for Palestinians.” Israeli cabinet minister Isaac Herzog writes in The New York Times that “Israel must take risks like this to set secure national borders, to ensure the future of a Jewish democratic state.” And David Makovsky of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy has published a monograph on withdrawal that asserts, “After several years of suffering and despair, Israelis and Palestinians have reason for hope in 2005.”
These experts are certainly aware of the risks: a resumption of terrorism, the rise of Hamas, a need by Israel to re-invade the territory they would have only just vacated. But they also believe that, if managed effectively, the withdrawal could have a “disproportionately weighty effect on future peacemaking,” as Makovsky puts it.
To be fair, Gordis is probably closer to their point of view than his ominous opening remarks made him sound. In fact, Gordis thinks withdrawal is both a terrible idea, and, as he puts it, the “only way to save the country.”
The first “terrible”: Gordis says the withdrawal violates two fundamental principles upon which the Jewish state was founded: that it never trades land without the prospect of peace and that Israel never withdraws under fire.
Second, the planned August withdrawal promises nothing come September. “It’s quiet now, but once they’ve got the land, what’s the incentive to remain quiet? We’ll be right back where we started, with no base of operations in Gaza.”
Third, the withdrawal represents a huge blow to the kind of Zionist fervor represented by the settler movement — and Israel was established on the shoulders of zealots who were willing to stick it out in what Gordis calls a “bad neighborhood.” Gordis asks his listeners to imagine what it might feel like to give up a home that your spouse, child, or parent died defending.
Put it together, says Gordis — retreating under fire, ignoring what happens next, humiliating the country’s ideological “backbone” — and you can see why many Israelis predict that the withdrawal may well be remembered as the moment when “Israel committed suicide.”
So why can he then say that withdrawal represents the “only way to save the country”? Because Israel has run out of options. Israel can maintain the status quo and keep the Jewish minority in control of an Arab majority without passports or the right to vote — which the rest of the world calls apartheid and which will make Israel a pariah state. And if you think academic boycotts are hurting now, just wait until the last Israeli scientist moves overseas so he or she can make a career.
Or you can make the Palestinians citizens of Israel, and kiss the Jewish state goodbye. Or you can keep the land and expel the Palestinians — a pleasant fantasy, perhaps, until the day CNN starts beaming pictures of Israeli soldiers herding Palestinian children and mothers into trucks and train cars.
What’s left? Getting rid of something. And right now the easiest something to get rid of is Gaza, which, unlike the Golan, has no strategic importance; which, unlike the West Bank, does not have huge populations of Jews entangled with the Arabs; which, unlike East Jerusalem, is not a religious and political hornet’s nest.
Gordis has three others reasons why withdrawal is a good idea: his children. Because with a daughter approaching army age and two younger sons at home, he need not work very hard to imagine what it might feel like to ask a child to “die in a place and for a place that we are not going to have in the long run.” The Palestinians will have a state, perhaps in two months, perhaps in two decades. And if that is to be the case, say Israeli parents, it is not worth their kid in a body bag to delay the inevitable. “Anyone who is opposed to disengagement must be humbled by that,” said Gordis.
Gordis knows his presentation — supportive of a policy that he reviles, disdainful of a policy that might just save his country — is a paradox, and a depressing one at that. But when he’s about to lose hope, he says he remembers four digits: 1945.
“In 1945 there was no reason to believe that we would have now — and we are in a much better situation than we were in 1945.” He doesn’t mean that anything that happens to the Jews is better than the Holocaust. He means that Jews have demonstrated the ability to rise from despair and paradox to build a home, a language, a society. “And if we work together,” he concludes, “we are home to stay.”