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Yesterday I asked, What’s Sharon thinking? with regard to the forced pullout of Israeli citizens from Gaza. Today we see this report:
If Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza comes off successfully, then, “I think we’ll have a different frame of mind” more conducive to pursuing peace, Bush said. “To me, that’s where the attention of the world ought to be, on Gaza.”
“A different frame of mind?” From the terrorists who kill little children on school busses?
But there will be no progress after the Gaza pullout unless “the Palestinians completely fulfill their obligations of stopping terror attacks, waging a war against terror, destroying the terror infrastructure and reforming their security services,” Sharon said.
“I have no intent, in no way, of progressing with the road map … until they fulfill all their obligations,” he said.
Can they be thinking that if Israel pulls out from Gaza and terrorist attacks continue, world opinion will turn against the terrorists? That seems like a doomed strategy. As Daniel Pipes notes:
After the Oslo round of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations (1993-2001) ended in disaster, many Israelis looked back on Oslo’s faulty assumptions, their own naïveté, and resolved not to repeat that bitter experience. Israelis awoke from the delusion that giving the Palestinians land, money, and arms in return for airy-fairy and fraudulent promises would lessen Palestinian hostility. They realized that, to the contrary, this imbalance enhanced Palestinian rejection of the very existence of the Jewish state.
The only way I can make sense of this, is that Bush and Sharon plan to get tougher with the terrorists after the Gaza pullout. But that’s sheer speculation. I’m very concerned that they will do nothing of the kind.
Coddling terrorists is like playing with fire. It’s like a little child playing with a pack of matches—or better yet, it’s like an adult letting a little child play with a pack of matches and saying, “It’s good to encourage the child. Any fires he lights can be kept in control.” Then the house burns down.
The only safe thing to do with terrorism is to oppose it, vigorously and decisively.
