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The End of the "Guilty Israeli"

[Los Angeles Times] Yossi Klein Halevi - We Israelis who once wanted nothing more than to leave Gaza forever now realize that we may have no choice but to return, at least until relative quiet is restored to our border. In the early 1990s, while serving as a reservist soldier in Gaza, I became a guilty Israeli. My unit patrolled the refugee camps where sewage flowed in rivulets and old men stared with hatred and children with despair. We found ourselves enforcing an occupation whose threat to Israel's Jewish and democratic values had become unbearable. The first intifada created a substantial bloc of guilt-ridden Israelis ready to take almost any risk for peace. As the Oslo peace process came into being, the guilty Israeli became the most potent source of Palestinian empowerment. Israelis felt so desperate to end the occupation that they withdrew their army and uprooted their settlements from Gaza in 2006. Gazans elected a government led by Hamas, whose theology calls for the destruction of Israel and war against Jews around the world, and whose terror attacks are small pre-enactments of its genocidal ambitions. Palestinian rocket attacks that had previously been aimed at settlements were simply redirected toward towns and villages within Israel. The result is that today the guilty Israeli has become nearly extinct. Gaza was a test case for Israeli withdrawal, and the experiment was a disaster. How, Israelis wonder, can we evacuate the West Bank and risk rocket attacks on Tel Aviv and Jerusalem? So we move toward the next terrible round of conflict. This time, though, for all our anguish, we will feel a lot less remorse. Because even guilty Israelis realize that, until our neighbors care more about building their state than undermining ours, the misery of Gaza will persist. The writer is a senior fellow in the Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies of the Shalem Center in Jerusalem.
2008-03-03 01:00:00
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