Leaving Gaza

Ariel Sharon - who, as the whole world knows, is a Nazi who wants to ethnically cleanse all of the West Bank and Gaza as part of his nefarious Jew...er, Zionist plan for world domination - has announced that Israel will be abandoning all of its settlements in the Gaza Strip:

All 17 Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip will eventually be dismantled, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon told a Likud Party meeting Monday.

"He said it is possible there will be no more Jews in the Gaza Strip," said Yechiel Hazan, a Likud legislator, after emerging from the closed-door meeting.

About 7,500 Jews live in the 17 settlements on the Gaza Strip. The settlements account for nearly one-quarter of the territory.

The settlements are built on officially occupied territory and are considered illegal under international law. (Easy to tell this is a CBC story, isn't it?)

Earlier on Monday, the Haaretz daily newspaper's website quoted Sharon as saying the Gaza settlements would be dismantled.

"It is my intention to carry out an evacuation – sorry, a relocation – of settlements that cause us problems and of places that we will not hold onto anyway in a final settlement, like the Gaza settlements," Sharon was quoted as saying on the Haaretz website.

There is no strategic reason why Israel should be building settlements in Gaza, and considering the resources put into maintaining them, I think Israel is doing the right thing. But if the Israelis think this will somehow turn international public opinion in their favor, they're sadly mistaken. Pulling out of Lebanon didn't help them - to Arabs (and the likes of Robert Fisk) the "legacy of Israeli occupation" is responsible for all of Lebanon's problems, and pay no attention to a civil war which raged for 7 years before the IDF showed up. Or the current Syrian occupation. Or the fact that southern Lebanon has been turned into a de facto Hazbollah statelet.

Israel could pull out of Gaza, and nothing will change. They can retreat to the 1967 borders altogether, and nothing will change. The Arabs want Israel destroyed, period - and most of the world really couldn't care less.

Posted by damian at February 2, 2004 05:31 PM