The outposts: A distraction

The opposition of Yesha settlement leaders to dismantling the illegal outposts, like the evasiveness of their great friend Ariel Sharon, show that neither he nor they are acting in good faith. The Yesha leaders are threatening that their people will dig in their heels at sites slated for evacuation, thereby compelling IDF troops to evict them by force. Between the lines, there have also been allusions to more active resistance and intentions to reoccupy the hills after the evacuation is complete, in order to make life more difficult for the army and basically, to taunt it.

This proves yet again that in the eyes of the settlers themselves, as well as their political supporters, the so-called distinction between "legal" settlements and "illegal" outposts is nothing but a disingenuous trick. What is not legal today will become legal tomorrow. All they have to do is maneuver properly in the halls of power. As proof, they point, justifiably, to three decades of successful maneuvering - always with the support of their patron, Sharon - and to the fact that they have stubbornly kept a grip on almost every place they have put down stakes. [read more]

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Impasse as the ideal solution

The fact is that two of the major reasons for that unnecessary war are now with us again as though we had entered a time tunnel: addiction to force and a destructive culture of government. Before the creation of the State of Israel, force building was a sine qua non not only for victory in the War of Independence, but also for the very ability of the Yishuv - as the Jewish community in pre-1948 Palestine was known - to stay its course and absorb refugees from the war in Europe. However, as early as the 1950s, Israel developed the concept that the preferred and most effective way to deal with the Arab world was by force. The reprisal raids in the first half of the 1950s, culminating in the Sinai War of 1956, was the first implementation of this approach. Its peak, however, came after the victory in the 1967 Six Day War, when the view was that there was no problem that tanks and planes could not resolve. The entrenchment along the Suez Canal was due to the fact that no one really knew what to do, apart from using more and more force. So the simple solution was not to budge. However, because no reality remains long without an ideological patina, a conception gradually developed insisting that our situation was never better and that only the foolhardy would try to change it. [read more]