by Yehudit Katsover and Nadia Matar
Abandoning territory to the enemy's control brings about terror and destruction.
Leftist commentators, its spokesmen and other supporters of withdrawal
and concessions see the sounds, the sounds of rockets exploding; hear the
sights, the spectacle of funerals and frightened residents resuming their biased
positions as if nothing is happening around us.
"It's not because of the Disengagement", they say, declaring
that "even before the Disengagement there were missiles" presenting
data and numbers. The time has come to answer these claims, to put an end to
the tendentious information that they serve up to us.
Let us refresh our memories:
Indeed, the attacks of missiles and rockets on the Israeli home front
did not begin with the uprooting of Gush Katif. There were such attacks before
then, but an examination of the facts from a much earlier time will allow us to
come to a true understanding and draw conclusions for the future:
As long as the IDF controlled the entire Gaza Strip there were no
missiles. Indeed, in 1987 there was the first Intifada, but the weapons that
the Arabs used on us then were stones and sometimes even Molotov cocktails.
Nothing more than that. The IDF monitored the roads and had a presence in the
cities. The security forces had comprehensive intelligence and many terror
attacks were prevented while even in their planning phase. Attempts to smuggle
weapons were thwarted. The reason for this is simple: the IDF was there.
And then, instead of putting down the intifada once and for all, some
leaders dreamed up withdrawals and concessions with the idea of rewarding the
attacker and signed the Oslo Accords. The Gaza-Jericho accord was signed in May
1994, and the IDF left most parts of the Gaza Strip; they withdrew from the
cities and the villages except for Gush Katif, Netzarim, Kfar Darom, Eli Sinai
and Dugit, and the area was abandoned to the control of the Palestinian
Authority.
It began with aging mortars and other ordnance, remember? When the first
mortar was launched at Netzarim in January 2001, we deluded ourselves with the
sentence "Well – it's just a mortar" but since then, they have only
become more sophisticated and we have tied our own hands with the question,
"What – are we going to conquer Gaza?" And we made ourselves
powerless. Some of these problems were corrected in Judea and Samaria during
Operation Protective Wall, when the IDF presence returned to all of the cities
and the villages. In Gaza, on the other hand, there was no such operation. This
is the reason that there are no rockets from Judea and Samaria, but from Gaza
there are so many.
From then on, the Arabs had the freedom of action and the calm to plan
escalation, raising the level, improving their rockets and missiles, arming
themselves and organizing their military. No one disturbed them. The first
rockets were primitive; they were much less destructive and less accurate, but
step by step the terrorists improved and the rockets began to reach the
communities of Gush Katif and later to Sderot and even further.
Even these painful signals did not arouse the Israeli leadership and did
not cause it to change its policy. This led to the Disengagement plan and the
uprooting of the communities of Gush Katif and northern Samaria with the
delusional and baseless hope that the enemy would turn the Strip into a
Singapore of the Middle East. The withdrawal of the IDF from the Strip gave the
Arabs of Gaza even more freedom of action. Hamas brutally and violently took
over the leadership of the Gaza Strip from the PA and expedited the development
of rockets and missiles to the present situation in which they can reach Tel
Aviv and its suburbs.
Along with all of this, Hamas' capabilities have grown underground and
it began digging terror tunnels many kilometers in length with the aim of
carrying out abductions and strategic conquests. In the absence of an Israeli
presence in the Strip Hamas could have caught us off guard and prepared its
underground terror.
This is the reality and this is history. Anyone who takes the primitive
drizzle of rockets before the Disengagement as proof that it was not the
Disengagement that caused the present rounds of disaster we are experiencing,
are lying in their souls and deceiving all of us. If the government of Israel
had not signed the Oslo Accords and abandoned the Gaza Strip to the terrorists,
and if we had not added to this disastrous agreement, a total disengagement
from the Strip, which, as we know, is part of the Land
of Israel - if we had then already applied our full sovereignty over the
Strip, we would not have come to the difficult situation in which we are now.
Now, shortly before Trump's plan is publicized, we must remember the
facts and acknowledge them and internalize the fact that peace and security
will only be brought about by Israeli control of the entire territory.
Abandoning the territory to Arab autonomy will bring about more and much more
destructive rockets, this time from the hills of Samaria to Gush Dan, Jerusalem
and more.
(Our thanks to historian Hagai Huberman for refreshing our memory of the
dates)
Translated from Hebrew by Sally Zahav
Yehudit Katsover and Nadia Matar
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1 comment:
One statistic which needs to be more fully explored and then sent out in PR messages to western media and western internet is the finding from Palestinian polls that about 43% of Arabs would prefer to live under Israeli sovereignty than in a PA state. Why do we not care more what the actual Arabs living in the affected areas actually want? This should be substantiated by more recent polls and it should be a part of the discussion.
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