JEWISH COWBOYS

You’re a cowboy out in the Wild West. You and your fellow cowboys are surrounded by a horde of bloodthirsty Indians dressed in warpaint and issuing bloodcurdling whoops for your scalps. There’s a dozen of you versus two thousand of them. Even John Wayne would know it’s time to retreat.

Especially if Wayne knew the Indians were from different tribes that hated each other, and by vamoosing, they’d start to fight among themselves, going at each others’ throats while you could get safely back to Fort Apache.

Pretty much sums up the situation in Gaza.

This description will drive Dennis “The Wizard” Turner and a good many others apoplectic – especially the comparison of John Wayne with Ariel Sharon who has become evil incarnate in their eyes. Yet all the rage over the Gaza pullout doesn’t matter compared to Israel’s fundamental problem:

Israel doesn’t have enough Dennis Turners.

Dennis is an American, born and raised in California. We met in college at UCLA, then worked together in Youth For Reagan in 1966 (Reagan’s first campaign for California Governor).

Dennis is a red-blooded pro-American Reagan Conservative. He is also Jewish. On a trip to Israel almost 20 years ago, he realized that America would get along without him, but Israel needed all the help it could get.

So he emigrated to Israel, became an Israeli citizen with dual Israeli-US citizenship, and has lived and worked in Jerusalem ever since. There are many, many American Jews who would praise Dennis to the moon for what he did – but the bottom line is, he did it and they have not. Dennis put his life where his mouth is.

There are about 14 million Jews in the world today, about 5 million of whom live in Israel. There are about 6 million here in the US, 1 million more than in Israel. These are all what demographers such as Prof. Sergio Della Pergola of Jerusalem’s Hebrew University call “core” Jewish populations.

“Expanded” populations of people with Jewish parentage who aren’t practicing Jews or are non-Jewish spouses of Jews – yet whom are entitled to immigrate to Israel under its Law of Return – is much larger. Prof. Della Pergola estimates the number of Americans so entitled to exceed 10 million.

If any appreciable fraction of them moved to Israel, there would be far less need to withdraw within the walls of Fort Apache, and a far brighter future for the Jewish State. But not many among them have the courage of Dennis Turner.

Gaza is the size of Philadelphia, about 140 square miles. Philadelphia has around a million and a half people, Gaza somewhere between a million and a million and a third (no one’s done a real census). Before the pullout started this week, 8,500 were Jews. Wrap your brain around these numbers: eight thousand surrounded by over a million. These are crazy odds.

For all the wailing and reciting the Book of Lamentations and apocalyptic predictions that the Gaza pullout will cause the extinction of Israel, it is simply nuts to pretend that a few thousand Jewish cowboys can be protected from a million, over a million, Indians indefinitely and at enormous cost.

Yes, the Palestinians are celebrating. Yes, they think it’s a great defeat for Israel. Yes, the entire Arab world is gloating, and thinks it’s a humiliation not just for Israel but for the US, a sign of weakness. If Israel can be made to retreat from Gaza, then America can be made to retreat from Iraq. Party time, all night long.

But when the Palestinians wake up in the morning…..

If everyone this side of Sharon can just get over their revulsion at the sight of suicide-bombing child-killing proto-hominids dancing in the streets, and start focusing on how short-lived this celebration will be, reason might prevail over breast-beating.

Maybe the breast-beaters’ suspicions over Sharon are true – that he made a deal with the dovish left to retreat from Gaza in exchange for not being prosecuted for shady business scams. My suspicion is that he’s still Israel’s John Wayne, building his fort’s security wall, getting his people out of Indian country, and betting the Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Palestinian Authority tribes are going to tear each other apart.

Who is naïve enough to believe that there won’t be a murderous power struggle between these tribes in Gaza once the settlers are gone?

Who is myopic enough not to see that Sharon has painted a bulls-eye on a settler-less Gaza?

All the Palestinian Jihadi brave talk about Gaza being a base from which to launch a terrorist assault on Israel — “Today Gaza, tomorrow Jerusalem” — is just that. They will be so much on the defensive there will little time or energy to be on any anti-Israel offensive.

Not only will they be engaged in massive power struggles, but the onus to get their act together will be on them, not the Israelis. There’s 60% unemployment in Gaza. The Palestinians will have no more excuses but to develop a real economy and a real democracy, and oil-rich Arab countries will have no excuse not to invest.

A city the size and population of Philadelphia right on the Mediterranean Sea at a major crossroad of world trade with a claim on the support of oil billionaires has utterly no excuse whatever not to become a flourishing, prosperous Hong Kong of the Middle East.

The flip side is that bulls-eye.

Let me tell you a story. When Colombian President Andres Pastrana gave Marxist terrorist guerrillas a sanctuary in central Colombia in 1998, Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori called to congratulate him. Pastrana was stunned, as he knew Fujimori despised his efforts as contemptible capitulation.

“You really approve of my sanctuary plan, Alberto?” he asked. “I think it’s brilliant, Andres,” Fujimori replied. “Now you’ve got them all in one place so you know where to kill them all!”

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Sharon is old, soft, blackmailed, and has become an Andres Pastrana. For now, my bet is he’s still like Alberto Fujimori.

Sharon is playing Jewish Cowboys and Palestinian Indians with deadly seriousness, and he does not intend for the bad guys to win. If the Palestinians turn Gaza into a terrorist sanctuary instead of a Hong Kong, no settlers will be blocking the view from Israeli gunsights.