THE COMING PALESTINIAN CIVIL WAR

Ariel Sharon’s announcement on February 4, that the 7,500 Jews hunkered down amidst 1.5 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have to leave, is giving heartburn to Israel supporters like Mort Klein, head of Zionists of America.

Mort thinks Arik (Sharon’s nickname) has lost his nerve and is selling out. The reality is that Mort only sees the settler’s trees and not a sovereign Israeli forest. Sharon is a strategic genius and just as Machiavellian as ever.

What Sharon’s critics and all supporters of Israel need to understand is this: Sharon is building his Security Fence in order to precipitate a Palestinian Civil War.

The ostensible purpose of the fence is to wall out Palestinian suicide-terrorists. Its further purpose is, by securing a Fortress Israel behind its walls, to evaporate the Palestinian fantasy of obliterating Israel.

What sustains Arafat, the PLA, Fatah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and all other Palestinian terrorist groups, is the hope, the dream, of someday destroying The Zionist Entity, of “pushing Israel into the sea” and establishing a Palestinian State from the Jordan to the Mediterranean free of the hated Jews.

What Sharon understands is that this hope is the only common bond that binds all these terrorist groups into a “Palestinian” identity. Destroy the hope and you destroy the bond. Kill the hope and the terrorists will start killing each other. Outside the fence and bereft of their destruction-of-Israel dream, suicide-terrorists will be blowing up fellow Palestinians in bloody internecine power struggles.

Such a civil war bloodbath is the only way to purge the Palestinians not only of the terrorists among them, but of the mentality of terrorism that infects them all. Terrorist organizations completely dominate Palestinian society. All attempts to advocate political and economic freedom for Palestinians, genuine democracy, an end to the gargantuan corruption of Arafat, the PLA, Hamas, et al, and regarding Jews with anything other than a Nazi-type hatred, are brutally and quickly snuffed.

Sharon sees the most efficient way to assure Israel’s survival is to create a situation where the terrorists kill themselves off. This requires him to get those Gaza settlers out of Indian Country. Once the Palestinian Civil War starts, they are toast unless he gets them safely back inside Fortress Israel.

The brilliance, scope, depth, and Machiavellian deviousness of Sharon’s Fence Strategy is so breathtaking that there is only one world leader shrewd enough and supportive of Israel enough to figure it out and back Sharon: George W. Bush.

In June of 2002, Bush gave a major speech in which he said: “I call on the Palestinian people to elect new leaders, leaders not compromised by terror. I call upon them to build a practicing democracy, based on tolerance and liberty.” His marginalization of Arafat and the PLA continues to this day. While he has allowed some mild criticism of the Fence for diplomatic cover, he has privately assured Sharon of his support — and not just of the Fence, but for Sharon’s announced plans to double the Jewish population of the Golan from 17,000 to 34,000 in 3 years, and keep increasing the number of Jews in the so-called West Bank (now at 236,000).

It was the Palestinians’ choice to play a zero-sum winner-take-all game with Israel. If their leaders had the slightest desire for an honest share-the-territory peace, there would be no conflict today. Sharon decided if that’s the way the game must be played, then so be it. The only way for there to be peace is for either Israel or the Palestinians to give up, flat-on-their-back defeated, and Sharon is making sure it will be the latter.

The suicidal energy of the Palestinians is about to be turned upon themselves. It will be a Götterdammerung of blood and horror, but the Palestinians left standing will be able and ready to live in a real peace with the Israelis, and flourish together. That was the dream of Israel’s founders, but only Ariel Sharon is tough enough to know how to achieve it.

Note: An interesting and lengthy discussion of these issues is on Stephen Den Beste’s website: www.denbeste.nu