On Gaza

For those needing further authoritative evaluations of Israel's so-called "disengagement" from Gaza, look no further than former IDF Chief of General Staff Moshe Yaalon. As reported in the Israeli Daily Yediot Ahronot (hat-tip Israpundit) Yaalon, speaking to Haaretz said:

"The intellectual failure of the disengagement is this: the fact that there is no one to speak to on the other side doesn't mean that we can ignore the other side and the effects of his activities on us. The fact that even the Fatah leadership is not ready to recognize the State of Israel as a Jewish state while it says it is committed to the road map peace plan doesn’t mean it is possible to ignore the fact that pulling out under fire is perceived as surrender and encourages terror," he said.

He added that "The disengagement was a strategic mistake of the first order. It brought about Hamas's victory. It emboldened terror groups. It has fueled the Palestinian struggle for years. It created a feeling among the Iranians, the Muslim Brotherhood, and al-Qaeda, that Israel can be beaten. That Israel is a society of spider webs as Nasrallah said or a rotten tree as Ahmadinejad said. And therefore the disengagement not only harmed us badly, but also harmed America's strategic war on terror in the region. It created a feeling among Muslim extremists that as it defeated the Soviets in Afghanistan it defeated us in Gaza and it will defeat us in Tel Aviv. As such, as they destabilized a super power, they will destabilize the west by defeating Israel."

Armchair strategists, such as Charles Krauthammer and Victor Davis Hanson should take note.

Media Bias in the US and Israel

Those among you bemoaning the state of the media in the United States should realize that it could be worse. Caroline Glick writes here latest column one at the Jerusalem Post:

In Israel, as the country's steady economic growth and high placement on just about every significant global economic index shows, the economic liberalization reforms enacted by former prime minister and finance minister Likud Chairman Binyamin Netanyahu have been a complete success. The Israeli economy is the envy of a Europe that suffers from stagnation and decline.

Yet inside of Israel, the country's economic success is a well-kept secret. Most Israelis operate under the impression that the country is on the verge of economic ruin - that poor people are starving, that sick people are going without proper medical care. The reason that most Israelis believe that the country is teetering on the brink of an economic disaster is because the Israeli media have consistently reported an economic narrative that has absolutely no relationship with reality. So, while international investors line up to invest in the Israeli economy, Israeli citizens look to socialist politicians and pundits to save them from their capitalist nightmare of success.

A similar situation exists here in the U.S. where headlines read "Payroll Growth Stalls With 75,000 New Jobs" and "Jobs Report Signals Cooling Economy, " yet the articles state that "the nation's unemployment rate dipped to 4.6 percent, the lowest since the summer of 2001." The security situation is similarly distorted. In Israel

Palestinian terrorists Tuesday morning videotaped Israeli forces in the ruins of the Israeli community of Dugit attacking a Palestinian terror squad as it prepared to launch a Kassam rocket on Ashkelon. On Wednesday the IDF admitted that it has been deploying commandos in Gaza to prevent rocket and missile launches for the past two months. That deployment had been kept secret to prevent the public from learning just how ill-advised last year's retreat was. The need to deploy ground forces in Gaza today proves unequivocally that the only way to defend Ashkelon and the other communities bordering Gaza from attack is by deploying IDF boots on the ground in Gaza.

Just as they distorted their coverage of the Katyusha attacks on northern Israel on Sunday, to prevent the public from absorbing the significance of the IDF ground operations in Gaza, the media concentrated its coverage of the deployment of ground forces in Gaza on irrelevant side issues. All the media turned their attention to the terror propaganda film. That film regaled Israeli TV viewers with footage of poor terrorists dying of their wounds just before they had the opportunity to attack Ashkelon with their rockets.[emphasis added]

I almost pity those, like columnist Charles Krauthammer ("the Israeli abandonment of Gaza ... is both correct and necessary") and classicist and military historian Victor Davis Hanson ("Sharon's withdrawal policy from Gaza...can only help a militarily superior Israel"), who thought the Gaza withdrawal was a good strategy. But they should have known better. Just as in economics, regulations breed further regulations, so in foreign policy, a concession leads to further concessions. I was always skeptical of Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon and doubly so of the Gaza "disengagement". Now Hezbollah sits on Israel's northern border and Hamas and Al Qaeda on Israel's southern. Sometimes I really wonder whether withdrawing from Sinai in return for "peace" from Egypt was such a good idea to begin with...