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The End Of "Greater Israel"

Ethan Bronner writes in The NY Times,

For those who long considered it folly to settle a handful of Jews among hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, the decision to remove them starting this week seems an acceptance of the obvious. What possible future could the settlers have had? How could their presence have done the state of Israel any good?
But for those, like Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who created and nurtured the settlements, the move to dismantle them is something very different. It is an admission not of error but of failure. Their cherished goal – the resettlement of the full biblical land of Israel by contemporary Jews – is not to be. The reason: not enough of them came.
“We have had to come to terms with certain unanticipated realities,” acknowledged Arye Mekel, Israeli consul general in New York. “Ideologically, we are disappointed. A pure Zionist must be disappointed because Zionism meant the Jews of the world would take their baggage and move to Israel. Most did not.”

Full story.

6 thoughts on “The End Of "Greater Israel"

  1. Sharon wanted this. He even waited till the yeshiva students had a three week break. He hopes to traumatize people so they won’t try to push this in the West Bank. This could have been easily avoided if he had just set a date for the IDF to withdraw and gave the settlers the option of becoming Palestinians. of they chose to stay. 90% would have left with no hassle and the other 10%, well who says the Palestinians have a right to an all Palestinian state.

  2. I am writing up a response to this article at New Zionist… I dont’ agree that this is a failure or that returning Gaza to the Palestinians is any different than returning the Sinai peninsula was in 1982. The land that we’re talking about in Gush, and in Gaza, and in Nabulus, was not part of Israel in 1948. It was part of the Balfour declaration… but hey, so was Aman. So the idea that Zionism fails if it does not control the land from the Mediteranean to the Jordan river is just plain false. Would we, as Zionists, like to see that happen? Yes. Was it ever likely to happen? No. Did we go ahead and found the state anyway, and declare independence, and repel the Arab countries in 1948? Hell yes.

  3. Some of you might think that this is ‘messianical’, but this expulsion one means that in the future (near or distant), Israel with conquer much more land than the current Med Sea to Jordan River. It happened in 48 when we got more than the partition plan gave us, it happened in 67 beyond the dreams of many, it happened in lebanon after we gave up Sinai, and it will happen again sometime in the future.
    One of the main issues worrying me is that ‘das sektor is judenrhein’ now. The precedent has been set and enforced that Jews accept the notion of Jew-free land.

  4. Remember “Greater Germany”?
    These zionist fanatics are disgracing the memory of those that died fighting German imperialism and terror.
    No, being Jewish does not give you moral capital to engage in stealing people’s land and terrorizing a population that you deem ‘inferior’.
    Wacko fanatics

  5. Trrorizing a population that you deem ‘inferior’.
    To avoid stereotyping, I’d point out that the issue is not whether pro-expansionist Jews believe Palestinians are “inferior”. Most don’t, and it isn’t really relevant.
    The issue, rather, is that pro-expansionists, including the settlers who’ve actually put the ideology into practice, believe that Palestinians are living on someone else’s land. Theirs.
    Wacko fanatics: I think this is what they usually call “dehumnisation”. It rarely leads to positive outcomes.

  6. 8opus said that most settlers do not view Palestinians as inferior. Sorry, but that is just incorrect and it doesn’t take much research to see this. The fact that they systematically vandalize Palestinian land and often times curse/assault them proves this.

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