Is there any connection between withdrawal from Gaza and violence in Iraq?

[kentuck]

Has Sharon been persuaded to withdraw from Gaza in hopes it will calm the violence in Iraq? The insurgents will be so busy celebrating, they will not be killing Americans? Perhaps there is no connection at all - just a thought.

[Cassandra]

1. The withdrawal from Gaza was planned a while ago.

I don't see the connection to violence in Iraq, only in Israel.

[H5N1]

2. Sharon is fooling no on (except, perhaps, stupid lazy Americans)

Info from Uri Avnery and Naomi Persky:

(What Sharon is REALLY up to)

"A new town called Gevaoth is to be built west of Bethlehem.
A new town (Efrata) was added to the East, and beyond that a number of new settlements, until the original few settlements had expanded into a massive settlement bloc almost surrounding Bethlehem. Now Sharon is going to fill it with even more settlers.
A big new settlement called "North Tsufim" is to be built north of Qalqilia. This, too, will reach the proportions of a town.
Giant housing projects, that will be set up in order to connect the Ma'aleh Adumim bloc to Jerusalem, and just about reach the Jordan river.
Also in the Jerusalem Area, the new (Labor) Minister for Housing, Yitzhak Herzog, promises to build big housing projects from Har Homa to Ma'aleh Adumim, while another one is going to be built east of a-Ram. The aim is to cut Jerusalem off completely from the West Bank.

All this is happening while Israel and the world are waxing lyrical about the "disengagement" plan - which, in essence, is nothing but a plan to consolidate the Gaza strip as one of the enclaves in "a state of scattered territories". (The Gaza Strip constitutes only 6% of the occupied territories.)

The Labor party is a full partner in this scheme.

As far as Sharon is concerned, the disengagement plan plays with the dismantling of some small settlements in a remote corner of the occupied territories for the fulfillment of his grand design to take over most of the West Bank."

So you see, Sharon is building new criminal settlements
as fast as he can! DU people should know guy this by now!!!!!

The whole world knows this, why don't we?

[kentuck]

4. Thanks for the explanation.

appreciate that.

[CWebster]

3. My guess

It was in Israel's interest that the US invade Iraq, now Israel must hold up their end--otherwise the political consequence would be potentially uncomfortable.

Notable, all the sympathy stories of the poor settlers--so many from the US, whose luxurious residences were subsidized by the US taxpayer--the US taxpayer who now foots the bill for the pullout while Israel busies itself bulldozing homes and partitioning Jerusalem.

How many stories do you hear of Palestinians forced off their land, homes confiscated, if not destroyed by Israel, and herded into ghettos--the densest populations on Earth?

Last night I heard the woman on the world news---"God gave us this land, the chosen people" and I was filled with disgust--as I would be with any other religious fundamentalist who believe they have the monopolization of god's heart.

[Lexingtonian]

5. no

Internal Israeli and Palestinian politics has run essentially independent of Iraq; it has run a track of its own since the Oslo accords. His subversions (well, both sides cheated) but mostly the failure to engage properly at the Taba negotiations made Arafat the immediate problem in the dialogue and Sharon treated him as such thereafter.

Ever since Arafat died Sharon has been treating the radical Israeli Right, i.e. the Settlers, as the next problem faction in the process. This Gaza de-settlement is a deliberate showdown to crush them as a political force. So far they've been able to overleverage their power by the implicit or explicit use of violence; Sharon is forcing them into this situation where they either have to give up violence (thus collapsing their power), or turn fully into criminals/terrorists in the eyes of Israeli public opinion. The Settlers know this and are trying to plot a middle course- symbolic violence, pretended victimhood- between these two things. Sharon has already beaten them, though, by having Israeli TV fully expose the whole faux martyrdom and deliberate low level violence these people have planned.

Iraq is pretty irrelevant. Remember that Israeli think tanks considered the American effort in Iraq lost in September 2003; they've been working on the assumption of American failure there for more than two years.

[CWebster]

6. "Barak's generous offer"

was a farce.

http://www.doublestandards.org/myth02.html

No Palestinian could accept that. Yet Arafat was plied with all the scorn, and Sharon, the war criminal was ignored.

[Lexingtonian]

8. I'm not disagreeing

But Taba was about Barak selling a phony deal and Arafat deciding, abruptly, to take the ball and go home. In Middle Eastern gamesmanship what Barak did was crap, but inside the bounds as an opening gambit. What Arafat did in response was bad gamesmanship, even by local standards. When offered crap you yell and posture and publicly expose and embarrass the idiot trying to hoke it, that's what the Rules Of The Suk are. You don't just wimp out in selfpity and insecurity and paranoia, bail out of the attempted transaction, as first or second move. The Palestinian side doesn't defend Arafat fully on Taba, though it has to pretend to.

Yes, the Likudnik portrayal of Taba is pure propaganda. But Arafat just plain failed his own side and de facto declared himself as incompetent to deal, yet wouldn't yield his power to any other Palestinian or play the game to give Sharon the room or opportunities to play needed to eliminate problem political players on the Israeli side, i.e. Netanyahu. Nor would he politically sideline problem players on the Palestinian side, i.e. Yassin. In the Middle East you have to keep the ball in play so that the idiots are eliminated from each side's team by their electorates giving yellow and red cards to, or the opponents knocking out, the worst abusers of the rules.

As for the one sided charge of 'war criminal', I don't think there are/were innocents on any side in their generation. The PLO killed enough people over the years- not that large a proportion of them Israelis, check how many Lebanese and Palestinians they did in- that Arafat isn't that far off from par with Sharon.

[bemildred]

7. No, not much. nt