Should Israel Annex the Gaza Strip?

by Brad Ford •  • 1 Comment

Peace only comes once national security is guaranteed.  Former Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin would have told you at once that his country would never be secure without the Gaza Strip.  Look at any map to see why.  The piece of land is visibly inside the boundaries of Israel itself.

     For a long stretch of its history, Gaza was once a Roman city.  Then the Byzantines took over after the Roman Empire dissolved.  When Islam was developed in the 7th century, it quickly became a land-grabbing force.  Christian and Jewish locations were aggressively gobbled up.  Constantinople itself fell in 1453 after repeated military attacks.

     Israel’s defensive Six-Day War in 1967 allowed it to capture, liberate and occupy key geographical points that were being used to attack the country.  The Gaza Strip was one of them.  The 17 Israeli communities and settlements there known as Gush Katif were quaintly modern, but Western-friendly, both Jews and Christians feeling a lot more at home again.

      As Wikipedia reports, “Many advocates of settlement in Gush Katif view it as part of the Land of Israel and thus subject to a theological injunction for resettlement, and some also assert a right of return to Gaza, as Jews had been living there for over 1600 years until they were moved out by the British during the 1929 Palestine Arab violence and riots.”

    But “diplomacy” from increasingly liberal Western democracies pressured Israel into pulling all of its communities and settlements out of the Gaza Strip in 2005.  Jewish residents and settlers were forced to relocate en masse–by their own government no less, many under forceful expulsion, like they did in Yamit the Jewish community in Sinai.

     But as Britain’s Chamberlain discovered in his dealing with Hitler, appeasement and concession-oriented diplomacy is seen as a sign of weakness, to be taken advantage of.  The Gaza Strip became even more of a magnet for  aggressive “wipe Israel off the map” Muslim politicians.

       Now the Israeli Army has a chance to send in ground forces to retake the Gaza Strip.  There is no other long-lasting choice.  Annexation might well be the only solution that will guarantee a lasting peace in that troubled territory.  Gush Katif Forever t-shirts are starting to show up again.

     The Muslims who have drifted in to populate the Gaza Strip over the years can continue migrating to Egypt and other Arab countries.  Wasn’t this religion-based solution what Mahandas Gandhi had it mind when he “partitioned” greater India into the countries we know today?

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