[Mb-civic] Gaza: Tomorrow's Iraq - Richard Cohen - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

Gaza: Tomorrow's Iraq

By Richard Cohen
Tuesday, August 16, 2005; Page A13

It is the solemn obligation of a columnist to connect the dots. So let's 
call one dot Iraq and another the Gaza Strip, and note that while they 
are far different in history and circumstance, they are both places 
where Western democracies, the United States and Israel, are being 
defeated by a common enemy, terrorism. What is happening in Gaza today 
will happen in Iraq tomorrow.

In both cases politicians will assert that it is not terrorism that has 
forced their hands. President Bush says this over and over again: 
denunciations of evil, vows to get the job done, fulsome praise for 
Iraq's remarkably brave democrats. But the fact remains that Iraq is 
coming apart -- the Kurds into their own state (with their own flag), 
the Sunnis into their own armed camps, and the dominant Shiites forming 
an Islamic republic that will in due course become our declared enemy.

Similarly, Israeli politicians assert that it is not terrorism that has 
chased Israel from Gaza but the realization that a minority of Jews 
(about 8,500) cannot manage a majority of Arabs (more than 1 million), 
and this is surely the case. But it was terrorism that made that point 
so powerfully. After all, Israel took Gaza from Egypt in the 1967 war. 
It took 20 years for the Palestinians there to launch their first 
uprising. Without the violence, Israelis would still be farming in Gaza.

<>Israel in Gaza, like America in Iraq, underestimated its enemy. 
Palestinians have been tenacious, not merely fighting but doing so in 
ways that elude our understanding. Since the 1993 Oslo accords, there 
have been more than 90 suicide bombings. Israel has responded wisely by 
erecting a security fence. It has not responded by pulling out of the 
West Bank. But what's true in Gaza is also true in the West Bank. For 
Israel, the numbers are all wrong -- too many Palestinians, too few 
Jews. Ultimately demographics will trump Zionism.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/15/AR2005081501149.html?nav=hcmodule 

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